Recently I made one of those purchases that you don’t expect much of, but it actually ends off changing your life dramatically. It has not only made my life so much easier, but it’s also made my dog much happier which also makes me feel good at heart. Everybody knows that when your dog is happy, you are happy, so this really worked out well for all parties involved.

That purchase was, of course, a wireless dog fence system procured from Amazon. I know my readers like the explicit technical details, so the exact one I bought was the PetSafe wireless fence. I looked through quite a few options and they’re all fairly similar from what I can tell. This one just seemed to offer the best features at the best price.

Probably my biggest reservation before I looked into it was that I thought they were quite expensive. After I did some research though it turns out they’re quite affordable. Especially when you consider the price and the inconvenience of an actual fence. So I figured what the heck, why not give one of these systems a try?

I can tell you now that I’m so happy I did. Another sticking point for me was that it was going to be difficult to put together and get working, but that simply was not the case. It was actually as easy as plugging everything in, setting our preferences on the system, and making sure that the collars were properly synced with the base station.

Then of course there was the process of training our dog, which did take a little bit of trial and error. The PetSafe came with some marker flags which we could use to set up the boundaries. It was a little non-intuitive to actually know where the boundaries were, and we had to actually carry the collars with us to really find out for sure. Luckily by doing so we were able to test how strong the electrical signals that the collar sends were, and they really weren’t too bad. At any rate, this might be one benefit of using the alternative wired systems, because despite having to do all of that burying of wire at least you know where the boundary is at the end.

With the boundary flags in place it was time to set our dog loose and see how she reacted. She was understandably quite confused at the outset. Why was she being left to run free with no leash? Was this some sort of test? She did eventually wander over to the boundary and presumably did get a bit of a shock, but she didn’t cry at all and simply ran away from the boundary. We saw this happen maybe two more times on the first day but haven’t seen it again since. Not to say that it hasn’t happened because we haven’t been watching her so closely once she seemed accustomed, but her “testing the boundaries” definitely slowed down after that first day.

Now that she’s trained and completely comfortable with the whole charade it’s nice to be able to simply let her out and not worry about her at all as long as she’s wearing her collar. I will say that you get a little less battery life out of the collar than I would have expected, but it’s not such a big deal. All in all, I’d highly recommend giving one of these systems a try if you’re considering it, it certainly paid off big time in my case.