"The reviews for this fence were so wonderful that I couldn't help but buy one for my 2 labradors (Hope - 4 year old brown lab, Dalton - 4 year old yellow lab). Currently Hope and Dalton spend 4 days a week in their metal kennels (indoors) while I am at work and although we've tried time and again to allow them free reign of the house while we're away, they just can't be trusted. At age 4 Dalton is still a chewer and although he has a veritable buffet of toys he still sometimes choses to chew on things that he shouldn't and Hope tends to show her displeasure of our absence by leaving little surprises on our bed/floor. I thought that purchasing an extra wide fence to close them off in the tiled kitchen would be a great compromise between complete freedom and their safety.
The fence arrived in perfect condition, looked very nice, and was exceptionally easy to install. The one feature I was surprised to find lacking, was an automatic rewinding of the fence. For some reason I assumed the fence would have an internal mechanism to both pull it taut across the opening, and rewind the fence into the casing when unlatched (guess I've looked at too many of those pull out screen doors at Lowes). It does not however, so the knob on the top of the casing must be turned in order to wind the fence back out of the way. A bit of a hassle, but certainly liveable.
Knowing how creative our little angels can be when it comes to new items such as this, we shut them up in the kitchen but didn't go very far so we could observe their behavior and determine if this fence really would be the answer to our prayers.
Unfortunately, in less than 5 minutes, our mischevious 45 lb Dalton had nosed against the left bottom portion of the fence (where the webbing attaches to the latching mechanism) so robustly that the fencing material popped/ripped out of the latching mechanism. This makes the fence totally unusable and we must now return it.
I'm not sure if we just got a defective model, or if Dalton is especially strong, but it took longer for us to put the fence up than it took for him to ruin it. We're really quite disappointed that this product didn't work for us and as a result of our little test, I don't believe we'd recommend it to others unless they have weaker/more passive beasts at which point, do you really need a fence like this anyways?"