When you design a device that a member of the family wears on their neck twenty-four hours a day, every extra feature is also a question: who benefits from it — the dog, you, or us? Here are five answers where the result was “none of you”.
1. It has no microphone and records no sound
This is the most important item on the list, so we start with it.
The collar is in the kitchen when you argue, in the bedroom when you sleep, in the car when you are on the phone. A device with a microphone in that place is a device you have to trust not to listen. We decided we will not ask you for that trust: there is no microphone in the collar and nothing in it records sound. It is not a setting that can be switched on — it is a component that is not there.
The price for that is a single one: barking, which could easily be measured by sound, we measure differently or not at all. That price is fine with us.
2. It gives the dog no electric shock — and no vibration or ultrasound “for training” either
There are collars that punish the dog: with an impulse, a vibration, a sound meant to deter them. Our collar does nothing to the dog. It measures where they are and how they are, and it can light up and make a sound — that is everything that goes from the collar towards the dog.
The reason is simple: a dog is a member of the family, not a device to be calibrated. And we are not alone in that: in several European countries, among them Austria, Germany and Denmark, electric collars are banned outright. We do not want to make a product whose legality depends on which side of a border you are on.
But watch out for one thing that looks similar and is not the same. The collar has a recall signal — from your phone you play a few short tones the dog learns to come to. That is not a punishment, it is a whistle you always have with you and that only your dog hears. The guide for teaching it is in the app. The difference between a signal and a correction is what happens when the dog does not come: nothing.
3. It has no training features
It follows from the previous point, but it is broader. You will not find an “obedience mode”, an “automatic reprimand for barking” or a “boundary beyond which the dog is punished” in the app. The app shows you where the dog is, where they walked, how much they moved and how they slept. What you do with that is between you, the dog and perhaps a trainer — not between the dog and a piece of electronics.
4. It has no optical pulse sensor
Your watch has a green light underneath that measures your pulse. On a dog the same thing does not work — fur scatters and absorbs the light, and the number that comes out is more chance than measurement. Such a sensor could still be put in the collar; it would look good in the list of features.
We do not have it there. We measure pulse and breathing from the movement of the chest while the dog lies calmly — the motion sensor picks up the tiny tremor caused by every heartbeat and every breath. In the first week the collar learns what is normal for your dog, and then it watches for deviations from that.
It also means one admission: you see pulse and breathing at rest, not while running. We do not promise “continuous health monitoring”, because it would not be true — it is measured in windows, and only while the dog lies down. Better fewer numbers you can trust than more numbers that look scientific.
5. It has no display and no menu on the device
There is nothing to set on the collar. The only control is a single button: a short press switches the light on or off, holding it shows the battery state by colour. Everything else is in your phone.
A display on a dog's neck would be a surface nobody reads, an opening in the case that needs sealing, and power you pay for in days of battery life. It is not a feature, it is an extra risk.
Why write about this at all
Because most of the worries people have about a “smart collar” are not about what it can do, but about what it might do behind their back: listen, punish, collect. This list is our answer — and it is a list that will not change with an app update, because those components are simply not in the collar.
What the collar does have, you will find on the home page in the overview of features: location on the map, live tracking, sound and light for finding them at home too, the safe zone, route history, activity and sleep, 14 days of battery life in normal use — that is, roughly two hours outdoors a day — and cover for loss and damage included in the price.