Dog containment ideas

I have 5+ acres and would like to give my dogs the run of the place, fence is out of the question cost wise, was thinking about the fencesless buried electric fence/shock collar. I haven't messured the perimeter yet, but will need a couple thousand feet anyways. SO here is my question/s. First any recommendations on brand model, second what kind of wire can I use to bury, the ones I have seen at most come with 1000 ft and then its 50 for each additional 250ft or something like that. I have a ton of old electric fence, can I use that?

I can't make a recommendation on the best brand to buy since I've not tried them all, but I have the Invisible Fence. I bought the unit about 15 years ago and it has been working flawlessly even since. As for the wire, I bought a spool at Home Depot. I purchased the type wire suggested by Invisible Fence. So I don't know if different fence systems require different size wire. But it surely is much cheaper buying it by the spool from a building supply source.

I didn't bury my wire. For ease of installation, maintenance, and relocation I have it on stick-in-the-ground plastic electric fence posts. Besides, my land is extremely rocky and it would be a Herculean challenge to bury it.

I don't think your old electric fence wire would work. I'm just guessing on that. All the "radio" invisible fences seem to be using copper strand wire.

The are a couple of reasons for failure with these fences......
....they don't keep trouble makers out. Stray dogs can freely enter your property to attack your dog.
.....an excited dog can bolt right through it while chasing a cat, deer, whatever.
.....they don't prevent someone from stealing your dog. I'm specifically directing this toward over zealous SPCA/Humane Society dog catchers. I caught one trespassing on my farm and trying to take one of my farm dogs, claiming it was an at-large stray. I had to call in the police to get my dog away from her (after I blocked her truck with my own vehicle so that she couldn't drive away with it). Boy I was tempted to file attempted theft charges that day. She sure wasn't happy giving me the dog back.
.....and the ultimate failure -- the dog wasn't successfully conditioned to respect the fence.

The dog needs to be well conditioned about the fence and warning beeps. The idea is to make zero mistakes. The dog needs to believe that it never can get through the fence, that it will always bite him if he tries. This type of canine thinking takes advantage of the dog's innate nature to submit to the more dominant dog. He must believe that he can never beat the fence. Over the years I've conditioned over a dozen dogs to the fence. Some were harder to train than others, but all managed to catch on. But alas not every owner is successful. My parents attempted to train their one dog and failed miserably. Their dog learned that it could take the jolt and run through the fence whenever it wanted.

thanks for the reply, great information, I never even thought about not burying it what a good idea.

Su Ba wrote:
I didn't bury my wire. For ease of installation, maintenance, and relocation I have it on stick-in-the-ground plastic electric fence posts. Besides, my land is extremely rocky and it would be a Herculean challenge to bury it. ........

All of your entry, Su, very similar to our own experiences.  Here's the one exception we are now struggling with.

Our property is fenced with livestock panels (~ 4 ft high) and the Invisible Fence wire runs along the top of this.  As you noted, with it exposed, it's much easier to observe for breaks, etc., even as it may have some down-sides to that configuration.  Our problem is that we are in the central Plains of the US south of the Canadian border.  Most years,.....but especially this year,... we have had major snow drifting that burys the physical fence along with the Invisible Fence.  The fence encompasses about 7 acres of the property and about 70% of the fence currently is under snow.

.....and the other night, it stopped working.  It gave the typical alarm for a broken wire so we had the local Invisible Fence representative out with a broken line detector, but no luck in finding where the break might be.   So I'm posting this in case others have had simiar issues in snowy environments with hopes there may be some solution to finding the break that we are missing?  Otherwise, spring thawing to expose the fence is weeks away.  Thanks!