Barking Dog Syndrome.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

An important detail is missing from your OP and from all the discussion so far.

Does the dog owner get a warning or several before the dog is evicted? Or do the powers that be just send the Marines and tow the dog away at the first complaint? Were your kin up the road given plenty of chance to solve this, or did they just come home one day only to find that Fido wasn’t there any more?

My personal take: I love dogs. People, not so much. I’d rather have a lot more dogs and a lot fewer people around. But I do also like peace and quiet, and I’m annoyed by persistenly noisy doggies. But I’d have to be really pushed to extremes to have some neighbors dog towed away. In contrast, I’d like to see a whole lot more cars with overly active car alarms towed away, and likewise with a lot of noisy neighbors.

22

More anecdote for you - the longest our dog has barked when not told to be quiet is <i>maybe</i> a minute.

When it thunders or there are fireworks, she hides behind the couch.

23

Six minutes straight? I’d go ballistic. :mad:

We have two dogs, one is a yapper the other rarely barks. If the yapper goes on longer than ONE minute I start to get stroppy.

Six minutes? That’s not fair for anybody, least of all the dog.

24

In my city’s limits, you can call animal control and make a complaint, anonymously or not, about your neighbor’s barking dog, and they will send them a letter. If it continues, they can fine them. I’m not down with dogs that bark incessantly, especially in close quarters, and I know for a fact that they can be trained not to. That this is a solvable problem here makes it almost worth it to live here forever.

25

I’ve been around three problem dogs in my life. The first barked intermittently 24/7, this high screeching bark that was awful. Added to never knowing when it would start up, kept everybody on edge.

For solid bark bark bark was a miserable little min pin next door. It’s owner was a jack ass and the dog would bark as steadily as a metronome every time someone was outside, so god forbid you wanted to wash your car or sit on your patio. They were evicted and we tenants high fived each other for a week.

The last does the same thing, but at least I know it’s because it’s half-crazy and have some pity. No border collie should be penned up in a small apartment by itself.

The way we dealt with the min pin was to record the barking. Talking to the owners only got us lies and then hostility. So we collected video and audio, time stamped, and presented the evidence to the property manager. They were gone in a week.

We’d asked that they just get a bark collar, or train the animal, but they didn’t want to bother as far as I could tell. It may sound harsh, but they brought it on themselves.

I have never had a dog I allowed to bark and I don’t leave them where they would disturb others if they barked when I’m gone.

It’s too bad dogs are the ones who usually pay the price because some owners don’t hold up their end of the bargain.

26

Society lost its tolerance, when people took a dog who was bred specifically to work and made a pet out of him.

Some dogs are great pets and some are not. Border collies are poor pets because they like to work. Border collies are great dogs, but lousy pets. They were put on Earth (or bred) to be at work. This is what they love to do.

Imagine if you trained night and day for 10 years to be a singer then all you could get was speaking parts in plays. You’d be frustrated. These dogs are the same way.

We think “oh cute dog,” but the dog doesn’t want to be cute, he wants to work. A border collie is a hard working dog, he isn’t going to hang around and wait for you to sit down so he can hop in your lap. He needs to be out chasing things, herding sheep and keeping busy.

27

[quote=“Senegoid, post:21, topic:606475”]

An

OK, I have done my research on my important info missing…

  1. law seems specific to Queensland…

  2. most procedure ask to approach the neighbour first to settle the dispute.

  3. then the dispute goes to a dispute resolution officer where a Barking Diary could be called for first before a decision is to be made.

  4. some councils word the noise complaint as 6 consecutive minutes, others as 6 accumulative minutes, others in a specific time frame, ie between 7pm and 7am. There seems to be no set rule, except that it is 6 minutes and that it is open to council discretion on how to enforce it.

  5. The process is open to appeal.

Either was, I agree with you all the way mate. I love my two dogs better than most humanbeings.

28

OK, I have done my research on my important info missing…

  1. law seems specific to Queensland…

  2. most procedure ask to approach the neighbour first to settle the dispute.

  3. then the dispute goes to a dispute resolution officer where a Barking Diary could be called for first before a decision is to be made.

  4. some councils word the noise complaint as 6 consecutive minutes, others as 6 accumulative minutes, others in a specific time frame, ie between 7pm and 7am. There seems to be no set rule, except that it is 6 minutes and that it is open to council discretion on how to enforce it.

  5. The process is open to appeal.

Either was, I agree with you all the way mate. I love my two dogs better than most humanbeings.

29

[quote=“Dennis_Arthur_PERRETT, post:27, topic:606475”]

That seems much more reasonable. So we are talking about repeat occurrences with warnings and attempts to resolve the situation, then, not a single episode as it appeared earlier.

