The misadventures of Ara slyhound

The buried electric fence thing sometimes has the opposite effect - high-prey dogs ignore the pain to run through and out, but then when they've given up and come home, they can't get back in because it's too painful. At that point, they may give up and wander off down the highway, and then you've really lost them.

It's worth taking time to observe if she's a digger or a jumper - how high is your existing fence? If she's one of those jump-six-feet-easily dogs, a kennel/ run (stable?) is the only thing that'll hold her.

We've had two dogs that got out constantly, and I had several as a kid.

For tie-outs ... you have to be very careful that there is nothing they can get tangled up in or wound around (like a tree). My little dog died after less than an hour when she got tangled up & couldn't get to her water. It was only about 80 degrees outside, but when you are a black dog and are going completely nuts barking at birds in the trees, etc., it apparently takes very little time to give yourself a heat stroke. We were only gone long enough to go to lunch, and we had put her outside because we had a newborn baby & we weren't walking her enough, so we thought she would like being able to run around outside while we were at lunch.

We had a big dog when I was a kid who also tangled himself up all the time, so my dad put in an electric fence thing (the buried line with a collar). The only thing it was useful for was letting us know when he got out, if we were home, because we would hear him howling as he worked up the courage to go over it, then heard him YELP-YELP-YELP when he finally went over. He would never come back close enough to the house for it to shock him when he was done carousing, so we had to look for him much further away. To be fair, my dad never did the full training thing you are supposed to do with them, which takes a few weeks of several-times-per-day training.

The only fence that would keep in our worst-digging dog was one with concrete barriers at the bottom. We had these in two houses -- one where they were accidental, retaining walls on all sides of our yards going into neighbor's yards -- and one where the previous owners had installed it to keep in their dogs. If you install buried concrete barriers, you are looking at many thousands of dollars, unless you can do concrete work yourself.

Another take on the electric fence is to actually run electric wire along the bottom of your existing fence, so that the dog gets shocked anytime he tries to dig. If any dog-lover wants to tell me this is cruel, I would say, "yes, but letting a dog get hit by a car or starve to death because they were lost is much more cruel." We had a dog that dug & dug & dug, and we finally lost her to this after trying everything under the sun. We did this at one house & it did work pretty well. You have to keep the grass away from it & maintain it, and the dog does learn fairly quickly not to dig. BUT -- they will keep trying every now & then, so you have to keep it running even after they don't appear to be trying anymore. One bonus to this is that any dog outside who is trying to get in will be shocked & discouraged, too.

All I can say is that I am very grateful that of our current dogs, one is too old to dig anymore (have you ever seen the kind of hole a St. Bernard will create? We're talking meteor craters!) and the other one would rather be home than off adventuring. Once a dog learns to dig, and likes to live the high life, being a dog owner starts to feel like you are running a maximum security prison, the warden trying to keep all the inmates in.


PS - just saw your avatar that says you are in OK. We were living in OK when we encountered so many people who just let their dogs run wild all day long, didn't understand why anyone else might have a problem with it or why their tax dollars were supporting that gestapo-force otherwise known as animal control. Have you seen Kipper? Small, neurotic German Shepherd-looking mix last seen in Ardmore.

I've done the electric wire with a hotbox around the perimeter for my hardcore diggers in the past. I've never had a dog try it more than twice. Sure it hurts, but it's better than having a dog hit by a car. I've only had one dog who could defeat the electric wire and he started his tunnels well clear of them. But he was a terrier and dug like nobodys business.

Hang in there!