Everyone knows what a GPS tracker is at this point. It identifies the location of a person, animal, or object. However, GPS tracking for dogs simply isn’t enough. You don’t just want to know where your dog is; you want to ensure that they are in the right location. There’s a world of difference between putting a tracker on your dog in hopes of protecting it versus a “sky fence” that keeps your dog secure and where it’s supposed to be.
My name is Stephen Haynes, a professional dog trainer and behaviorist of 21 years. In my long career as a dog trainer, I’ve had a lot of requests from clients to help keep their dogs safe. Everything from keeping dogs away from tree lines where bears were known to hang out to keeping them away from the county roads along the edges of their ranches and houses.
Dog trainers can do a lot training-wise to get a dog to respond when given a direct command. This applies as long as we’re close enough that they can hear us, be able to think about us, and realize we are close by. This all changes when the dogs are out alone on the property and making their own decisions.
Working with clients over the years, our options on how to accomplish this were limited. Most of the time, keeping the dogs in or out of a specific area required the use of a wired fence. These could take the form of a physical barrier like chain link or, more commonly, a barrier that used a wire trenched into the ground that emitted a signal that talked to a collar that the dog would wear. When the dog got close to the wire in the ground, the collar would “remind” the dog that it was time to make a good decision and turn around. These things are a pretty good proxy for a human being close by but have a couple of notable downsides.
The Downsides of In-Ground Wire Fences
First, they were expensive to install, particularly on larger properties, steep or rocky gradients, or around complicated landscaping. Having a crew come out to dig a trench to lay in the wire around the property always cost a lot of money. There was also the maintenance of the wire. If the wire got cut by anything from a landscaping crew to a horse stepping on it, then the “fence” would stop working at all points, and the dog could just walk out anywhere with no reminder to stay in the boundary.
The second issue with these in-ground wire fences was the lack of flexibility and portability. You could install one on a property, but there it would stay. To have one at both your lake house and your main house involved buying another complete system. Not to mention if you wanted to go camping and keep the dog close to the campsite. Setting up a physical barrier on the fly is almost never a practical option.
The Downsides of GPS Tracking for Dogs
By the early 2000s, I started seeing methods of GPS tracking for dogs. Owners liked the idea of being able to see where the dog might be at any point without the hassle of fences or wires. However, the limitations of these collars became quickly apparent when I started getting calls from people that were using them.
GPS tracking devices allowed the clients to set up an area that was a safe zone for the dog to stay in. These collars would then notify the owner when the dog went out of that area. That was great in theory, but if a dog was chasing a deer, a mouse, or even just following the smell of something interesting, the dog neither knew nor cared where the boundaries were, and it would keep going when it crossed the line.
My clients were spending hours looking at their phones, seeing a dot on the map where their dog was, and chasing after it. Often, when they would get close, the dog would take off chasing something else. My clients would call me because they wanted to improve their dog’s recall or “come to you” command, so they didn’t have to spend so much time chasing it around through the canyons, but even great recall wasn’t enough to stop the initial chase.
The Ultimate Solution: SkyShepherd GPS Dog Containment
The trackers were great for knowing where your dog was but didn’t help at all with getting it back to you or, even better, keeping it where it was supposed to be in the first place. Fortunately, there are better solutions now.
One, in particular, is addressing the containment issues my clients have had for years. One of the best developments is what I describe as a “sky fence” that makes it simple for my clients to keep their dogs in an area they define, without fences or wires. These solutions leverage GPS technology, but the critical difference is that they combine GPS with the proven containment technology of the in-ground wire systems to get the best of both without the limitations of either.
Sky fences like SkyShepherd solve the main drawbacks of the hard-wired fences of the past. It uses GPS to map out a boundary for your dog through a mapping tool on your phone. The dog owner defines one or more safe spaces, and when the dog gets close to that perimeter, it will get that all-important reminder to turn around to safety. And what is more amazing for me as a trainer is that if the dog somehow manages to venture outside the boundary, the system will begin to shepherd the dog back into the safe zone automatically—no more chasing around the forest of canyons looking for a pet that has wandered into danger. Of course, if you have a big property where the dog has lots of freedom to roam, you can still simply use the app to see where the dog is whenever you want in real-time.
The second great thing about a sky fence is that they are portable. Go to a new location, and all you have to do is draw a new boundary on your phone screen. The dog will be able to explore the new territory until it finds the edges before roaming around free inside the zone. Camping, hanging out somewhere while on a long hike, using it at the lake house, or marking out a safe area while fly fishing, SkyShepherd makes identifying safe areas for your dog ultra simple.
These new tools are making my clients’ lives with their dogs better. My goal as a trainer is to help clients be able to take their dogs with them wherever they are able as easily as possible. SkyShepherd is letting them do this in ways that have never been possible in my world until now. In dog training, we say that the easy way is usually the right way to get a dog to do something, and having a tool like SkyShepherd as a sky fence certainly makes keeping dogs safe easier for clients.
