Your neighbour keeps dogs and they bark incessantly causing you distress. Your neighbour is a complete pain-in-the-butt. Starting Monday 20th October 2014, in the UK, you can do something about it.
New laws coming into force, Monday, will give powers to the police, local authorities and social housing landlords to issue a community protection notice which forces dog owners to take preventative action if their dog is chasing someone’s cat or for that matter behaving in a way which causes distress or damage in any way.
The test whether a dog owner receives a notice is whether the dog’s behaviour is having a persistent and unreasonable ‘detrimental effect on the quality of life of those in the locality’.
The concept is to take preventative measures; to force irresponsible dog owners to make sure their dogs are under control and not endangering people, peoples’ property or their pets. This is a different concept to the Dangerous Dogs Act which targets certain dog breeds and brands them as dangerous.
Another classically distressing example of dog behaviour is when a dog bites someone without reason or even growls at people and frightens them. About 2 years ago a small terrier lunged at me as I walked past him. He bit me on the knee. I still have the scar and my trousers were ruined. The dog was on a lead with two other dogs on their leads. All three being accompanied by a women who had no control over them. That would be a good example of the kind of behaviour that the new ‘Canine ASBO’ is designed for. ‘ASBO’ means Anti-social Behaviour Order.
The new powers come from the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.
These new notices also provide powers to ban dog owners from taking their dogs to schools and play areas, to repair fencing, clean dog kennels and install a letter cage to protect postmen. These are just a selection of possible orders.
This law should please and help Ruth and Babz as for some time they have had to put up with persistent barking by neighbours’ dogs. Often neighbours whose dogs cause distress are stubborn, unreasonable, rude and obstructive. In fact they are often unpleasant people who don’t care about the consequences of their actions and are unsympathetic towards others who complain and worse.
Now people who felt at a lose as to what to do to stop dogs causing misery can take positive steps which have real force to improve their lives. I suppose the only hurdle will be to convince the local authority or police that there is a genuine problem. The key will be to get evidence in video. You can’t beat good video and all cameras these days can create videos.
Fines up to £2,500 are available if an order is broken by the person served with the notice. If a guard dog business is served a notice and breaks it the fine can be as high as £20,000.
Photo (modified by Michael) by chefjancris
Egads! – You couldn’t even enjoy your own yard w/your boys w/o guarding them every moment? Those people must have been head-cases. But at least you do have your N.W. where you live now – which should help.
As I’ve mentioned before, I feel the solitude when I wheel the garbage can into the roadway for the monthly pickup (don’t generate much, as I grow most of my victuals). Yes – the ocean fog & silence are heaven as you stand in the road at 3:00 a.m. and listen to the loons gabbling in their sleep down on the riverbank. (If you put out the can in the evening, yobs ambling down the road will tip it over.) The quietude is perfect – no barking dogs at night, no noisy kids during the day, nothing but wilderness to the east & west, and not too much more to the north and south. But after nearly ten years of living here, my friends are still an eight- to 20-mile drive from the house, and to have a NW watch where I live would be a joke: the neighbors ARE the marauders – they all have rap sheets!
At least you’ve related reasonably well to the last two tenants; you managed to be pleasant even if you didn’t enjoy them. (Though you indicate that the new ones next door are very nice.) It’s the best you can do – it’s the best I’m able to muster. And it’s safer than popping your cork, as I did with those ruffians clambering over my fence day & night. Now if only the OCD could grasp the fact that unemployed tenants w/bunches of animals in that flat mean vacancies every few months and costly cleanups and repairs.
Ruthie – If you have any feeling for your cats, don’t ever, EVER even consider reporting to the police a neighbor’s barking dog.
Your sister is one thousand percent correct. I have lived through that nightmare for nearly five years, before finally getting my Frankenvine hedge to grow 20 feet high and 18 feet thick.
The first and last time I’ve ever shouted at anyone in all my born days was when the ‘Ma Barker’ clan that lived several hundred feet down the road began jumping my fence and grabbing apples.
No. 1: I do not like apples. No. 2: I’m not a female Scrooge. Anyone who wanted apples was welcome to come to the gate and ask for them, and he could have shopping bags full. But these j. delinquents were leaping my fence like kangaroos, and after the years of having vandals pussyfooting in here on dark nights and tearing my veggie garden to shreds, I’d become a mite thin-skinned over the unwillingness of these ruffians to recognize the difference between a public park and private property.
Which is why, when I saw one of them jump my fence one morning something inside me detonated, and I roared at him with leather lungs ‘You get the bl**dy h*** off my property!’ His eyes started out of their sockets, his jaw dropped and he yelled back at me ‘You don’t have to be rude!’ ‘You don’t lecture me on manners, buddy!’ I bellowed in return. ‘I can have you arrested for trespass! I don’t come onto YOUR property and grab whatever I see that I want!’
I was thunderstruck at the magnitude of my fury, and so was he. He gaped for a couple of seconds, then spun around and ran off.
Well…they made me pay the price. At least twice a week for the next two months he and his two teenaged brothers were throwing themselves against my fence late at night, bashing it to the ground. My contractor charged $40.00 an hour to make repairs, and within a couple of days the fence was flat as a pancake again. Why? All because I dared to stand up for my rights.
You report any barking of neighbors’ dogs, and you can say goodbye to your boyz when the neighbors either shoot them with air guns or put out anti-freeze or tasty bits laced with rat poison.
I asked the local P.D. if I should get a dog to keep the vandals out, and they said the neighbors could poison or shoot a dog (everyone down here is gun-happy).
Babz is exactly on target in zeroing in on retaliation. Over the years – though things have quieted down since my killer hedge – when I called the PD at night I asked them NOT TO PARK in the roadway when they came out here, but to pull their patrol car into my garage so none of the neighbors would see the car, which would give them something to cackle over. End result? They’d make my life even more miserable. And as she rightly points out: the cops are here for only a few minutes. And when they leave, it’s right back to Square One: the hoodlums close in with redoubled vengeance. And she is right. There IS no answer. The new law in the UK sounds hunky-dory at first blush, but it can have deadly repercussions when you have animals of your own.
Do not report ANY NEIGHBOR if you can avoid it — just keep a low profile, and take one day (night) at a time. Sickening & sad, but a way of life sometimes.
Yes, reluctantly I agree that what you say is applicable to some (most perhaps) people Sylvia because the world is mad. The good people give in to the bad people. We submit to bad behavior. That results in a worse world.
Don’t worry Sylvia, this was exactly why we moved last time, because once we started fighting back, the bullying got worse. The last straw was that our cats Bryan and Ebony couldn’t sit in our own garden, we stood outside with them for the last few days until we got away. Surely we can’t be so unlucky as to get NFH in the house next door to this one again, but if so and it gets too bad we will have to move, we don’t want to until Babz can retire and we can get right away from the area but our cats come first. The other side are liveable with now, they are trying to make their dogs behave, they’re actually a nice young couple. We live and let live as long as our cats are safe and happy and we know everyone because of running Neighbourhood Watch, it’s just when new people come it’s worrying until we know what they are like.