Is there any e-collar dog fence options that don't require burying the damn wire around the property.

My dog is very good about staying  around the house, but he sneaks away on me from time to time. The neighbor came over today and said he has a few pics of him on his trail cams romping out through his woods.

He doesn't chase anything but coons and rabbits, but he needs to stay on the our property when we are just hanging out at the house.

I was hoping there was a wireless option that worked with like a 100-200 yard radius, I found a few of them, but the diameter was tiny, like 100 ft.

Tagged.  I may need a system like this in the next couple months.

My cousin and his wife had a wireless dog fence. Recently they lost their dog for three days. Something to think about.

I don't lose my dog with one, he just sneaks over to the neighbors for some exercise in front of his trail cams. Most of the time around home he is without a collar on and when I call he comes running.

I just need to reinforce his loose sense of boundaries a bit.

I bought one of these 2 years ago for both of our dogs, both about 90 lbs,
http://store.petsafe.net/stay-play-wireless-fence
and it still works fine. (reading the reviews doesn't sound too promising)  
I have it set out to the max 210 feet setting.  
My dogs aren't flight risks and generally stay around the house, but when we let the batteries drain in the collars,
the dogs figure it out and start to wander into the woods after a week or so.
Our one dog will still run thru the shocks occasionally when he sees a rabbit that is close by.

I saw that. I was hoping for something with at least a 300 ft range though.

I have been using the Petsafe wireless system for5-6 years now and it works great on my GSDs.  You need to shave a spot so it makes good contact.  You can buy several of the transmitters and overlap them to get a larger area.  I need to do a search to see if you can mod them to get more range out of them.

This is what a neighbor and I did.  He got one for his dog so our systems now overlap and they get a really big area to run around in.  My favorite part of the system is when one of the dogs gets stupid and tries to chase a car. ZAP! Next thing you know they won't leave the yard for a month.

ETA Neat thing.  Unlike a wired system, they keep getting popped until they come back into range. Not just when they cross a line.

He is already accustomed to an e-collar since I use one for training. I think once he got his boundaries established he wouldn't cross them.

As an additional question, for those that have the in ground system, is it possible to run the wire from the house out to the perimeter and around without making a spot that will zap the dog if he crosses it.

Or would I need to mount the box on the perimeter and run electric to it so the small wire is just in one big loop?

Yes. Twisting the ends of the wire will cancel the signal. If you need a long run of this, chuck the two ends in a drill and twist away.

I might just have to go this route then.

The area I want to contain is just over an acre, but our house is right in the middle of it. There are woods on 3 sides so I think I could just sort of weave it through the brush and only have to bury the road side.

What breed of dog are we talking about?

If he is on a game cam it sounds like he is tracking (smelling) game (deer maybe?)

During hunting season this might not be good. I have a beagle mix that chases anything within 500 feet of my house.

Yeah, I didn't bury mine. I just used biodegradable lawn stakes to hold it down over last fall and winter.  In the spring I set the deck on my mower higher than usual. By June I had it back down to a normal level.  No issues at all.


Edit-  I did bury the twisted wire up to my house.

Coon Dog

He doesn't chase trash, we fixed that early with the e-collar on max
Pretty neat to watch really, he won't even look at a deer anymore unless its near the garden, then he knows it's ok to chase it back over the line. He will stop right at the road or just inside the woods though and come right back. If he gets on a coon though no amount of electricity will top him, I've had him treed right over an electric fence before and every time he put feet on the tree he would get nailed, that just pissed him off even more and feeds his hatred of coons. It took me almost 5 minutes to get to him that time, so he must have been really pissed.

But he does like to explore a bit. The neighbors pile their deer scraps each year out on the backside of their line and he can smell them as soon as they hit the ground. Little bastard drags back more legs and hides each year than I care to pick up in the spring, you think he would be content with all the scraps I bring home for him from where I hunt, but he just has to have them all.

I should add too, that I think the neighbors aren't from here originally, so they think the scent of the dog in the woods will scare the deer away forever. Not defending my dog or myself, it is my fault or allowing him over the line, but sometimes he slinks away. But on the farm we would be in a stand and the dog would come through the woods doing his dog thing, right under the stand, then 30 minutes later a deer would come walking right down the same trail like nothing was on their mind.

And yet another question about the wired fences.

How strong is the zap on the collar? I use a Trashbreaker with a 1 mile range and when we first started I shocked myself with the two lowest and it hurt, I figured it would be fine, didn't even phase my dog.

I had to use it on number 5 to get through to him. Rolls him over like he just got taken down by a cheetah though.

If the collars that come with it just give a tingle it won't help me much since he is really good at ignoring moderate pain.

Indirectly related to this subject, find out if any of your neighbors are amateur radio operators first.  Most invisible fence systems cause major interference on ham bands, and most hams are willing to work with you to come up with a solution that will cause minimal interference and still meet your needs.

Zach

How far would the problem be. I have the one neighbor a few hundred yards from my house, and the next is at least 500 yards. Then after that they are a good distance away.

I installed the Invisible Fence brand years ago. Apparently their brand uses a different type of oscillating shock frequency so the dog won't get accustomed to the jolt.

Works great, but every once in a while a stubborn dog will get through if tempted enough.  Keep in mind you just can't install it and expect it to work. It takes weeks of training your dog to respond to the audible signal before the shock.  And if you don't have hearing good enough to detect the signal, it won't do you any good to try and train your dog.

Easiest way to install the wire is to use a lawn edger.  Walking backward with it, dig the trench. lay the wire over the trench and using one of the really big paint paddles for mixing the 5 gallon buckets of paint, shove the wire into the trench.  Do 50' sections at a time. It just seems easier that way.   Use the underground water proof wire nuts where you make joints or repairs in the future.  

And as mentioned, to create dead zones, twist the wires with a drill.  I've got a 30' section from the edge of the yard to up inside the house where the transmitter is.

The wife learned years ago that if the dog does get out, and you remove the collar to bring her back in, don't hold the electrodes of the collar in your hand.  She came off the ground about 3' while holding a lab/chow mix.

I remember a hilarious event at my cousins house when I was a kid.

He had asked for one of our coon dog pups and we gave him one, he didn't hunt her though she was just a pet in the burbs. The learned fast that young coon dogs like to run, a lot. And chaining them just makes it worse because they want to run farther and longer when they get off.

So the put an invisible fence up and went through a solid week of training, I was there for soccer camp all week. The dog responded well and behaved on the perimeter, then one day she went over and tested the line and got shocked, then backed up slow and ran straight through it full speed, I'm not sure if they ever got her fully broke on it.

I know my hound would respond quickly to training though because he is such a good dog as it is, smart bastard too. If I put his shock collar on as a dummy collar he won't to anything I have ever scolded him for, just hangs out in the porch and the lawn doing dog stuff. If I take it off though he instantly will expand his perimeter out to about 500 yards and patrol it. Im sure once he had the collar on and heard the old familiar warning tone possibly followed by a shock as he does a sweep around the property he would pick it up fast.

Well, I picked up a sport dog inground fence and installed it. Other than coming up about 100 ft short and having to make a wire run it was easy enough.

I put it on level 4 with a tone and a shock, that seemed a bit much so it's on level one now. He knows what a tone means from his other collar anyway.

The dog is not happy about it, for the time being he refuses to leave the porch. I'm sure he'll adjust once he figures out where the lines are a little better.