Deaf vet Julie Beckett, tells us about the danger of dog collars (BSL vlog with English transcript)

English transcript:

Hi! I hope you are all well. I wanted to make you all aware of something important. Do you have more than one dog? Perhaps 2, 3 or 4 dogs at home or possibly more? There’s an important video circulating at the moment that I want to make you aware of.

If you have a group of dogs in your home, or perhaps siblings that play together, perhaps you let them play on their own independently in the garden while you’re relaxing inside the house? Or maybe you leave them alone outside while you go to work? It is important that you make sure you remove their collars before you do this.

Why? There’s been an incident that’s been shared via video to make people aware of what may happen if you do this. In the video, one woman has left two of her dogs in her back garden to play while she is indoors. There is one large dog and one smaller one.

The woman is inside and she can hear typical noises that dogs make when they play. Perhaps she’s listening to music relaxing – I don’t know exactly – but the dogs are outside alone anyhow.

But what happened was that in the middle of their playing, the dogs collars both became tangled with each other’s! The dogs became really stuck and confused, the big dog was trying to escape from the other but he couldn’t get away. The dogs owner was oblivious inside!

Luckily, the next door neighbour saw that something had happened and ran to the dog owners door to let the woman know that her dogs needed some help urgently. The owner ran into the garden and managed to remove the collars that were stuck and held the dogs, which were panicking and breathless. The owner knew that they were lucky to have helped the dogs in time!

So, that’s why I wanted to make you aware that it’s important that if you have a pair or group of dogs that love to play together to always make sure they take their collars off. Not only might they get stuck on each other’s collars but they could also get tangled on another object or a single dog could jump and land on something and accidentally strangle themselves.

Also, if you leave dogs alone at home please remove the collar too. You never know if a dog may accidentally get caught on a door handle or kitchen cupboard. Some dogs love to explore the kitchen or stand on their hind legs to see whats on a work top, just doing so could cause them to get their collars stuck on a cupboard or drawer and cause injury or death. Unfortunately accidents do happen.

So if your dogs are home alone or in the garden alone, please remove their collar. Of course, if they’re going out on a walk then keep their collars on, their tags are important. But I always encourage dog owners to please supervise your dogs at all times, just like you would always keep your eyes on children, do the same to your dogs.

I have shared the video of what happened, if you find it upsetting then do turn it off. But I hope it makes you all aware of the risks as I don’t want your dogs to suffer at all.

Thank you for watching. Bye!

Julie is a deaf veterinary nurse assistant who lives in the North East with her many pets! You can find her Facebook page here with details of her work.