Our pups are our entire world.
So how would we move our spoiled dogs to Virginia?
From our trips to Virginia, we know a lot of people just let their dogs roam without a fence. This would not work for us….. our babies are free spirits. Despite two years worth of weekly training sessions, they are too curious to stay in one spot. So we would have to figure out how to best secure our babies in multiple acres of land.
Should we put in a physical fence? Is a deer fence going to hold them in? How do you put in a fence when the land is mainly rock?
Or should we get an invisible wireless dog fence? Is the wireless option going to work if you don’t have good internet? What brand options could we consider?
In this review, I dive into what I learned about the invisible dog fence options, deer fences, and wired invisible dog fences.
Our first step was to check out the wireless GPS fences.
We narrowed it down to two leaders in the industry: Halo collar (www.halocollar.com) and the SpotOn GPS (https://spotonfence.com). Fence. At first glance, I was inclined to get the Halo Collar because their website looks more professional and the collar is less expensive. But after some research, I learned the Halo collar is harder to drop each “fence post” (SpotOn has an automatic fence drop). Also, the SpotOn collar is better for more remote areas, more accurate, more user friendly, and the SpotOn Collar does not have an annual subscription requirement (they offer one but it’s not mandatory for the collar to work).
So which collar did I go with?
The answer is: Neither.
Each collar only lasts 1 day before needing to be recharged. That is not convenient for when you have to travel and leave the dog with a dog sitter or if you forget to charge it. It has too much risk, so I decided to investigate Deer Fences as an alternative.
The deer fence I like the most is the PetPlayGround deer fence. They make a 5, 6, or 7 foot fence which is made specifically for dogs. At first glance, the fence looks a little flimsy (compared to a strong wood fence) but after looking into it more, it seems to be pretty well made. They also offer a dig guard which is great for the escape artists and they sell different strength fences.
So, why would you do a deer fence, instead of a strong metal or wood fence? Because we live in the mountains, digging is pretty difficult. So it would be a more straightforward approach to just putting up a deer fence instead. Also, it is pretty transparent. So it will be nicer to not block the view of the mountains surrounding the property.
We will put up a deer fence someday and when we do, we will also install an electric fence around the bottom-outside of the fence. We will do that to stop predators from trying to enter it (we have bears and coyotes in the area).
My last stop in the research was the: In Ground Invisible Dog Fence. We decided to explore this option because of the reliability. I want to know that the fence won’t suddenly stop working or be impacted by other components. With an inground fence, your only concern has to be accidently cutting the wire. but if you install it properly, cutting a wire would be difficult to do.
The invisible dog fence I eventually settled on is this one: Extremedogfence.com. I read a lot of reviews on it and it doesn’t seem perfect but for the price, it seems good enough. They offer various strength levels for the fences (I chose the strongest). My only concern is the collar. I watched some youtube videos on the fence, and discovered that the contact points on the collar tend to get corroded. In the reviews I saw online, it seems inevitable this will happen. So I will be prepared to address it when it does.
With that said, we did discover we had one issue with the fence. But not the fence itself… We had an issue with our land. Since we moved to a home in the mountains, the ground is heavily covered by rock. So installing the fence became a very complicated project. We had to rent an excavator to clean the land to install the fence. So what would have otherwise been a fairly labor intensive job, became an extremely (!) labor intensive job. But for our dogs, it is worth all the extra work. Our baby’s safety is our number one concern.