But What About Collapsing Trachea?

I've encountered a lot of people concerned about collapsing trachea recently - it seems to be a meme that's circling around the pet owning population with increasing frequency.

Let's talk about what collapsing trachea is -

Collapsing trachea is a degenerative disorder, which means that certain dogs will have a propensity for their tracheal anatomy to be particularly delicate in a structural way. This means that there is something inherently wrong in the structure of the trachea that can be exacerbated but not caused by things like environmental smoke, the use of standard collars, and obesity.

The misunderstanding seems to be that people think the use of standard collars is guaranteed to cause collapsing trachea, particularly in toy breeds. The causal relationship is backwards on this thought - the collar doesn't cause the tracheal collapse, the tracheal collapse causes a sensitivity to the use of a collar.

The answer for this problem isn't to tie your hands if you have a toy breed, it is to pay attention and establish if it's a problem to begin with. If your dog has tracheal collapse, the best setup of equipment is probably a front attach harness paired with an ecollar (which has no physical pressure associated with it) during initial training so that you achieve a level of reliability so refined that the dog is offleash reliable.

Otherwise, if your dog doesn't have that disorder, a normal training setup of martingale and leash is perfectly workable. You aren't going to give your dog tracheal collapse unless they were born with it as a disorder.

Notice that I do not advocate for giving up on training in fear of causing tracheal collapse, because you are most certainly selling your dog short if you do that. Adapt around the disabilities of your dog, but don't give them a disability they don't have.