30

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is how the people are sure it is the same dog barking, and can identify said dog. I live in a neighborhood where every other house has at least one dog, if not more. And some of the houses are duplexes, such that if the dog is barking inside the house, unless someone is right in front of the front door of the apartment, they just won’t know which side/dog is barking. Also, there are houses that are hidden behind other houses, and shared backyards.

For a while, I had a neighbor in my duplex whose dog barked at anything, all day long. Since I was a vet who lived alone (with a mostly nonbarking dog), I didn’t care. She didn’t take her dog out frequently, while I took mine out at morning and evenings, sometimes in the middle of the day, with occasional walks around the neighborhood. When someone complained of dog barking in the house (a duplex), I was the one who got the note. But how could they know, since both dogs were kept inside during the day, which one was it?

Later the neighbor moved and the complaint resolved. Then last year I got a new neighbor, who has the house behind mine (so hidden from the street in front of my house), and whose backyard abuts with the property I rent. She has a very large, barking dog. That barks… all the time. Yes, again, my dog got the complaint.

This time, though, I recorded my dog for a week while I was out at work (with the webcam). Other than ONE episode of barking of less than one minute, which sounded more like “guardian bark” (some stranger at the door), the rest of the video consisted of my dog sleeping and stretching for 10 hours every day. VERY boring. Oh, and I did catch (several times) that while my dog was curled up snoozing, you could distinctly hear other dogs barking in the neighborhood.

So one of my concerns with this type of ordinance would be proving you have the right dog. And also determine that and compare it with the rest of the neighborhood. Like I said, even if my dog barked and were removed, that leaves at least 10 other dogs, about a third of them barkers, around the neighborhood.

31

Six accumulative minutes? That’s just anti-dog. My dog probably does that just saying hello.

Six consecutive minutes? That is too long - go let the dog in the house.

32

That sounds a tad less draconian - but six accumulative minutes in one twelve hour stretch? My dogs are quiet for the most part (and indoors when I leave the house) but between the four of them, I’m sure there are days where they exceed the six-minute-rule, accumulatively. I tell them to settle and shush after 30 seconds or so of barking, but cats outside, squirrels chattering up a tree, someone coming to the door, the dog next door barking, excitement and playing, howling back at sirens…all reasons to get briefly vocal.

I had a foster dog early this year who was both unbelievably cute (luckily, he got adopted within a few weeks) and very vocal. A beagle-spaniel type mix. He didn’t bark, he did a shrieky combination of barking and howling and even when indoors you could hear him from the street.

The type of barking I dislike is the bored barking of a dog that’s left alone, penned, or on a chain by owners who don’t care. Not so much because it annoys me but it makes me sad for the poor dog.

33

I kind of agree, if you live in close quarters with neighbours, your dog shouldn’t be barking 6 mins. If you’re out, crate the animal, if you can’t be arsed to train it. I mean it’s not hard to teach any dog not to bark, you just don’t tolerate it. When they do it, put them in a 10 min bathroom timeout. It has worked with every dog I’ve ever had. No excuse beyond owner laziness, for barky dogs, in my opinion. (And all neighbourhoods are the same; someone just got their colicky baby to sleep, someone is home ill, someone works shiftwork, etc.)

I would be frenzied if any of the neighbourhood dogs, of which there are many, was allowed to bark for 6 mins. I think, around here, your neighbours would be calling animal control out of concern for the dog, as it would be so unusual.

34

Forgot to add that’s six accumulative minutes within the hour but still anti-dog as you say.

35

Wish we had a law like that about false car alarms. Only in that case I’d make it six accumulative minutes per year, and your car is hauled away to become scrap metal. Yowling cats too.

36

And screaming babies. Much worse than a dog barking.

37

A neighbor once asked me if another neighbor’s dog which barked a lot at night didn’t bother me. (It bothered her, and she lived farther away. I lived right next door.) The odd thing is that I hadn’t even noticed the barking until she mentioned it. Then I heard it, but it didn’t bother me. I’m not really a dog lover, either.

38

Now Now! Screaming babies come under a decibel law over here, anything over 105 we send them off for testing on the Moon.

39

Seriously. I’m rabid about not letting the dogs bark in the yard. They love being outside and playing but if they start barking they come in the house. No exceptions.

I could theoretically ease up if I wanted to because I’m down to one neighbor and he’s stated on a couple of occasions that he likes that the dogs bark when someone comes up his driveway but I don’t want to let their training slide.

They bark when something happens and my job is to RESPOND and see what they’re barking about. Then they stop. The issue with dogs that bark all day is 100% the owners.

40

My dogs don’t bark much, but some of the neighbors’ dogs do; it still doesn’t bother me that much. The kids with their yelling and screaming and drum sets, the old dude that runs his leafblower half the day to blow a quarter of a bag of leaves out of his yard, the landscapers, and the people yelling at the soccer field down the street are a thousand times louder and more bothersome than even the yappy dog next door.