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Hawke's Bay Pet Photographer | Pet Portraits - LupinBay

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Why I Don't Use Citronella Dog Collars

November 23, 2017 Kaylene Fister
LupinBay-Jack-Russell-Dog-Photography-0152-4966.jpg

It's funny how sometimes you do a thing that ends up showing you exactly what your friends think of you.  It happened to me recently with the whole citronella dog collar fiasco.

Have you seen the post doing its rounds on Facebook recently about the collars?  It had me laughing so hard that I had to re-read it out loud to Steve so we could both end up as hysterical little puddles on the floor.

In case you haven't had the pleasure yet, here's the story for your enjoyment.  You're welcome. 

My neighbors have been complaining that my dog has been barking non-stop and I hate the electric zapping bark collars so I purchased a humane citronella collar... When a dog barks, it shoots a blast of citronella under their nose and apparently they don't like it.

Last night I was getting the collar ready and filled it with the citronella liquid.  I begin to become curious as to β€œhow” the collars actually works.  So I'm standing by my back door "barking" at the dog's collar... Nothing happens...  I make sure it's turned on, check the fill level, and go through the "getting started" check list one more time.  Again, I bark... nothing happens!!

Now I'm not quite sure why I thought this would be a good idea, but I did...  I put the collar on.  I seriously attached the band around my neck and fit the growl box against my throat and barked.  Apparently, the collar only works if it feels vibrations, because I immediately received a blast of citronella to the face. 

I began coughing, which only caused the collar to continue squirting bug spray over and over into my nasal cavity.  I'm now on my hands and knees in my back yard, trying to breathe, and to make matters worse, the darn dog is barking.  So between coughing and yelling at him to shut up, I've emptied over a dozen blasts of citronella to my face.  During all of this ruckus, I'm trying to undo the clasp of the collar, which has somehow managed to become welded shut during this whole fiasco.

I finally get the collar off and threw the thing across the yard, and laid in the grass sucking in the fresh air.  In the middle of thinking this is probably the dumbest thing I've done in a while, I hear laughter.  MY NEIGHBOR SAW THE WHOLE THING!  He was laughing so darn hard he couldn't breathe.  Between gasps, he tells me, "I was gonna come help, but every time I started to climb over the fence, you'd set it off again and then I would start laughing and couldn't make it."  So now, not only are my eyes red and swollen but I'm mortified too.

Lesson learned: if you ever want to test one of these make sure that:
1. You Don't fill the collar before trying to set it off.
2. Remember the neighbor is not a good source of help in a crisis situation.
On the plus side, I won’t have a mosquito problem for a few days!

The problem was that most of my friends apparently didn't make it past the moral of the story bit and so missed reading the disclaimer:

This is a copied story that gave me a good laugh so feel free to do the same.
***I usually hate these, but this one had me laughing so hard my ribs hurt πŸ˜‚πŸ˜«πŸ˜³πŸ˜πŸ˜―πŸ˜†πŸ˜‚!!!!!!!***
I feel a lot of you needed a good laugh today..

And so it began.

Citronella 01.JPG

And pointing out that I'd managed to fool them didn't exactly work in my favour...

Citronella 02.JPG

The heartfelt sympathy for my supposed pain and suffering was overwhelming and brought a tear or two to the eye:

Citronella 04.JPG
Citronella 05.JPG

Given that I have friends living in several time zones around the world, this whole thing carried on for nearly a week.

And right when I was resigning myself to the knowledge that my friends think I'm a deranged doolally who's watched one too many Mythbusters episodes and decided phooey, it IS okay to try these things at home, a friend who's known me for roughly half of my life said this:

Citronella 03.JPG
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Which essentially is saying I am a deranged doolally who's watched one too many Mythbusters episodes, but in a much sweeter way.  Although, seeing as she's lived in the southeast of the USA for longer than I did, I'm more than a little surprised she didn't end it with the kid-gloved insult: "bless your heart".  In her defence, it would have been appropriate.

But at least, as I can tell from the overall emoticon ranking on the post, my apparent suffering was the cause of much joy to my friends. 

Citronella 06.JPG
In LupinBay Journal Tags Dogs, Pets, Through My Lens
← How to Choose a New Pet: Tips for Those in RecoverySnuggle Between the Pages of a Rabbit Tale: World Book Day 2017 →

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