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Excessive Jingling of Dog Tags

A pet peeve worth stopping
By Karen B. London PhD, August 2009, Updated June 2021

Large numbers of dog tags jingling on a dog’s collar drive me crazy and probably bother most dogs even more. For sound-sensitive dogs in particular, noisy tags may negatively affect their quality of life. Seeing dogs suffer the constant clanging and additional weight of wearing all that metal activates my pet peeve sensors like few other avoidable irritations. I even had a little rant about it recently on another blog.

We can minimize the number of tags by pitching expired ones and by getting a flat ID tag that is directly attached to the collar. That leaves just a city license and a rabies tag for most dogs, which cuts out a lot of the sound. Or, the jingling can be eliminated completely with The Quiet Spot’s Pet Tag Silencer that holds all the tags in one pouch. Less chic than the Pet Tag Silencer but effective and inexpensive is using some electrical tape to secure the tags into a single silent mass.

Dogs make our lives better in a thousand small ways each day. Lessening the irritation of heavy, loud tags on our dogs’ collars is one small way we can repay the favor.

Is your pet peeve quite different from mine? Do you have a remedy that will make all our dogs’ lives better?

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Karen B. London, Ph.D. is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and Certified Professional Dog Trainer who specializes in working with dogs with serious behavioral issues, including aggression. Karen writes the animal column for the Arizona Daily Sun and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of six books about canine training and behavior, including her most recent, Treat Everyone Like a Dog: How a Dog Trainer’s World View Can Improve Your Life