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Originally Posted by bluedog103
We too have two dogs, one big one, another about 12 lbs. They were used to a big, fenced in yard to run in.
We bought a designer home with a villa wall behind us and on one side. That gives us privacy without being boxed in.
We had an underground fence installed by Dogwatch and found it to be a very good investment. The dogs learned their boundries very quickly and now don't need their correcton collars when they are outdoors. The training that comes with Dogwatch is probably as valuable as the hardware. The trainer comes by and works with you and your dogs and it's extremely effective without being stressful to the dogs.
If you're wondering if the correction collars are painful, they aren't. Before I put them on our dogs I buckled them around my arm and walked through the correction area repeatedly. The correction is more of a tingle than a shock. It gets their attention but is not at all painful.
Still, you have to keep any eye on your dogs. We never let them out unsupervised. There are some pretty nasty creatures out there, both on the ground and flying above. This would apply whether you have an underground fence or a courtyard villa. You are your dogs' protector. Please stay with them at all times.
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Our experience with invisible fencing was identical to Bluedog. We used Dogwatch, tested the collars on our arms first, and we have a 10 lb dog and a 70 lb dog. The key to use of invisible fencing is the pretraining. I cannot emphasize that enough. There is a beeping noise as the dog approaches the fence. The whole idea is to pretrain your dog to avoid the fence when he hears the beep. We pretrained for two weeks before turning on the correction system. We turned on our system to the lowest correction level, which as Bluedog stated, is more of a surprise tingle than a shock.
Each of our dogs went through the fence once and felt the corrective tingle. From that time on, they avoided the perimeter of the property. When ducks come up from the golf course to tease our 70 lb Lolli Pop, she takes the high road and ignores them.
At this point in time, we don't even have to put the collars on the dogs. (Although we do use the collars some of the time to refresh the beep training). When we returned to The Villages in October last year, after a six-month Summer Sabbatical, we had to order new batteries. The dogs remembered the perimeter of the property without the collars.
Like Halle and Bluedog, I strongly believe that your pets should be supervised, whether in a CYV or your backyard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ssmith
There is just one exception that I know of for the electric fence. We have friends who had a gray hound who was too fast for the electric fence. He would back up and take off and be through the fence before it could register to give him a shock. LOL
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Possibly, this greyhound wasn't given enough beep training. The correction part of our electrical system wasn't turned on until our Dog Watch Trainer felt our dogs were sufficiently beep trained.