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Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Works For Me Wednesday - Help! My neighbors dogs bark ALL THE TIME!

Behind our home is a thin stretch of woods behind which is an older development. Through the woods you can just barely make out a white house with a dog pen in the back. The dog that lives in this pen is a BARKER! All dogs barks, I know - but do all dogs bark all the time?? This one thinks it needs to defend its home against everything. If we so much as open our back door the dog will bark incessantly. Keep in mind we can't even see the dog from the door - we have to walk down to the property line to actually make him out through the woods. So why does he think we are trying to invade his property when we sit on our back porch!?

I can imagine its possible the owners of the dog are also frustrated. For years they lived with no houses on the other side of their woods (I think this was farm land, either that or more woods) and now they have us to contend with. Maybe the dog thinks we built a house on HIS property?

Sigh...So my Works For Me Wednesday question is - Have you ever faced a similar problem and how on earth did you fix it?

I hope that with time the dog will adjust to having us here. I am an "outside" kind of person and I hate to think that I will not be able to peacefully use my own backyard thanks to this dog!

Thanks everyone for visiting!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

you know we have had similar problems in the past and never figured out what to do...let me know if you figure it out!

orneryswife said...

Go talk to the neighbors. It is not a neighborly thing to allow your dog to bark incessantly, and if you are in a city, there are laws to regulate public nuisances. There is a bark collar on the market that is very effective, and will break the habit quickly. People who own dogs need to be responsible with them, and we all need to be good neighbors. It is not comfortable to talk about a sensitive issue like this, but it is effective. TM

Brandi said...

We just had to deal with this problem ourselves.
We had 2 neighbors that would let their dogs out whenever they wanted via doggie doors. Both sets of dogs would bark during the day, but at night was when it really bothered me. I was losing lots of sleep. It was terrible.
The first thing I did was very nicely confront both neighbors, and things seemed to get better for a while. But as time went on, we started hearing the dogs bark incessently once again.
We finally decided to call animal control and have an officer come out to talk to both neighbors.
For now our neighbors are graciously keeping their dogs inside at night. So far this is "working for us".
We are prepared for future barking, though, for now we have a voice recorder if we ever need to tape the sound of dogs barking for hours on end. We would need this kind of proof anyway if we ever had to go to court, which I do not want to do.
Hope this helps!

Anonymous said...

We are having the same problem with two of our neighbors. Our next door neighbor has several of those small yipping type dogs that sit at their screen door and yip all night long which makes all the dogs in the neighborhood bard and the other one allows their dogs to run wild every day, they chase cars, use my lawn as a toilet and harass my dogs. The problem with that one is she works with the dog warden, so you know...it's all in who you know!

Little Penpen said...

We used to have that problem too. It may be that the dogs are finally used to us living here, but after three years they have stopped barking at us. As you know, we got our own selves some dogs back in the spring and it really drove the neighbor dogs crazy every time we went out. Now, I walk my dogs to the fence and let them sniff at each other for a few minutes. Sometimes I even give the neighbor dogs some of my dogs treats. (they love it) So I guess we have finally "made friends" with our neighbor dogs and can sit outside peacefully. (I'll have to tell you what we did before all that in an email...LOL)