An Invisible Fence for your Dog
Like a lot of families, we like to be outside in our front yard with our dog. It’s not as much fun when she has to be on a leash, so we decided to try an invisible fence system, and LOVE IT!
The invisible fence system has two major parts. First, the installer will come and bury a signal wire in your grass, which will serve as the boundary that your dog will have to stay inside of and not cross. Second, your dog will wear a special collar that can sense when it gets to the boundary wire, and will emit a tone to warn your dog and/or a static stimulation (light shock) if they don’t back away.
We used Invisible Fence of Austin to do our installation and training. The installer spent about ½ a day burying the wire (and did an awesome job of it), and putting little flags to mark where the wire is. Then the training started: two sessions with the trainer, and then some consistency by us.
Day one the trainer taught our dog where the boundary is, using a leash to pull her away from it each time the collar beeped. After she got the hang of it, he turned the stimulation on so if she didn’t turn away from the boundary fast enough she would get a little shock. We were asked to repeat this training with her, a few times a day, for a week.
Day two (a week later), the trainer started distraction training. He brought all sorts of toys to distract our dog, we used passer bys and cars, etc. With the leash on, he kept trying to get our dog to cross over the boundary with more and more enticing distractions, and would pull her back if she didn’t. Once she understood this “game,” he turned up the shock level and “played” off leash. She got it pretty quickly.
After that, we just had to monitor her outside, and slowly started removing the flags every couple of days until the y were all gone.
The invisible fence has been awesome.
