I like my house too, especially the fact that I can’t even see any of my neighbors houses from my house ;).
As it is though, I just accepted after my first home in suburbia that if one lives in those sort of neighborhoods you either deal with having a fence (and the ones I had no dog ever successfully jumped over) or you deal with the BS that comes from not having a fence. I never considered any place I lived at in a suburban/urban neighborhood to be a place I wanted to live for any lengthy period of time so aesthetics didn’t matter as much to me.
You could try my trick of seizing the dog and taking it to the pound. And the next time you catch your neighbor in your yard go outside and tell him to leave. I’m not sure why you were inside taking pictures and not outside telling him to get the hell off your property.
Yeah, I’m kicking myself for not running out and yelling at him. But we have talked to them about this problem before and I wanted to get proof.
I’ve decided I’m taking these steps now:
When I see the one of the neighbors, I’m going to stop them and have a firm, but calm convesration about this. I’m going to inform them they are trespassing and defacing my property and there will be no more talks after today.
We are getting a couple “No Trespassing” signs and posting them
-If I see one of their dogs in my yard, I’m taking out the garden hose and drenching it
Then if it happens again, I’m calling Animal Control and telling them there is a dog running loose in my neighborhood
We will then get the Scarecrow or one of those yard alarms
I will make flyers of the pictures I took and pass them out to the neighborhood and make this wonderful yard sign I designed yesterday (It has one of the photos on it and it says “Does your neighbors’ dogs poop on your lawn? OURS DOES!” With an arrow pointing to their house)
If we continue to see it happen, I will then decide on two things: either take the dogs to the pound or take them to court.
BB guns. When you see the little shit machine squatting down, pop em in the ass with a BB gun. It shouldn’t hurt a dog that big that much and would be negative reinforcement to counteract your neighbors “Good Dog.” Hell, I’d hit the neighbor in the ass too if I caught him standing there watching his dog shit in my yard. My neighbor has a great dane and his dog shits in his yard and his yard only and we don’t even have a fence. He’s a good dog but I’d still smack him around if I caught him shitting in my yard.
It shows a guy with a dog, but not a dog pooping. The dog is sitting in one photo, but it’s not in a pooping stance (the front and hind paws are very close together, and the tail is upright).
It looks like there’s no sidewalks on the street. In residential areas, your front property line will be anywhere from 20’ to 30’ from the center of the road. You might think a dog is pooping in your yard, but it’s actually pooping in the public right-of-way. It’s rude for anyone to not clean up after theyr dog, regardless of where they might poop, but you could get into some serious trouble for shooting a dog that might not even trespassing on your property.
I empathize. My lawn has been an infrequent recipient of mystery-poo. My neighbors have two dogs, but those dogs are never outside without a leash as far as I can tell, because they’re both horribly antisocial. So I assume it’s a stray, or a wide-roaming dogwalker that strikes when I’m at work. Ah well.
I keep meaning to go find out if there’s anything that can be done about it…
Great idea. Give him a pooper-scooper and a supply of bags, and tell him if he insists on bringing his dog to your yard to poop, the least he can do is clean it up.
As I said in one of my earlier posts, I did not catch him in the act while I was taking photos. Doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. We’ve witnessed it, our other neighbors have witnessed it, they KNOW their dogs do it.
And no, you’re wrong about the the property. If that were the case, half our front lawn would be city property. Which means they should be coming out to mow half our lawn. Also, the neighbors with the dogs from hell wouldn’t even own the front third of their house. We’ve looked at our property lines and we know exactly where they are and they run up to about a foot from the street.
Also, if they are pooping on city land, that’s a health code violation and can carry serious fines if not jail time.
And no, I’d never have the heart to shoot the dog with a BB gun. Other people have suggested it, but I could never hurt another animal.
Don’t encourage people to shoot dogs with BB guns, Madd Maxx. For one, it ain’t the dog’s fault the owner is an ass. Secondly, it’s just friggin’ cruel. The dog’s pooping in the wrong yard, not robbing the house and holding the cat hostage.
Ooh, I wish I had a good answer for you, PinkMarabou. Fact is, I’ve got nearly the same problem, times two.
The asswipe on one side has 2 large labs, and we have found piles of large dog poo on our side of the (tall, wooden) fence bordering his yard. We’ve never caught him, but we are confident he has shovelled them over.
The douchebag on the other side has 2 springer spaniels, and lately, they keep mysteriously appearing in our back yard. We’ve found the proportionate-sized piles scattered through the yard. My husband found a loose board in the fence that they must’ve been getting through, and nailed it back in place. What really frosts my cookies is that this is the same jerk who rakes his front yard and deposits the debris right in front of our mailbox every time, because “those leaves came off a tree in our yard.” I say, tit-for-tat, that shit came from his dogs, so we should deposit the shit right in front of his mailbox. Husband won’t do it, though. However, he was amendable to my suggestion that the next time he finds their dogs in our yard, he recover the hole they got through to keep them from getting back into their own yard, and call Animal Control to come pick them up.
