I'll never put a collar on my dogs.

My 12 week old puppy Brandy was in our back yard for less than 10 minutes and hung on the chain link fence. My daughter and I picked Brandy from a litter, a timid 9 week old female Rottweiler, only to lose her in 3 weeks time.

Brandy was an indoor dog, but while my husband and daughter were out I needed a break from the 24/7 time I spent with her so I could vacuum.


My daughter had just bought her a pink nylon collar to put her tags on (we also had just had her microchipped at the vet) and I put her outside with our 9 year old Samoyed.

Brandy was used to being with Zak in the back yard and often observed him jumping along the 1 acre chain linked dog run. When I looked out into the back yard, it looked like she was jumping. I ran out and saw that she was hanging. I screamed and loosened the collar and attempted CPR even though I knew she was dead. This was the most devastating day for our family. We ended up with her cousin about 3 weeks later, but my daughter, who was 16, refused to get close to Mazie. We bought Mazie a "Break-Away Collar" that was on closeout at Petsmart. She only had the collar on when she was supervised. Now that I heard about the baby gate deaths I am thankful that we never had a collar on Mazie when she was in the house. To this day, Mazie is microchipped and doesn't wear a collar.

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