Another difficulty to consider - an IF may keep YOUR dog in, but doesn’t do anything to keep other beasts - wild, domestic dog or human - out. The neighbor’s 85lb dog can’t get at my dog inside my fence. Neither can coyotes, or canine males (when I had an intact bitch) or humans who “Just want to pet the cute doggy”… who may be afraid of strangers.
There is no substitute for training, supervision, and getting the appropriate dog for your lifestyle.
The best fence I’ve ever found is a neighbor with a best-friend dog. If the dog runs out of the house… she beelines for the neighbor’s house to go play with the friend. And vice versa.
Not really. Once you have a runaway dog, you unplug the fence, and it can come back without being shocked.
That works fine as long as you know about it when it happens. If your dog is only outside when you are able to observe him, no problem. Otherwise …
Sorry, I didn’t bother to type out the entire training process, the initial training is positive reinforcement. When the system is first installed you spend hours walking your dog around the perimeter, giving them treats and praise for staying inside the perimeter. The perimeter is marked with flags, so the dog has a visual cue. There are no beeps, no shock. Stage two you add beeps - but no shock. That’s a negative reinforcement. Stage three you add the shock. There is still praise and treats for staying inside rather than going outside at each stage.
We have a dog that has worked really well with the invisible fence (eager to please, not a car chaser, submissive, but with enough German Shepard in him to be territorial - at least if that means ‘not really wanting to go very far from his people’) - and due to neighborhood covenants and how we use our yard - its the only option other than chaining him up that lets the dog be part of the family. (We can fence our backyard, but we don’t use it and its small for a large dog. We can’t fence our front yard, which is larger and what we use. If we fenced the backyard, our dog wouldn’t be able to hang where we hang). Although the Invisible Fence people claim that they can get any dog trained within the fence, some breeds are apparently MUCH more difficult to train, and MUCH more likely to end up with a lot more negative training than our dog required.
This is the training system the Invisible Fence brand uses - they sell the training with the fence (and they won’t guarantee their fence without the training.) Its certainly possible to put in a shock collar system from the hardware store, stick the collar on your dog and set it to “stun” and ‘train’ your dog to stay inside the yard.
Dogs are a little like small kids, and regardless of what kind of fence you have - unless its pretty escape proof, you should be supervising the dog outside. The neighbor has a small dog and a six foot fence - that dog could clear that fence (I’m not sure how, maybe there was something to climb up on the other side?). The fence is now eight feet - and they are backing it up in the front yard with the IF so if the dog does get out from the back yard (or out of their hands when on the leash when they are out front), he doesn’t run. He IS a bolter though, unlike our dog. And really thinks he should be paying social calls on all the neighborhood dogs.
One of the things we’ve done is put our boundary about halfway up the yard. A lot of people put it pretty close to the street - our dog doesn’t get within fifteen feet of the street - basically for this reason. We figured the closer he got to other dogs on the street, the more likely he was to charge through (not terribly likely given his personality).
You would be the exception in my area. We have sidewalks, and most IFs come right to the edge of the walk. Really sucks when I’m just minding my own business walking my 2 goldens on leash, and some hound comes bounding around the corner of a house towards us with no visible barrier between us.
This impresses me as an extremely dickish attitude. If such a thing happened to me I could imagine deriving a certain level of amusement out of taking a baseball bat to that beast’s head - or better yet - its owner’s.
OK tough guy, first of all, the people and/or dogs my boxer dog is barking at (as he runs parallel to his fence border) are the same people and dogs every day. They are my neighbors that live on my street. They know my dog. I have big signs proclaiming “Dog Contained By Invisible Fence”. The dog has never crossed the border, except once when he had an epileptic seizure and in post-ictal blindly wandered off into the woods in my back yard, and in that state he is a danger to nobody but himself.
Secondly…lighten up, Francis. I was making a joke.
He’s not an aggressive dog. He doesn’t bite. He’s barely out of puppyhood and the breed is extremely rambunctious and playful. When my sons little friends come over to play we have to crate him because he’s big and strong enough and not entirely broken of jumping on someone in friendly excitement, which can knock little kids down.
