Underground Fence

Anonymous Poster · Oct 30, 2002

The fence I have comes from Pet Safe. http://radiofence.com/index.html
All it is, is a radio transmitter. The part you bury is nothing more than an antenna. The dog wears the reciever around it's neck and recieves a shock if it gets to close. There is a training period that you have to work on your dog with. Some dogs train faster than others. My neighbor has a very stubborn dog though. He had to get a special "stubborn dog" collar that has a significantly larger shock to it.
I also had to by a fence that is on a different frequency than my neighbors. If you don't, chances are it won't work where the fence runs in parellel within 3 ft. of another fence. PetSafe is the only manufacturer of one that I'm aware of.

Anonymous Poster · Oct 30, 2002

The wing guides are made of 1/4 inch steel, welded to the trencher blade. The only problem I encountered is where I went through some taller weeds that I missed with the mower befor hand. They tended to wrap around the blade and forced the whole blade and box scraper up a bit. That's why I would use a guide wheel on the box instead of the wings. The box scraper stayed about 5 inches above the ground at all times so wasn't a problem at all. I also cantered the trencher blade back a bit so the wings wouldn't dig in and would ride on top of the ground.

Elkoboy · Nov 3, 2002

I don't believe the training period is that difficult, unless your dog is really really stupid. And since dogs are territorial, they can learn boundaries, such as your lot line.

I have used the Radio Fence system with lots of dogs for many years (I used to foster large dogs for a local animal rescue organization), and once the dogs are trained have had very good success with it.

But, you DO have to TRAIN the dog, contrary to what some people seem to think. You can't put the radio fence wire in, put a collar on the dog, and expect the fence system to work.

Training the dog involves putting boundary flags all around the property where the fence lies. Then you need to walk the dog on a leash around the lotlines over and over so that he learns where the lotline is. The dog will also learn what the collar warning tones mean and that they are associated with the flags (and thus the boundary).

This is not an overnight/one time training exercise. I think most recommendations are to walk the dog for a week or so to teach him the lotlines. Eventually you need to let the dog go off the leash, and watch him. If he tries to cross the boundary, you need to call him back to you and praise him (he might get confused and blunder the wrong way into the fenceline and get zapped), until he understands that safety (no tones/corrections/shocks) is on your property.

After the dog understands and respects the boundary you leave the flags in for a while just to give the dog a visual cue where the boundary is. Eventually you pull the flags too.

If you train the dog correctly, the fence systems work very well. If you fail to train the dog, the dog will probably repeatedly get zapped by the fence and fail utterly to understand what is going on.

What I've also found is that once you have one dog trained, other dogs tend to more quickly learn the setup (my guess because of the pack mentality of dogs) with less training.

Just make sure you train your dog according to the directions with the fence system you have, and you shouldn't have problems.

Another thing to keep in mind is that unlike a real physical fence, the radio fence systems keep your dog in, but they won't keep other dogs out. That means your dog has the potential to be attacked by a mean dog without being able to escape or otherwise seek refuge.

You shouldn't leave your dog unattended in a radio fence yard for long periods of time because of that. My dogs get put in outdoor wire fence kennels for their safety when they're out for long periods unattended.

The only people I know of that have had bad luck with the fence systems failed to train their dogs properly, so make sure you train your dogs properly and you should have good success with the systems.