Editorial Standards
How We Check Our Facts
Dog fence advice is full of recycled numbers nobody ever traced to a source. Ours are traced. This page explains the process, and what it has cost us.
The rule: every number needs a primary source
Every figure we publish, a burial depth, a boundary width, a price, an accuracy claim, has to trace to a source we actually read. Not a competitor's blog post, not a number that has bounced around pet sites for a decade. When we can't find a primary source for a claim, we either say so in the text or we don't publish the claim.
What counts as a source here
- Government specifications and data: the official GPS performance standard, NOAA space weather records, FAA monitoring reports, FCC equipment filings, USDA field tests, state 811 statutes.
- Peer-reviewed research: the JAVMA containment survey, the Schalke e-collar stress study, canine spatial-learning research, GPS attenuation studies in forestry and snow-science journals.
- Manufacturer manuals and spec pages, read directly. When a fact comes from a maker's own documentation, we attribute it that way in the text ("by the makers' own numbers"), and we treat self-published precision claims as claims, not verified results.
- University extension services for anything about lawns, soil, and digging.
One deliberate policy: we do not name other containment brands, positively or negatively. We cite their published numbers generically and let the numbers do the arguing.
We attack our own claims before you read them
New numbers on this site go through an adversarial check: a second pass whose only job is to prove the claim wrong by re-fetching the source and hunting for contradicting evidence. Claims that can't be confirmed from a source we actually retrieved get cut or rewritten as attributed claims.
This process has teeth. When we audited our own site in mid-2026, we re-verified 32 load-bearing claims against primary sources and ended up correcting 21 of them, including numbers we had repeated for months. The corrected versions are what you read today, and the same audit is why our burial-depth advice, our boundary-width numbers, and our collar wear rules sometimes contradict what other sites keep republishing.
What we refuse to publish
- Containment rates with no published methodology. Vendor "99%" figures appear on this site only as claims to be examined, never as facts. The number we lead with instead comes from the largest independent survey (JAVMA, 974 owners): 44 percent of electronically fenced dogs escaped at least once in their lifetime.
- Safety reassurances. We never call static correction "harmless." We describe it as a brief, low-energy interrupt and publish the wear rules that actually prevent injuries, because documented collar injuries are pressure sores from fit and wear time.
- Undated prices. Every price carries the date it was checked, and we re-verify them on a schedule.
- Advice without its limits. Every guide states at least one real limitation of its own recommendation, including the dogs these systems are wrong for.
Found an error?
Tell us. If a number on this site is wrong or has gone stale, we want it fixed more than you do: send us the page and the correction and we'll reply within a business day. Corrections get fixed in the text, not buried in a footnote.
See the process in the product
The guides are where the sourcing shows: animated diagrams, honest limits, and numbers you can trace.