Dog Fence Training – The DogFence Company http://dogcompany.com Inground Electric Dog Fences Mon, 06 Oct 2014 19:36:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.28 Dog Training: The Most Important Step for Dog Fence Installation http://dogcompany.com/dog-training-the-most-important-step-for-dog-fence-installation/ http://dogcompany.com/dog-training-the-most-important-step-for-dog-fence-installation/#respond Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:12:00 +0000 http://dogcompany.com/?p=63 Dog training for dog fencesThere are three major phases for any underground dog fence installation:

1.  Planning For Your Underground Fence

The layout of your fence needs to take into account several factors including:

  • Where do you want your dog to stay?
  • What areas do you need to keep off-limits?  Do you want to keep your dog out of a pool, or a flower bed?  Yep, you can plan for that.
  • Where are the utility lines running through your yard?  A quick call to Miss Utility can help with this question.  Running the wires safely means avoiding cutting utility lines, as well as preventing the dog fence signal from carrying into the home on your electricity lines.

2. Installation of your Fence

This is where the hard work begins…  Expect an installation to take 4-8 hours depending on the size of your lawn and other factors such as terrain.  If you did your work in the planning phase, everything should go easily enough, but there are always some surprises along the way.  For instance, during one of our installations, we were surprised to find that buried 2″ below the surface of the yard corrugated pieces of metal.  It’s certainly not something that we expected to find.

Experience goes a long way when it comes to handling the unexpected during a fence installation.

3.  Training Your Dog to Stay In Your Yard

Without a doubt this is where your fence will succeed or fail.  In the previous two phases, technical know how are crucial.  In the training phase, it takes a special understanding of a dog’s psychology to ensure the safety of the dogs that you’re planning to protect.

There are several things that can go wrong in the training phase.  Some problems that we have corrected for other fence installers include:

  • Dogs that Run Through the Fence:  A dog must believe that there is a steel wall that is preventing them from leaving the yard.  It’s not just an invisible curtain that they can run through.  They must believe that they physically are incapable of leaving the boundary of the yard.  To accomplish this, you must test your dog with distractions, and temptations that simulate (and sometimes duplicate) what they will encounter on any given day.  Prey chase (chasing after dogs, people, or squirrels) is the leading cause for dogs that break through a dog fence, and needs to be thoroughly proofed to ensure that breakthrough is not a possibility.
  • Fear of the Yard:  Most dog fence installers rely on pain to keep the dog from breaking through the boundary.  They will turn up the correction level on the fence to a very high level, and then attempt to lead the dog to the fence line.  When the dog gets the correction for the first time they have no idea what just happened to them.  A bee may have just stung them, or God may have just tapped them on the shoulder with a bolt of lightning.  With this approach, the dog will very likely become afraid of the entire yard.  They won’t understand that there is a line that they can’t cross, but instead blame the entire area where the correction occurred for the shock.  When this happens, dogs will refuse to enter the yard, and choose to stay pressed up against the home.  It’s important that a dog understands that they can safely enter the yard in the free area, while choosing to avoid the boundary. To avoid this problem proper conditioning of the boundary line in conjunction with the correction is needed.  In addition, teaching the dog that there is a safe zone where they can happily play is crucial.  The Dog Fence Company uses each training session to train the dog on the boundary AND to train the dog on basic commands in the safe area.  It’s a win-win situation.  The dog gains a better understanding of the boundary, and the owner gets a better behaved dog.
  • Fear of Any Sound that Resembles the Warning Beep on the Fence Collar:  We have often retrained dogs that are fearful of everyday beeps inside and around the home.  Imagine that you are cooking a meal in the microwave, and when the beep goes off telling you that your meal is ready, your dog urinates and hides under your kitchen table.  It happens all the time.  We started The Dog Fence Company because we are trainers who have had the unfortunate task of rehabilitating dogs with this and other similar problems.  It’s crucial that the dog has a solid understanding of the warning sound, and isn’t afraid when it hears the beep.  Again, proper training can abate this problem.

There are more issues than we can list here for you, but they all have their solutions deeply rooted in solid training techniques.  We have years of training experience that is based on the proper use of static electric corrections.  It’s simple.  If you want a fence that will protect your dog, and ensures that they are happy, make sure that your dog’s fence training program is solid.

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