Dog Fencing – the Benefits for Dog Owners

A prudent and effective alternative to physical fencing is dog fencing. .Still, there are those who think this pet containment system doesn’t work or is expensive in the long run. Sometime were hear about doubts and concerns whether dog fencing really works; if you have such worries, this short piece covers them.

Ideally, a pet containment system allows some freedom while being limited in a certain area – with some training and a perimeter set up, the dog avoids moving out of the perimeter. This may be your entire home, a part of your front yard, and so on – just any area you can mark off and surround with buried wires. The boundaries of the perimeter are the wires buried, and when your dog (which wears a special collar) comes close to the wires, a warning tone is heard from the collar. When a dog wearing a collar connected to that buried wire system walks past the boundaries, despite hearing the warning tone, the dog’s collar sends out a static shock.

Besides invisible dog fencing, there are other types of pet containment systems. In some indoor set ups, dog owners do not want their pets getting close to expensive furniture or installations. The indoor set up is the same as the outdoor set up differing only in magnitude of area covered by installed wires – the same warning tone and subsequent shock provided by the dog collar is also present. The tone, of course, is the signal for the dog to move away or get shocked.

Just the same, this indoor set up may not work out unless your dog is accustomed to responding in expected ways to the tone, and the shock that may follow. This only serves to remind us that pet containment systems require the investment of the pet owner to train his or her pet to react the proper way, for the system to work.

Here are the key reasons dog fencing is cost-effective – it works around ordinances, rules, regulations against building physical fences; it is cheaper than physical fences (no handyman/contractor to hire or digging machinery to rent); and it does not keep your dog fenced in like a criminal, or like cattle.

Detractors on the claimed efficiency of dog fencing argue based mostly on these following (1) dogs ignoring the static correction (to approach other pets, other people, chase after cars), (2) the buried wire plus collar set up break down (allowing dogs to roam un-shocked), and (3) dogs developing a fear moving close to the “fenced” area.

In practice, these problems can be addressed by routine check ups on the system – checking if the collar responds to the wires and if there’s enough battery power in the collar – and enough training so the dog acts in prescribed ways. There are ways to overcome insufficient training – if the dog owner has not enough time to properly train his or her dog, then dog trainers become a real option. This pet containment system, as with any pet containment system, can only work when the dog is trained and if the system is up and running and powered.