February is Dog Training Education Month, so it seems fitting we would be in the process of training our dog. I notice, though, the designation suggests more than just teaching the dog a few new tricks—it’s clear the dog owners must learn to teach before offering even the first treat.

When my husband and I enrolled our puppy in a training class, we immediately discovered we were the ones being trained. We learned to be consistent, friendly and patient yet firm, to be prudent with the treats and, in general, to be pack leaders.

After we mastered the art of teaching our new dog to sit, lay, walk on the leash without wrenching a shoulder and play with the cat without flinging it, we decided it was time for a potty bell. Several dog-owning friends recommended a bell that the dog rings when he needs to go outside.  Big Puppy was so quick to learn this trick that now it’s clear we have been trained. You can almost see his mischievous wheels turning—hmmm, every time I ring the bell, they run for the door. I like this bell business, he mumbles to himself.

Bell mastered, we are now in the stage of teaching our puppy how to live within the boundaries of an invisible fence.  It works this way—an underground wire outlines the yard and interacts with a collar, first emitting beeps when the dog approaches, and then a static charge that is strong enough to suggest he step back within his designated territory.

We are almost thoroughly trained, the lot of us, and Big Puppy seems to enjoy his new space. He can now run untethered to chase sticks, examine deer tracks and sniff for moles to his content. But his freedom has limits. He may go so far and no farther without consequences.

At times, I watch him gaze out beyond the invisible fence line, and I wonder if he is dreaming of the day he might bound through the force field and run like the wind. I imagine an entire anthropomorphic monolog in which he says, “There must be wonderful things out there, things I cannot see or smell from where I sit, or these people wouldn’t go to so much trouble to keep me here. Don’t they know the world is meant for me to explore, me with my insatiable appetites?” he shouts in a frustrated plea for a world without fences.

But then I remember something I learned in the puppy training class—dogs actually like boundaries. They are pack animals that acknowledge leaders and recognize rules for the sake of their safety and well-being. It is in their nature to explore to some extent, but they almost always come home, and knowing exactly where that space begins and where it ends makes all the difference.

It isn’t very different for their human counterparts. Even those of us who don’t like rules or who claim we have too many laws can at least recognize that a certain number of our rules and laws—a certain length of fence line—bring with them a sense of security.

We build visible and invisible fences for all manner of reasons. Those put up out of irrational fear and insecurity, those are the ones worth tearing down. But we build needed figurative and literal fences for privacy and for safety, for protection against our enemies and our weaknesses, and to keep civilized society from imploding.

And we build fences around what we call Home. It’s our turf and our sanctuary. Whether we leave it for a few hours or for a few weeks, we almost always come back to it. And knowing exactly where it is, where it begins and where it ends, makes all the difference.

As Robert Frost said, “Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” Big Puppy may not be able to see his fence, and despite my tendency to attribute human reasoning to his canine brain, I doubt he understands why we put it there.

He’ll just have to trust his people on this one because, like him, we’ve been trained to live within one fence or another, and most of them are there for good reason.