I am a dog lover.  My dogs are like my second set of children.  They are spoiled beyond belief and in return are extremely loving and loyal.  They are also very accustom to having a large backyard to roam freely in. 

I had this awesome idea to purchase a wireless dog fence system yesterday from PetSmart, because this keeping the dogs on a 3' leash tied to the picnic table just isn't really working.  My husband had an all out fit in the store when he saw that this system was going to cost us about $600.  I argued my case, citing that it would be soooo much better for the dogs to have some freedom, it would be in their best interest and how much safer they would be.  I basically kept talking until he caved in and let me buy it.  So yes, it was totally my idea. 

We get back to the rv with the system, get everything set up and my husband puts one of the collars on Katy.  Sure, pick the only female, the smallest, the youngest, the most timid dog we've got to test it on... really?  So he decides to test it out on himself first.  Okay, at that moment I had to giggle because I was having flashbacks to an email about a guy who bought his wife a taser for Christmas...  Funny story, if you haven't read it you should Google it.  You'll laugh till you pee your pants!  At any rate, my husband came through it unscathed and said it was the equivalent of a 9-volt battery, not a big deal.  Of course he wasn't wearing it around his neck like the dogs would be, he tested it on his arm.  Uh huh.  Katy of course crossed the boundary line immediately and didn't know she was supposed to come back into the circle.  Imagine that.  Maybe we should have read the directions out loud to the dogs so that they would know the rules too.  So here is poor little Katy, stuck outside the boundary area and the collar starts zapping her (we honestly did have it set to low).  She started yelping and flopping around in an attempt to get the collar off, literally crying like a baby, and LOUD!  My husband is running around in the street trying to catch her so he can remove the collar, while I am fumbling around trying to unplug the stupid thing from the power.  This naturally caused some of our animal loving neighbors to investigate, which was rather embarrassing to explain I might add.  Poor Katy remained inside the rest of the evening trembling in fear under the kitchen table. 

I was ready to return the damn thing after that and then I hear my husband say, "What's fair is fair!" as he's putting the next collar on Larry, our middle "child"... Really?  We're actually going to try this again???  I'm pretty sure I saw Larry's eyes cross...  and into the rv he went.  I found him hiding on the dash between the windshield and the curtain. My poor baby boy!

At this point Jack, the oldest and wisest of the bunch, was none too excited about partaking in what everybody else was doing.  I'm pretty sure he had been paying very close attention the entire time.  He was hesitant to say the least.  That is until the cat wandered on to the scene.  If Jack got shocked we don't really know.  You can't exactly hear the collar beeping when it's traveling at the speed of light half a block away.  So we turned it up a notch.  It did get his attention after that but thankfully he didn't whine or yelp, or spend the rest of the evening trembling in terror like the other two.  That's okay, he minds pretty well without a shock collar anyway.

The moral to the story is this folks, the directions that came with the system were most likely written by someone who knows something about training dogs and their behavior.  You, and your dogs, are not smarter than this person.  Read the directions and then follow them.  There's a reason you don't just slap the collar on the dog and turn them loose.  Trust me on this.  It's going to take a couple of weeks, just like the directions say, but we'll get through it I'm sure and once we do I will have three very happy dogs and my husband will have his happy wife back.