"Neighbor Doesn't Like Me Using My Own Garden"

I have already quoted Mark Twain in my posts more than once, so one more ingenious quote, I think, will not hurt at all. Well, a great writer once said, "The more people I meet, the more I like my dog." And it's good that in the 19th century there was no Reddit with its endless stories about various entitled folks; otherwise, I'm sure Mark Twain would have put it even more scathingly.

In any case, in today's tale from the user u/Strawybales14,you will find a real combo: an entitled neighbor and his yappy dog, who, according to this very neighbor, are at the same time the aggrieved party. But it's up to you to judge who's right here and who's not, so let's move on to the story as soon as possible.

So, in the Original Poster's (OP's) own words, he and his neighbor have unattached properties with separate and fenced gardens. At the same time, the author's garden is completely visible from the neighbor's house, which this guy abuses in the most malicious way. And not only him, but also his dog.

So it turns out that the neighbor's pooch belongs to that very kind of canine which bursts into barking in response to literally every movement around, and for a long time after that, they cannot calm down. The OP says that he was regularly barked at whenever he left the house, and when he returned, the doggo issued a long shrill barking to the neighborhood as well.

However, the neighbor himself did not share the author's indignation at his pet's behavior. Quite the contrary - he repeatedly accused the OP of "annoying" his dog and "provoking it to bark". Moreover, the neighbor sincerely believed that the author was preventing him from working because he worked from home. Any garden activities on the part of the author were invariably monitored by the neighbor and his canine, and just as invariably accompanied by barking and verbal abuse.

And when the OP got himself a rescue dog and began to train it in his own garden (by the way, as the author notes, completely without any sound accompaniment from the animal - some neighbors did not suspect for several months that he had a dog at all), then the stream of swearing from the obnoxious neighbor reached its climax. The author laments that he seems to have no choice but to install a camera doorbell to record the abuse, and then to take legal action.

To understand this case properly, one should first of all understand why the dog barks. The thing is that over the millennia that dogs have coexisted with humans, we have bred dozens of different breeds, and each of them has a completely different purpose. So, some breeds have been trained for generations to raise a bark (and the most dissonant one at that) at the slightest provocation, while others, on the contrary, from a puppy's age are taught to be as quiet and calm as possible. Such is dog breeding, and nothing can be done about it.

Accordingly, the author's neighbor, when he got a pet, should have simply consulted about how dogs of this breed react to external irritations. But even in this case, it is unrealistic to expect that the pet will stop barking overall. "It's important to start by setting yourself a realistic goal," Blue Cross in the UK official website states. "Planning for your dog to stop barking completely is not realistic. Barking is a natural dog behavior and dogs will bark whether we want it or not. You can reduce the amount of barking, but stopping it entirely will never be possible."

Be that as it may, there is, apparently, a clear misunderstanding by the OP's neighbor of both the dog's nature, and the elementary rules of good neighborliness. According to people in the comments, the neighbor is trying to shift the problem with his pet onto the shoulders of the author of the post, and this looks like pure entitlement. What's more, according to some commenters, the neighbor's apparently inappropriate reaction raises fears that he might even try to poison the OP's rescue dog in the future, so yes, it's definitely worth taking precautions beforehand.

The commenters also believe that recording the neighbor's abuse may help, and in any case, if this happens again, it's worth reporting him to the cops. "His failure to train his dog doesn't make it *your* problem," one of the folks in the comments aptly wrote. However, such hapless pet owners, as it turns out, are found all the time - like, for instance, the story from this post of ours about a cat lover from San Diego, who desperately tried to stop his kitty from roaming around the neighbor's yard. By the way, have you ever met people like these? If so, please let us know about your own stories in the comments below.