Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My recently adopted, very excitable dog has had the collar on a total of maybe 3 hours over two days. Already, *without* the collar on, he has absolutely stopped barking at (a) the vacuum cleaner, (b) the neighbor's perpetually yapping (instigator) dog right on the other side of the fence, and (c) squirrels (real or imagined) in the trees behind the house. The transformation is absolutely beyond belief. Get over any "I don't want to hurt my baby" thing you may have going on - I did too - and buy this product if you have a barking problem. I'm floored by how effective this thing is and wish I'd known about it years ago. I realize that training isn't complete at this point but I've seen instantaneous and really dramatic improvement. Good luck and I hope you have even half the success I'm having with this product. Note to those who got a defective one - try again! Added 2 days after my initial review - it gets better! Tried this on my other young dog, adopted a month or so earlier, who is pretty good about barking except while I'm preparing her food. Then, she barks like crazy and runs back and forth. It's cute and no problem at my house, but it's not cool when we're visiting my mom's apartment in a retirement community. I stuck the collar on her before starting food prep tonight and got two (count 'em!) barks during the entire prep process. Normally I wouldn't be able to count the frantic, nonstop barks during food prep. This change was astonishing. I have become more aware of the need to be on top of things since I have two relatively young and energetic dogs. They may go from a "barking's not good now" situation (barking at the fence at passerby) to a "barking's OK now" situation (chasing each other around the house) pretty quickly. You need to be ready to take off (or put on) the shock collar at such transitions during training. But I'm finding that even occasional concentration on this is yielding bigtime resuts faster than I would have ever believed.