Laughs aside from watching 'Strays,' are dog electric fences safe?
The pros and cons of buying an invisible fence to give your dog more room to run around
No knock to Will Ferrell, but Jamie Foxx was the actor who made the 2023 film “Strays” laugh-out-loud funny through the majority of the film. Even in a scene with a particularly cruel dog owner, the adult comedy somehow made viewers so entertained by the dogs that we could look past what definitely would’ve had the Anti-Cruelty Society paying this guy a visit.
However, there was one particular scene in the film where viewers like me weren’t quite sure if we should laugh or be worried. It involved a dog in his front yard, running “freely.” While the loose dogs wanted him to come along to hang out, that dog kept warning them that he couldn’t figure out how to get out of the yard. Any time he got too close to the edge of the yard, that invisible dog fence got the best of him.
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As soon as I saw this scene, I thought about how my first dog (a 50-60-pound Labrador Retriever/German Shepherd mix) was constantly squeezing his way through our backyard between a set of bushes. Even when we stacked rocks and fencing in his way, he’d hop over them and squeeze his way to the front yard again.
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He never ran away. He never even seemed interested in running in the yard. He’d stroll through the front yard, walk up the front steps and sit on the porch to people-watch. I’m sure this had to be intimidating to a random passerby who wasn’t quite sure why this dog wasn’t moving or if it was a statue. Maybe they thought we had an electric fence. (We did not.) But Shep never made a move down one step.
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I happened to be walking home from either school or work one day and noticed an unfamiliar object near the potted plants. Sure enough, a living, blinking, fluffy dog made eye contact and patiently waited for me to walk to the bottom step. Shep was so intrigued by sitting like a statue on those steps that he didn’t even run around the yard to greet me — and this is the same dog who would knock down Christmas trees and lay completely flat on the middle, basement step so we had to pet him each time we did laundry. (You either had to hop over him or pet him, and then he’d immediately scoot over.)
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And watching “Strays” made me wonder if my family dropped the ball on getting a dog invisible fence so he could continue to enjoy hanging out in the front yard? Would it have been too intimidating for people walking by and scared of dogs? Are electronic pet fences safe anyway? And if neighbors (like this Reddit user) were fed up with loose dogs running in their own yards, would it be OK for them to install their own invisible fences to keep dogs away?