High Tech Pet Company Offers Innovative Pet Products

Although pet products companies are in stiff competition for your business, it's sometimes difficult to find innovative designs in the offering, and when we do, it's worth passing it along to others in the pet world.



High Tech Pet is a Ventura, CA based electronic pet care manufacturer that was founded in 1986. With the sole pioneer invention of the electronic flea collar, the company was launched. They glided along for awhile on this product, but quickly realized that if they were going to survive in the intense competition that was quickly defining the electronic pet products market, they would have to put their heads together to come up with more innovative products.



Nick Bonge, the company founder, started to work on researching what pet owners were asking for, and with his background of mechanical engineering, put his talents to work on developing the right pet products.



In the early 90s, they pioneered the first fully automatic electronic dog doors. As they learned what their customers were looking for, they tweaked their doors accordingly until they perfected their design to showcase doors that were well insulated, secure, and attractive. Today, they have developed not only their dog door product line, but doors for cats as well, offering a line of doors to accommodate just about any pet, but their original Power Pet Door, improved and streamlined, leads the sales in their pet door line.



The major feature that sets the Power Pet Door apart from other automatic pet doors, is the motor driven design. Instead of a simple flap, electronically opened so the pet can then push through it, the Power Pet has a motor driven clear panel that lifts up into the top of the door, closing and locking after the pet is through the door.



The next product line that High Tech Pet tackled was an electric pet fence. They knew the electric pet fence technology worked on the principal of Progressive Stimulus" or "Run-Through" technology, typically having a tone only warning zone, followed by a mild stimulus zone and finally a high level shock zone very close to the wire.



"Tone only" warning zones, in their opinion, presented the first potential problem in which they often allow the dog to escape because if they stand in the warning zone long enough, the tone stops, as the collar battery runs down. Since the tone always precedes the shock, astute dogs could quickly learn that once the warning tone stopped, they were free to leave.



The second problem that these traditional containment systems presented in their opinion, was that they created zones wherein a low voltage shock is followed by a higher voltage shock. The low voltage shock was light enough to sometimes allow dogs to ignore the stimulus, thereby getting closer to the boundary line. Once they crossed into the next zone, they promptly received a higher voltage shock, causing many to react with trauma.



To address these problems, they put their engineers to work and eventually unveiled the technology of Pulsed Proportional Stimulus. Instead of a warning tone, followed by a continuous shock of one level or another, this technology combined sound and shock delivered simultaneously in short, intense bursts, increasing continuously as the dog approached the boundary wire. The closer your dog moved toward the boundary, the more rapid the pulses became allowing the dog to decide for himself, how much stimulus was enough to engender the retreat behavior. This new treatment of stimulus was designed to get your dog's attention, but with such a short pulse that your dog would probably not perceive it as painful. This eliminated the problem of dogs lingering in the warning zone and the possibility of trauma to the dog from a higher voltage continuous shock was eliminated.



Once they had grown their product line of pet doors, training, and containment items, they went to work on bringing the entire line together by research and development of the next innovative design. This was called "Pulsed Proportional Stimulus", or PAW. With this technology, they created a modular, expandable pet care system by consolidating two already existing pet collars into one small lightweight collar to activate the several pet products in the training, containment and pet door line. The PAW line of products was divided into two families.



First was the Ultrasonic family, controlled by the MS-2 Ultrasonic Transmitter Collar, which activated the motor driven Power Pet Doors, the Sound Barrier indoor sonic fence to keep pets out of restricted areas in the house, and the Yard Barrier outdoor sonic fence to keep them out of flower beds and other outdoor restricted areas.



Second was the Radio family, controlled by the RC-8 Radio Collar, which powered the Scat Mat, which keeps pets off the furniture, and the Humane Contain outdoor electronic underground fence, to keep pets safely contained in the yard.



These 2 families were brought together with the RX-10 combination ultrasonic radio collar allowing a dog to wear only one collar to operate any or all of the products in these two lines.



Nick Bonge, president of High Tech Pet, states they strive to retain small company characteristics when it comes to things like individual customer attention, while at the same time, being comfortable with the phenomenal growth they’ve experienced, allowing them to offer the highest quality in design and manufacturing of their pet doors, training items and dog fences, at the lowest prices possible.



Nick says, "To further realize this, we maintaining our company headquarters and control center for High Tech Pet's online site, in the coastal town of Ventura, California, where we design, engineer, market, test, and warehouse our products, and we also own and operate our own Chinese production facility, located in the city of Dongguan, where most of our products are manufactured. This is our own factory, which we have operated for over 10 years, so we’re able to maintain the highest production quality while achieving outstanding cost advantages with no trading company mark up. Our factory is clean, cool, well lit and contains modern production and test equipment. We maintain a very strict lower age limit of eighteen. We believe this is good for the United States because it keeps the prices of our goods affordable and good for a peaceful world to allow our economies to grow together and reinforce each other. Our products are shipped monthly in large containers to the US. We warehouse everything here in Ventura, so we are usually able to ship within one business day."



"We never forget that it is our customers (and their human companions) that we really work for. We will always go to whatever lengths are necessary to make our company the best of its kind from which to purchase and although we’re in stiff competition with companies like Innotek®, Petsafe®, Invisible Fence® and Dogtra®, we’re committed to disproving the conventional wisdom that you have to make a choice between inferior products at affordable prices or advanced, high quality products at high cost. At High Tech Pet, we try to offer pet products that fit every budget and make sure that quality is built into every one of our products, no matter the price level.