Hello all. First time posting here. We have a 1 1/2 year old rat terrier mix that we adopted almost a year ago. When we first got her, we only had a collar on her. She never scratched at anything besides her occasional scratches. Fast forward a couple months, we finally get a dog tag. After that, she started to scratch at her neck a lot. She started rolling in the grass a lot more during the summer, so we figure it might just be allergies/a bug might have scratched her. So we just get antiseptic spray and cream and cover her neck up for a bit until she would stop. After that, she still kept scratching at her neck. We took her a bath and more cream and put her harness on her. It stops her for a little bit and it heals up, so we put her collar back on, and immediately she starts scratching again! It got to the point where she scratched some hair away on her neck.

We don’t know what to do so we just ditch her collar for a couple months and it heals up fully. We figure, she might not like the way the collar feels (it was faux leather) and maybe she’s allergic to metal. Just today, we bought her a new organic soft collar and engrave a new dog tag with a rubber border on it so not metal would touch her. Get home, put it on her, 3 minutes later - scratching! And she scratches her neck about 3 times in the span of 10 minutes after putting it on. Not wanting her to scratch up her neck again, we just take off the collar once more. No more scratching the rest of the night.

Has anyone else dealt with this? When the harness is on her she scratches maybe every now and then, but not nearly as much as when it’s just her collar & tag. Could she be possibly allergic to the collar/metal tag, even with the rubber bumper? Or does she just like to be a naked pup?