Help keeping dog(s) in fence

[GoldenEagle]

I need some suggestions/feedback on helping to keep a dog in the yard. I have a six foot tall wooden fence that was build about a year ago when I bought the house. The fence builders did a great job. But the wood they used for the crossboards are thick. That allows my jack russell/lab mix to jump up on the top crossboard and propel herself over the fence.

I am looking at a couple of different options to prevent this. The first is an electric wire. The idea behind that is when her paws touch the top board, it would give her a minor shock and it would train her not to do it anymore. My concern with that is that we have a septic tank buried in the backyard that I assume could put out some stray voltage that the fence could pick up and make the shock more powerful. The other is that we do have some pools of water near the fence. We could use some dirt to fill that it, but we have a sprinkler system from the septic tank that would at least put some water in the backyard on a regular basis.

The second is to take some welded wire and bend it in and place on the top of the fence and create a 90 degree angle that would prevent her from being able to jump. But I think this this would be more expensive and require more manual labor and be quite ugly.

Any other ideas? I though about putting something slick on the top of the crossboard where she couldn't get a grip, but I haven't been able to find anything.

I also have some dogs that like to dig. To solve that, I took some chicken wire and laid it on the ground and zip-tied it to the fence. This works but is a nightmare to cut the grass around. I thought about running a electric wire at the bottom of the fence and insulating with a crossboard, but I would still have those same concerns about the water and stray voltage.

[Blackadar]

I wouldn't worry too much about stray voltage due to water. It's the amps that kill, not the volts. I did this with my dogs to keep them out of my garden and it worked like a champ. Run an electric wire about a foot up and out from the fence, which should take care of both problems. Once the dogs get shocked once or twice, they won't want to mess with it.

If you're smart, you'll set it up so that you can easily take the wire down and put it back up again. First, you'll need to mow/trim around the wire while your dogs learn. Once they do, you can take it down again...but if they start up digging/jumping, you'll need to put it up as a reminder. So drive tubes into the ground that you can easily fit the plastic poles holding the wire into. The tubes are permanent, but that allows you to easily slip out the poles and the wire and roll that up. If you need to re-deploy the wire just unroll it and slide the poles back into the tubes.

[Glengoyne]

Mrs. Glen here, and I'm sure Mr. Glen can add more...

Our shep/chow mix is an escape artist of his own right, preferring to plow through anything, rather than over. We did the electric fence, even had one for "stubborn" animals I think. That was a headache and a half. We were constantly maintaining the thing because one way or another it would become grounded and be ineffective.

We eventually discovered the invisible fence where the dog wears a device that shocks him when he gets close to the fence. Because it has to be a full circuit, we were able to run the wire out along the bottom of the fence, then ran it back along the top of the fence.

This has worked for the better part of 4 years that we have been at our house. It has only been in the last couple of weeks that either the battery on his collar needs to be replaced, or he has just decided that the neighbor chihuahua is worth the pain, but that is more for another post.

Good luck

[Butter]

If you're going ugly, why not just a flat piece of plywood on the side of the crossboards (covering them) all the way up to near the top, so it is a completely flat surface with no way to get a foothold.

[Bobble]

Originally Posted by GoldenEagle

Help keeping dog(s) in fence

You could remind them of the good points of both sides of the argument.

[stevew]

The non ugly fix is to just finish the fence on the other side.

[Crapshoot]

Have you ever looked at electronic fencing around a certain distance? That's what my mom did for our older lab.

[thesloppy]

I can't tell you how many times my eyes have flashed past this thread and read the title as "Help keeping dog(s) feces". I'd probably just put it in a ziploc and put it in the fridge. Yumm.

[SegRat]

I have the same problom with my dog. I have a 4 foot high fence. My dog was jumping all the time. I put in the Invisible Fence as a last resort before taking him back to the pound. For the last 6 months this has worked great.

[GoldenEagle]

I think what I am going to wind up doing is putting some railroad ties at the bottom to prevent the dogs from digging out. Theoretically, I guess they could still dig under those but they would have a long way to go.

For the top part of the fence, I think I am going to go with the PVC pipe and spray paint the color of the fence. That will be easily removable if I want to do that down the road.