Training a pet can be a challenging and frustrating experience. When you’re desperate to get your pet to stop peeing in the house or tearing through the garbage, some people will take up more severe measures — most famously, the shock collar.

Shock collars, for anyone who’s never heard of the device, are exactly how they sound: collars worn by pets that can deliver up to 6,000 volts of electricity into the animal’s neck when they misbehave. The collars can be controlled by a remote and used as negative reinforcement, but some models (known as “bark collars”) will go off every time the wearer makes a noise. Still another variety will go off if the pet crosses an electrical line, usually set up with small metal poles around the border of a yard or an off-limits room.

Needless to say, these collars are extremely controversial. Animal rights groups have been fighting against the use of these devices since they were invented in the 1960s — but it wasn’t until more recently that some serious change started to happen.

The newest progress comes from Great Britain, where the British government just announced a country-wide ban of shock collars.

A spokesperson from the RSPCA said:

“In modern day society there is no excuse or need for the use of devices which can compromise cat and dog welfare, especially when humane and viable alternatives to training and containing dogs and cats are available.”

The organization has been very vocal about replacing shock collars with “positive methods, free from pain.”

However, not everyone is thrilled by this sweeping ban. One RSPCA survey found that 5% of dog owners reported using shock collars, suggesting that hundreds of thousands of animals (and humans) would be affected by the new law.

As of right now, containment fences are still legal in England; this decision comes after a government poll, in which half of the 7,000 responses said they did not want containment fences banned. While activists work to expand the ban to these electrical fences, others are fighting to keep containment fences legal.

Ian Gregory, a lobbyist for pet collar manufacturers is arguing that containment fences helped prevent some of the 300,000 deaths of cats in road accidents:

“The anecdotal problems reported with pet collars can be resolved by product standards rather than by banning a proven technology,” he said. “The hundreds of thousands of dog owners using remote trainers do not deserve to be criminalized.”

Gregory claims animal charities “exaggerated the impact of the shock delivered by a collar,” comparing the collars to cattle fencing, which are a thousand times more powerful.

How do you feel about this ban in Britain? Would you like to see a ban on shock collars in your country or no?