Wireless Fence Training: The First Two Weeks

By INVIROX Training Team · Published 2026-11-08 · 8 min read

Before day one

Nothing in this protocol works if the setup underneath it is wrong, so half an hour of preparation saves a fortnight of confusion.

1. Set the boundary and walk it yourself, collar in hand, dropping a flag at every point where the warning tone begins. Do not guess where the line is.
2. Look at the flags. If they do not form a clean shape, move the center point before you involve the dog.
3. Fit the receiver high on the neck, just under the jaw, with one finger of slack and no more.
4. Check the contact points reach skin. Lift the strap and look. On a thick coat you will need longer prongs, and this is the moment to find that out.
5. Charge everything and buy a long line if you do not own one. Twenty to thirty feet of light line is the single most important piece of equipment in this whole process.

Pick a fortnight when someone is actually around. Two sessions a day of fifteen minutes is not much, but it has to happen on most days, and starting the week before a holiday guarantees a broken protocol.

→ Related reading: how to fit the collar so it works

Days 1 to 3: flags only

The collar is on the dog and switched off. Nothing fires. This stage is pure association: flags mean turn around, and coming back to you is the best thing that happens all day.

Walk the inside of the boundary on the long line. When your dog drifts toward a flag, say your recall word once, turn, and move away from the line. The instant they follow, reward heavily. Food, praise, a toy, whatever your dog actually values.

• Two sessions of ten minutes beats one session of twenty.
• Never let the dog reach a flag and sniff it undisturbed. Turn before they arrive.
• Keep your own body language calm. If you tense up on the line, the dog learns the flags are frightening rather than simply a place you turn.
• End every session inside the safe zone with something enjoyable, not at the boundary.

By day three most dogs are visibly slowing down as they approach the flags. That slowing is the behaviour the rest of the protocol builds on.

Days 4 to 7: tone only

Now the collar plays the warning tone, and still nothing else. This is the week that decides whether the finished boundary is held by sound or by static, and you want it held by sound.

Same walk, same long line. Let your dog get close enough to trigger the tone, then immediately call and turn. Reward every single turn without exception, for the whole four days. You are teaching that the tone predicts a good outcome if they respond to it.

Watch for the moment your dog turns before you say anything. That usually appears somewhere on day five or six, and it is the single best predictor of how the whole system will hold up.

Days 8 to 11: adding the working level

First, find the level. Do this indoors, calm, off the boundary entirely. Start at the bottom of the scale and step up one at a time until your dog gives you a look, an ear flick, or a small head turn. That is the working level. If they flinch, freeze, or vocalise, you have gone too far and should drop several levels immediately.

Then put it into the boundary work. The sequence at the line is always the same: tone, a moment for the dog to respond, and the level only if they continue. Most dogs, having done stage two properly, will rarely reach it.

• Keep the long line on. This is the stage where an untimely correction with no way to guide the dog does the most harm.
• If your dog reaches the level twice in one session, stop. Either the level is wrong or the previous stage needs more time.
• Never call your dog toward the boundary to test it. Ever.
• Reward the turn just as heavily as you did in week one. Rewarding does not stop when correction starts.

If at any point your dog starts avoiding the whole garden rather than the boundary, the level is too high. Turn it down, go back to tone-only for three or four days, and rebuild. That is a normal detour and not a failure.

→ Related reading: how communication levels actually work

Days 12 to 14: proofing against distraction

This is the stage everybody skips and the stage that decides everything. A boundary that holds in an empty garden is not a boundary. It has to hold when something interesting is on the other side of it.

Recruit a helper and manufacture the distractions deliberately, in rising order of difficulty, always with the long line on.

1. A person walking past the line at a distance.
2. The same person closer, then stopping, then calling the dog.
3. A ball or toy rolled slowly across the boundary and left there.
4. Another dog walking past outside the line, if you can arrange one safely.
5. A car door, a bicycle, children's voices, whatever your dog actually reacts to in daily life.

Every one of these is a repetition of the same lesson: the tone still applies when something exciting is happening. A dog who has done three days of this is a fundamentally different proposition from one who has only walked a quiet perimeter.

→ Related reading: the mistakes that undo boundary work

Week three: taking the line off

Two clean weeks means two weeks with no crossings and reliable turns under distraction. If you have that, the long line comes off, and you stay outside with the dog for the whole of week three.

Supervised does not mean sitting inside watching from a window. It means being in the garden, able to intervene, and running short refresher walks along the boundary every few days. The dog is learning that the rule applies when the line is not attached, which is genuinely new information to them.

Only after that third week does unsupervised garden time make sense, and even then start with short periods rather than an afternoon.

What to do when a stage goes wrong

Almost every problem in this fortnight has the same fix, which is to go back one stage rather than push forward.

Going back a stage costs three or four days. Pushing through a stage the dog has not understood costs weeks, and sometimes costs the whole system.

After the fortnight

A trained boundary is not a finished project, it is a maintained one, though the maintenance is light.

• Walk the boundary with your dog once a month, on the line, as a refresher.
• Re-check the working level when the coat changes with the season.
• Re-proof after any long absence, a holiday, a stay with family, a period of illness.
• Keep the charging routine tied to an existing habit so a flat collar never surprises you.

And keep the recall alive independently of the fence. The boundary is a convenience at home; the recall is what covers everywhere else and every day the system is off. The households with the fewest problems are the ones who never let the fence become the only thing holding the dog.

→ Related reading: keeping the recall sharp alongside the boundary