Last night, the Noisy Neighborhood Dog started barking right about the time I went to bed. I don’t know exactly where this dog lives, somewhere in the next block. This dog has a distinctive bark. barkbarkbarkpausebarkbarkbarkpausebarkbarkbarkpause It’s so regular I’d swear he was following a metronome. When he starts barking he doesn’t stop. No pause to stroll around the yard, take a drink, dig a hole, then start barking again. No. It is continuous. So he started barking right before I went to bed and didn’t stop for at least two hours. I don’t know if he stopped or I just fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. Then, I was awoken about 90 minutes earlier than my usual workday rising time by … barkbarkbarkpausebarkbarkbarkpause
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHHHH
Is that all? No, it is not. I got home about 2 hours ago and the dog has been barking the whole time.
HOW DO YOU OWN A DOG AND NOT KNOW OR CARE THAT IT BARKS LIKE THIS? HOW DO YOU SLEEP? HOW DO YOU DO ANYTHING WITH THAT NEVERENDING BACKGROUND NOISE RIGHT THERE IN YOUR YARD? WHY IN FUCK CAN YOU NOT EITHER BRING THE DOG INSIDE OR GET A BARK COLLAR? WHY DO I HAVE TO LOSE SLEEP AND SANITY BECAUSE YOUR DOG IS OBVIOUSLY UNHAPPY, UNTRAINED, and OUTSIDE?
You can’t be the only person the dog’s annoying the crap out of. Someone will come along and give poochie a rat-poison sandwich (urban) or a bullet to the head (rural).
Can’t you call the cops if it’s after 10 or 11 for noise nuisance?
Hey, you must be my neighbor. There’s a dog like that in the house catty corner to mine. It barks at night, in the morning, all kinds of weather. Dumbasses don’t care about that animal or their neighbor’s sanity.
There’s also the little punks who were playing basketball til midnight or later. Fortunately, school’s in now, so they only play in the afternoon. But it’s still annoying THUDTHUDTHUD. And they have a girl-child who SHREIKS about nothing.
According to my local animal control (YMMV) nuicense barking is illegal at any time. I say call animal control…often. When they get enough complaints, either from you or you and your neighbors, they will send a nasty-gram to said dog owner, who probably doesn’t have a license for the dog and sternly request he/she cease and desist and get the dog a pricey license.
We have a neighborhood yap-yap dog that does that, too. I swear the family leaves him outside all day. I can’t quite locate the house it’s coming from (yet), but when I do–I will be calling the police. Forget talking to the neighbors–they can’t not know about it. It’s every day (I just haven’t been around enough to pursue it–it is very annoying when I am home, though).
“I been calling y’all people for better than a month now, gripe ‘bout y’all, ever time that dang ol’ dog across the street start yappin’ his jaw… 24-hours a day… nobody answers… How you supposed to come out here and do anything about that dog?.. Ain’t no computer gonna come over here and shut that dang ol’ dog up.”
Yah, I could probably call, but I don’t think it would do a lot of good. There are a lot of other noise issues in my neighborhood occasionally, and calling about them has never helped – calls like that are very low priority, esp. when I can’t say where exactly it’s coming from.
sigh
What I really need to do is drive around and and find the house when the barking starts, but it’s usually at night after I’m in my jammies, or at crack-o-dawn, and I just haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to get dressed and get out and do it.
When I lived in Wyoming it was pretty rural. Someone moved in from ‘out East’ and had a yappy toy dog. Neighbors complained but nothing was done.
I was talking with her one day and she brought it up…basically that she didn’t care and what were people going to do about it?
I thought…poor dog…it doesn’t have long to live.
About a month later I was hearing the normal yap yap yap…yap yap yap…yap yap yap in the middle of the night…then a gunshot…then no more yapping. The owner was distraught trying to find out who did it but nobody came forth.
People forget that the law is what it is but is doesn’t mean people will grin and accept it…it wasn’t against the law for her dog to yapping all the time…it is against the law to shoot someone’s dog…doesn’t mean someone won’t shoot the dog.
You’d be surprised what can happen. In an apartment I used to live in, the floor plans were pretty much the same for the units. The apartment directly above us had some young kids that their babysitter let run wild during the day. Judging by the loud boom sounds we’d hear fairly frequently from the ceiling over our kitchen, the kids were probably climbing up on the kitchen cabinets and then jumping down onto the floor. Our dishes would rattle in the cabinets. One day my husband was in there and boom - and then there was a scraping sound. The wall cabinet unit with some of our dishes in it was pulling out of the wall! My husband grabbed it and yelled for my help; we eased it down onto the floor, and called the landlord. We suspect that it probably wasn’t mounted properly, but man, those kids sure didn’t help things.
We have a dog like this in our neighborhood. Until just recently, the dog (and sometimes another dog) would be left chained outside all day and into the evening with questionable access to food and fresh water. The first time we called the police on them was last winter when it was about 25 below and the poor thing sounded like it was going to die. It was no more than a pup at the time. The second time we called was to complain that the dog was loose and tried to bite my dog while I was walking him on his leash. They got a visit from the police and after that, the neighbors started putting up a fence. Now, this dog is a lab and they were putting up a four-foot fence. Like a four-foot fence would hold in a lab. Needless to say, they ended up taking the fence back down. The last time we called was the culmination of the dog barking nearly continuously from Friday evening to Saturday evening, and my husband witnessing the neighbor girl (an eighth grader with some obvious problems) kicking and hitting the dog (the other one she just dresses up and puts in a baby carriage). The police came that night and took all of their dogs away. Much screaming was enjoyed by all. The dogs were back by the following evening. I will say that things have largely improved since then. The dog is not chained outside nearly as much, and as a result there has been less barking. They still have the habit of letting both of their dogs off their leashes on a regular basis and then screaming at them when they run off. Hell, I’d run off, too. But I’m sick of their dog taking monster shits and harassing my dog in my yard when he is on a leash as city code dictates, and also wearing a bark collar. These people make me so angry for so many reasons, I should start my own thread. It felt good to vent a bit.
You might be surprised. I had a similar problem a few years ago.
Not wanting to be unneighbourly, I first wrote them a note which quoted the appropriate bylaw and the schedule of fines for violation, and reminded them that they were obligated to train the dog. I said that I would not call the bylaw enforcement office immediately, but would give them the opportunity to obtain some obedience training for their dog.
The specified time elapsed with no change. (The most infuriating thing was that you could hear the mutt start barking inside their home, and their course of action would just be to open the door to let it bark outside.)
When I called the bylaw enforcement office, I didn’t even have to explain. “Hi, I…” “Oh, sounds like you have an animal noise complaint.” “Yes. Yes, I do.”
Thing is, the noise stopped pretty much immediately. For sure, it was the last day that I heard it, and it bothered me every day of the summer before that. I often wondered what happened to that dog. I doubt that they ever even considered obedience school. I’d like to think that they found a friend with an acreage that very day, but I think it’s more likely that they drowned the little bugger in a sack.