I want to follow on from the recent piece about the EU welfare proposals, because something is happening much closer to home that deserves the same attention, and possibly more urgency, given how short the window for response actually is.
The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland has published a consultation on proposed animal welfare reforms, and within that proposal sits a section dealing directly with the use of handheld electronic training collars, choke collars and prong collars. Whether you live in Northern Ireland or not is genuinely beside the point. These consultations don't sit neatly inside their own borders, and the patterns they create get borrowed, repurposed, and held up as precedent the moment anyone elsewhere wants to push for the same.
What the consultation proposes is a ban on the use of handheld electronic collars, choke collars and prong collars on dogs and cats. Interestingly, containment fence systems and spray collars are not included in that proposal, which itself raises a fairly obvious question about what the underlying logic is supposed to be, because if the concern is genuinely about the use of a deterrent or a corrective signal, then those exclusions don't follow consistently from the rest of the argument. What it tells you, more accurately, is that the position being taken isn't really about welfare in a holistic sense, it's about removing particular tools from particular hands.
We have been here before. The same anti-logic underpinned the lobbying efforts in both England and Scotland, and we fought against it on each occasion for exactly the same reasons. It isn't a welfare issue. It's a political gesture.
That distinction matters, because once a piece of legislation sets a benchmark in one part of the United Kingdom, it tends to become the reference point everyone else gets compared against. Pressure groups will point to it, civil servants will lean on it as a precedent, and the people who actually live with and manage these situations day to day will once again find themselves trying to defend ground that should never have been lost in the first place.
None of this is really about a piece of equipment. It's about whether responsible dog owners are going to continue to be treated as people who are capable of making informed decisions about their own animals, or whether those decisions are going to be progressively taken away from them on behalf of a position that is rarely informed by practical experience. The ability to control your dog reliably — particularly around livestock, wildlife, or other dogs — isn't a luxury. It's the foundation of being able to give a dog freedom in the first place, and it's the reason a great many dogs are alive and well today rather than seized, shot, or destroyed by court order.
It's also about the welfare of the animals your dog encounters, which is a part of this conversation that consistently gets overlooked. A dog that cannot be reliably called away from a sheep, or a hare, or another dog, is a danger to that animal long before it is a danger to anyone else, and the people best placed to prevent that outcome are the people being told, repeatedly, that the tools they've used responsibly for years are no longer to be trusted in their hands.
This is why responding to these consultations actually matters. Not because any single response is going to swing the outcome on its own, but because policy moves in the direction of whoever turns up. If the only voices on record are those pushing for restriction, then restriction is what gets recorded as the public position. If responsible dog owners stay quiet, that silence gets read as consent. It isn't, and it never has been, but unless people stand up and put their position on the record, that's the version of the story that ends up shaping what comes next.
That is the entire reason ARDO exists. It isn't a fund-raising operation, it isn't a campaign of complaint, and it isn't a vehicle for any particular individual. It's a way of making sure that the experience, judgement, and lived reality of responsible dog owners is represented properly when decisions are being made about how they're allowed to live and work with their dogs. The more of us there are, and the more visibly we are willing to stand behind that, the harder it becomes for any of this to be pushed through on the basis that nobody really objected.
We urge you, regardless of where you live, to respond to the consultation, and to ask anyone you know who shares this view to do the same. The closing date is the 30th of June, but we'd strongly advise against leaving it until the last few days. Consultations of this kind are designed to be read, and the responses are weighed, not just counted, so the more clearly and personally you can put your position, the more useful that response becomes.
As always, ARDO operates on strength through numbers, not financial investment. It costs nothing to support, and it never has, because what matters is the willingness of people to be counted on the issues that affect how we live and work with our dogs. If you haven't already done so, click the button on the site and add your name. That is the bit that actually carries weight, because policy decisions are not made on the basis of who feels most strongly in private — they are made on the basis of who is prepared to be counted in public.