Entanglements

Wow. This no-jump harness is really a contraption. If you are mechanically impaired, this is not the tool for you. It seems to work, but it's very unwieldy to get on and off and prevents him also from running and playing outside, which we aren't very pleased about. I'm also curious how one prevents the harness from being urinated upon. Blech.

See harness here

The neighbor cats were kind enough to entice him to leap at the fence this evening and allow us to correct him, so at least we know what sets him off (not that we have any control over it). I don’t think he’s triggered by neighbor dogs walking by (with or without their people) although he does bark at them. If he was, he’d have been over the fence many, many times by now as there is a lot of dogwalking traffic by our house daily and a couple of neighbor dogs (every color lab and a great dane) that escape their respective yards with regularity.

We have a few other options we can try with him as well:

Extend a flexi-lead about 6' and lock it. attach to collar before letting him out. dragging the lead apparently makes dogs not want to jump, and if they do jump, the handle of the flexi is likely to remain caught on the fence, so they will not get far. If you use this technique, please PLEASE be careful that your dog has enough lead spooled out to land safely on the other side of your fence should they jump over. We had a friend whose dog hung herself because she'd jumped over the fence while tied out and couldn't reach the ground. Tragic.

We have an electronic training collar we could try with him. The caveat here is that he's so clever (as our previous dobes were) that he will likely quickly associate the collar with the correction and save his shenanigans for times he doesn't have the collar on.

Figure some way to run an electric wire along the section of fence he's most likely to go over (the front and part of the eastern side) and let him deter himself. This worked great with one of our previous labs and we only ever had to have the electric fence on once!

Don't let him out unsupervised. Alas, he is a lot faster than either of us on foot, so if he decides to run at the fence and get over, he's likely to be able to do so faster than we can stop him. Us being out there with him tonight didn't seem to deter him from trying to make it over as he did it several times in front of us.

Huge thanks to Auntie Ceilidh (Doberman rescue, Salem OR) for the flexi idea!

We'll keep everyone posted.

If you'd like to adopt King Ralph in spite of his "youthful exuberance", please apply here! He really is a wonderful dog.