I like my invisible fence. I don’t want a big real fence around my over half an acre yard. It isn’t inhumane, either, no more than an electric bark collar is. Actually I think those can be inhumane, and I’ve considered one for my beagle mix because she is such a prolific barker. I can’t leave her outside for very long she barks so damn much.
Not many posters are addressing the OP: ‘Are “invisible fence” systems inhumane to dogs?’
I see a lot of discussion about invisible fences vs. real fences vs. training. There are trade-offs among all three of these options, these trade-offs are pretty well established, but that is not what the OP asked.
Is anyone here arguing that the fences are inhumane? Because I am interested in hearing from this perspective.
OK. My answer is no. Yes, it’s convenient and probably not as good of a substitute for tons of hours of tireless training. But I don’t care, because I don’t have the time to spend training my dog to acknowledge where his boundaries of where his yard is, and I’m not convinced that that type of exhaustive training is going to be as effective of a deterrent for a territorial animal like a dog than my invisible fence is.
My fence is 100% effective for both my dogs when the batteries aren’t allowed to run down (my fault, the beagle) or when my Boxer happens to have a seizure while he’s outside (which has happened once in two years), which I cannot control.
The only side effect I’ve noticed for the Boxer is that he’s so terrified of the border that I cannot walk him. The last time I tried, I removed his fence collar, put on a regular one, leashed him, and he stopped cold just before the boundary. I couldn’t cajole or carry that dog to cross that border, and when I did try to carry him across to show him it was OK, he freaked out and urinated all over me in fear. So maybe that’s inhumane, the fact that now he’s afraid to leave his yard, but he has over a half acre to run, and run he does, so it isn’t that bad.
I just can’t walk him is all.
Its the exception around here as well - but I’m not any more enamoured of a dog I don’t know running up within five feet of me barking territorially than you are, so it seemed both the safest thing for our dog and the right thing to do for our neighbors.
(My front yard is pretty deep and our back yard is really short and backs onto the neighbors.
I agree. I find that it is often not the case in the real world, however.
But in that respect, an invisible fence is no better or worse than a fence a dog can and occasionally does jump, or dig under. Or one that’s gate is sometimes left open by the kids.
So?
Yup. The perfect way to train your dog not to come back.
On the subject at hand, I’m completely, 100% against using electric shocks of any kind on dogs (or beatings, obviously).
The shock is pretty mild (at least to me), and generally the dogs only get shocked once or twice and that’s it. There’s plenty of stories about dog owner whom can remove their dog’s fence collar after a period of time and the dogs do not forget where the boundary is.
Kinda a different spin - when my BIL had an invisible fence installed, they marked it with little flags. (His yard is fenced, but their dog regularly jumped it. So they had the IF installed to discourage the jumping.) He eventually took the flags down, but hung on to them.
Some time later, he reseeded a portion of his backyard, and used the little flags to demarcate the reseeded area so his kids would stay off it. After a couple of days he realized that his dog habitually avoided the seeded area - it appeared as tho she still associated the flags with the electric fence, even tho they were in a different location/formation. 
I have a scat mat for my cats. We recently moved to a new apartment with a back yard and I don’t want my cats making a run out that door. The front door leads to a hallway so I can just go grab them if they make a break that way but if they get outside to the yard they will jump our wall and be on the streets of NYC within seconds. I figure that a small static shock (each of them touched it exactly once and will not go near it again) is much more humane than being crushed by a car when they get outside. Would I like to avoid ever doing anything that would cause my cats any discomfort? Of course. Would I do whatever it takes to keep them safe and healthy? Of course. That is why I bought the scat mat in the first place.
Just that it isn’t an argument against an invisible fence in particular - if any dog escapes his containment when you aren’t looking, the fence isn’t doing that much good.
I guess the one advantage of a traditional fence is that the dog can come back quickly and show up on your doorstep before you notice he’s missing without getting the shock. But from the neighbor’s dog chasing I’ve done, it doesn’t seem like most dogs show back up again quickly. And you can turn off the fence when you notice the dog is gone.