Won’t work in your case, since you don’t have the fence. Good luck!
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be serious. I should have said smack him with a rolled-up newspaper but that wouldn’t be nearly as effective on the owner as it would on the dog. And it is first and formost the owners fault and responsibility. As far as robbing the house and holding the cat hostage, all I can say is “slippery slope.”
While i don’t condone hurting animals it’s a good idea to use a high (ish) pressure hose and just soak the dog every time you see it in your yard. This will have twofold effects.
Firstly the owner has a soaking wet dog to deal with and man they stink your house out. Secondly the puppy will build up an association of being in your yard and having unpleasant things happen. He’s young enough to learn quickly - just make sure the waterpressure isn’t high enough to hurt him.
When you do it don’t get involved in any arguments with the owner. Just go out, soak the dog and return indoors. They should both get the message fast.
There are a couple of dogpoop-phobic folks in our neighborhood. Everyone else thinks, “Man, that is One Curious Dude.” They are universally shunned. We see them out there scrubbing the driveway, and we think of Adrian Monk.
Listen, folks. Life is not perfect and antiseptic. Dog poop in your yard is part of suburban life. Every responsible dog owner exercises the dog; this means long walks (Except for the owners of Chihuahuas, who get tuckered out running around the lawn.) Exercise stimulates peristalsis, and that means the dog will poop mid-walk. Dogs naturally sniff the markings of other dogs. After they read the p-mail, they click “reply to all.”
For a while, after I moved to this neighborhood, I carried zippy bags to retrieve my dog’s poop. It didn’t take long to figure out I was the only one doing this. So I just let her drop it where she drops it. I keep her out of Mr. Monk’s yard, though. The less I have to talk to him, the better.
No, no it’s not. It’s only part of suburban life if you have inconsiderate neighbors with dogs. I know several responsible dog owners who always scoop, and for whom the Ziploc bag is as essential as the leash and collar. When you choose to own a dog, you take on certain responsibilities, and scooping is one of them.
Since this isn’t the pit, I’ll just say that I find this attitude distasteful. (Actually, maybe I can say I find it shitty, since I’ll mean it in a pun-like sense.)
Have you ever run over a pile of dog poop, hidden in tall grass, with a lawnmower? Let me just say that dealing with the aftermath takes a lot longer than it would have taken the dog owner to scoop the poop into a Ziploc.
And would you mind if I emptied my cat’s litter box into your yard, if I found that less onerous than taking the refuse to the curb for trash pickup?
(AskNott, I don’t usually demonstrate even this level of snarkiness to other posters, but this issue has really pushed my buttons (and gotten on my sneakers) of late. I just don’t understand why leaving your dog’s crap on someone else’s property is any different than throwing empty beer cans and rotting banana peels on their lawn.)
It would be one thing if they had no idea or if they punished their dogs for going on other people’s lawns. My neighbors ENCOURAGE and REWARD their dogs for doing this. I have yet to see either one of their dogs shit on their own lawn.
Since these same people do a LOT of entertaining guests, they have really taken meticulous care of their lawn. There are flowers galore, they built a paver patio with this beautiful canopy tent, they have a little fish pond. It’s not like these people are slobs, they’re just RUDE and completely inconsiderate of their neighbors.
And so are their guests.
We put up a 6’ privacy fence about 2 months ago. One Sunday evening, I was laying out in the hammock with the little boy Chico, when I about fell out. They were having a party (again) and one of their hill-jack friends exclaimed “let’s break-in this here fence by pissing all over it!”. Did they chastise their guest? No. Did they ask their guest to leave? No. He then went on to say “how far onto YOUR property did they put this fence?”. Luckily one of the owners corrected him and told him we actually put it in a couple feet so as not to impose on their driveway since it’s on the property line. So hill-jack guy walks right up to the fence and looks through the boards, we make eye contact. He jumps back and says “how long has SHE been sitting there?”. I yelled over “Long enough! And if you so much as even THINK about pissing on my fence I’m gonna cut off your penis!”. He kept quiet after that.
We’ve heard from neighbors that in the past their party guests have run over a group of mailboxes (they clump them together in like sets of 8 or so) and have driven through another neighbor’s yard. One night they woke me up at 2 in the morning during the week because their 20-something son was having a screaming hissy fit out in the street. They never told him to come inside. It took me yelling out the window that I was calling the cops for them to shut up.
These people are a piece of work and I consider myself pretty tolerant. All of our other neighbors love us. The ones on the other side are an older, retired couple (we’re in our late 20’s) and they said we are the best neighbors they have ever had, I think that says a lot. They don’t like the people on the other side either, pretty much no one in the neighborhood likes these people, we just tolerate them.
And if the neighbor comes to supervise, soak the neighbor. No, seriously. For him, though, use high pressure; he knows what he’s doing. Make sure not to spray him once he gets off your property, though.
