Customer Reviews

SportDOG European-Style Silent Whistle

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Unfortunately, I have neighbors that leave their howling dog outside, neglected, untrained, unhappy and he lets us know about it with hours of frantic howling. People like that shouldn't be dog owners. When I blow the whistle he usually -- unless he's frenzied -- stops immediately. How silent is silent on the whistle? Someone in the next apartment can't hear the whistle -- but someone standing nearby or in my apartment might hear a very high pitched, barely audible whistle. Close enough, in my book.

The whistle is good quality, solid metal. I gave it 4 instead of 5 stars because the keychain loop is attached to the plastic pull-off cap, not to the whistle itself. So you can't hang the whistle around your neck and just bring it up and give it a tweet; you have to remove the cap first. Although many of the silent dog whistles seem designed like that, it seems to me that the whistle itself could and should have an attachment point.

About that cap. I feel like an idiot saying this, but it took me a good 10 minutes to get the cap off. I spent a while thinking it screwed off, but you just have to give it a very mighty pull. Once the cap is off, you can adjust the tone of the whistle by turning the metal post at the end of the whistle. Then you can tighten the little metal ring to keep the post at that length.

As others have noted, the whistle is not actually silent to humans. To me it doesn't sound very loud, but high-pitched and annoying. I presume it sounds louder to the dog. My dog (German Shepherd cross) sure perks up and comes running for a tasty treat. That's what I wanted, so so far so good. I don't really see how it would stop a dog from barking, though - unless maybe from surprise, the first couple times.

We have several neighbors dogs. When they get together, things can get barkingly loud. With this whistle, I blow from inside the house, they quite down quickly. The humans still don't know we have the whistle. It is our secret weapon against loud dogs.

If you expect this whistle to be truly silent you will be disappointed. If you believe it's purpose is to stop your neighbors dog from barking or any such nonsense you are sadly mistaken. This is an excellent communication device when used properly. Adjust the length until the pitch gets your dogs attention and then link various patterns of long and or short tweets to known commands. It works great.
Attempting to use this thing for anything else is witchcraft.
It is sad to see that these myths are perpetuated on this very page under Tag Suggestions.
Misinformation runs rampant.
The only difference between this and any other whistle is the fact that it won't annoy nearby humans. And that's a good thing.

This whistle worked great for the first three days. We were just getting our dog trained to it when it stopped working. Now we have to interrupt the training while we wait for another (better quality) whistle.

I bought 2 of these. Both were used for a training session of about 20 minutes. They never worked again. Absolutely junk. Buy a high quality one and have it last!

This is one of the worst products I have ever purchased. No instructions on how to adjust the sound and I can hear ir quite clearly. Don't waste your money.

This was bought to try to bring a little bit of training to our lab puppy to try to keep her nearby..After a few tries with treats every time, she really responds to the whistle..It is not, however, silent and in no way can be construed to be silent...It is a shrill whistle with a slight control to vary the shrillness...This does not bother me, it works, therefore the 5 stars..

dogs were interested in the whistle at close range...I paired the whistle with a reward with the intent of using the whistle for a recall, I then built up distance

WELL turns out the dog aren't hearing anything but the air excaping the whistle, so once they were 10-15 feet away the thing was useless since they could no longer hear it.

fun to watch them cock their heads, but useless for training...I have since started using a normal whistle with great success.

The product just doesn't work, that's all. We have two one year old Weimaraners with incredible hearing, and no matter how we adjusted it this whistle it didn't even got them to notice.