Man. that is just total inconsideration. not much consolation in knowing they're keeping them up too.

ear plugs, maybe?

An anonymous note would be my first course of action. Since you feel guilty about complaining, I mean. The poor dogs....left out for days??

My BIL's family has a cabin upstate that we visit a couple of times a year. The neighbors there have two dogs that they leave staked out in the yard 24/7. The dogs do nothing but pace in circles and have forged such a deep ditch around the parameter that it looks like they live on an island. They howl constantly (as they should)and the one time someone talked to the owners it became a "Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?" conversation. Really sad.

I have sometimes thought about releasing dogs in this type of situation. I realize that this is selfish, and would probably lead to a much shorter life for the dogs I "liberated", so I have never done it. On the other hand, the dogs in the circle story hurts my heart.

The neighbor does not know that the dogs howl, because she is gone, right? Just tell her, and perhaps there could be a solution.

Hell, my landlords divorced son is building himself a swinging bachelor bad downstairs from me, and from the amount of hammering, he's got a battalion of meth-crazed hobbits helping him.

He'll be roaming the halls in gold chains and bikini underwear before long. And he's Greek which means people will mistake him for a werewolf and spray the house with a silver bullet drive-by.

Yes, but do the hobbits start work at 5:30 in the morning?

If the dogs were chained I'd have done something drastic long ago, but they're not chained, and she does let them inside sometimes (get this, she has another, smaller, dog inside who never goes outside) and they have food and water and a doghouse to sleep in so I don't feel like I can call the ASPCA or anything. I can complain about the barking and she'll probably put bark collars on them, which will fix the immediate problem but make me sad in a whole other way.

i just wrote a rather rude and agressive reply which i have deleted, because i am trying to not to be rude and agressive, but, rather, communicative and open. or something. so forgive the strained and pompous tone, but it's probably an improvement on version 1.

anyway, it struck me as odd that you get irate because of bad behaviour at 5:30, but had a badly behaved dog yourself.

some of us don't like badly behaved dogs at any time. that you can pick 5:30am as the dividing line between the unpleasantness you forced on others and what you are now receiving seems rather arbitrary.

what you feel at 5:30 is probably what other people have felt about you at other times of the day.

Yes, but do the hobbits start work at 5:30 in the morning?

no. only at night when I'm home.

Well, what you say is true andrew, but on the other hand after 6 months of bad behaviour - that I worked very hard to stop - I got rid of the dog in question. The dog I still have is extremely well behaved. Also, I kept even my bad dog quiet and in the house at night, which is when most people in the neighborhood sleep. My neighbor's dogs have been in that yard for 3 years now, so it's no wonder that they occasionally howl and bark for hours at a time.

I have to back mygothlaundry up here, andrew. She related the stories about her struggles with that poor dog on her weblog.

"How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog"

Funny story.

My folks have similar problems with their next-door neighbors' dogs. They're kept in the backyard and the bark/howl all night long. This has been going on for years -- probably 8 or 10.

My dad is an inveterate grudge-holder, and he tends to think that anything that annoys him was intentionally perpetrated by people out to get him. (But he's a great guy. Don't get me wrong.)

My dad's also a retired engineer. So he tried for several years to rig an ultrasonic buzzer that he could trip from his nightstand. Even through several stages of development, he couldn't get it to work.

He found one of these things online and installed it in a tree on the property line.

It worked!!

But a few weeks after he put it up, the neighbor came over and knocked on my parents' door in a rage. He's got two pre-teen girls. They'd been in the pool and had seen the red light on the anti-bark device, and they told their dad that Daddy Puppie was spying on them in the pool!

So the neighbor came over raging to my dad about being a pervert, that this was the last straw, he was calling the police, etc. My dad took him out to show him what it was, and the neighbor's bluster failed. He even moved it over onto his own property.

My parents were horrified that anyone would think of my dad as a pedophile. They're the quintessential law-abiding middle class white folk.

But I think it's hilarious.

That is funny, 'pup!