This morning I was in the laundry room doing, well, laundry and the dogs were barking. Nothing new there until I was bringing a clean load upstairs. I heard this awful dog crying/baying that sounded distinctly like a small dog in pain. By this time, Josh and Cora were going crazy.
Hearing how close the noise was, I opened the front door and it was coming from right in front of the next door neighbor’s house. I ran off the steps and across the lawn. When I came around the tree line, a guy was crouched over a brown beagle on the side of the road. At first, I thought it had been hit by a car. When I asked if it was all right, he said he thought so. When I got closer he picked the dog up, her collar was off and he had a rope leader on the ground.
He explained he lived a few houses down the street and asked if I had an electric collar fence in our yard. I said, “Yes.”
“Oh, that’s what happened,” he said. “She got out and got stuck in your yard. She was biting me when I tried to take her collar off. She was getting lit up pretty good.”
He explained that he also has one because of the deer that go through his yard drive his dogs bonkers too. The collar he had in his hand looked a little different than the ones we use. Not the collar really, the module that has the correction nodes on it. His was much bigger and appeared to have some kind of adjustment dial. Our system only has the send unit and the wire that runs the entire perimeter of our yard, front and back. There are also three remote units that plug into outlets and keep the dogs from jumping through the front window, keep them off the stairs (for the safety of the cats) and from leaping through the HDTV in the family room in the case of anyone wearing red, looking directly into the camera, or happens to be an animal. They even know the songs of commercials that contain things they like to bark at. But I digress.
So the man with the dog kept trying to explain how he was driving by with the dogs in the back and one got out. Her name is “Sugar.” She seemed like a nice old beagle and I couldn’t quite grasp how “she got out” of what. The back of the truck? Her yard? It didn’t – and still doesn’t – make sense to me and I didn’t press the issue. The dog was fine.
Moral: Invisible Canine Fences or anything like them are for confining your dogs to YOUR property. If you take them somewhere else, don’t leave the electronic collars on them. It reminds me of my brother’s radar detector. Riding down the street, that thing beeps and boops at the oddest times. Usually, it is because of the x-rays emitted from doors on shopping centers and banks, etc., and make it react. It isn’t law enforcement but if we are looking for places to go with automatic door openers, that device has more than one use.
The same is true if the dog you are attempting to keep close gets excited enough to leave the confinement field. They are so hell-bent on chasing something that they ignore the correction. Once they get outside the field, they don’t have that same sense of excitement to return home and cannot. That, is a dangerous situation and the exact opposite of the reason for the electronic fence in the first place. You have locked your dog out, they don’t know how to get back in and all the predicaments you are trying to protect them from are a clear and present danger.
