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How to persuade your neighbors to quiet their chronically barking dogs

Lazy & Reluctant Dog Owners

Of the people who keep barking dogs, there are many who know how to train their pets and aren't really all that opposed to the idea. They just need someone or something to motivate them to do it.

To bring around a dog owner of this variety, you just need to keep calling on them, very politely, once or twice a week. And keep it up long enough to make them realize that your life is being so negatively impacted by their irresponsible behavior that you will never stop coming back until they do the right thing and quiet their dog. You just have to keep it up for a few weeks and, if you're dealing with a dog owner of the lazy or reluctant variety, that will do the trick.

But what if it doesn't? What if you do all of the above and the barking continues? Well, unfortunately, that brings us to the third classification of those who keep barking dogs: the malicious and the recalcitrant.

Malicious and/or Recalcitrant Dog Owners

In my experience, better than 45% of those who maintain noisy dogs are reflexively obstinate people who ignore polite requests and pathetic pleas, and will quiet their dogs only if you hound them for an extended period of time. Incredibly, an equal percentage are dig-in-your-heels, never-give-an-inch, hard core, incorrigibles whose perspective parallels that of Charleton Heston: i.e. you can have quiet when you pry it out of their cold, dead hands.

At first blush, it doesn't seem possible that the rate of recalcitrance could be that high. After all, if you randomly selected ten people on the street and did a psychological work-up on them, you might find that one or two of them are chronically oppositional. But you would never expect to find that 90% of those whom you randomly evaluated, were predisposed to that kind of behavior. Nonetheless, if you take a close look at those who keep chronically barking dogs, the rate of recalcitrance does indeed seem to be that high.

I'm convinced that the extremely large percentage of belligerent people found among those who choose to keep chronically barking dogs is due to the fact that it is a self-selecting population. In other words, there exists such a high rate of hostility among those with barking dogs because keeping a barking dog within earshot of a neighbor's home is a hostile thing to do. That's why we find a disproportionately large percentage of hostile people among those who choose to do it.

It should be no surprise, then, that the great majority of the time, when you scratch the surface of a person keeping a barking dog, you will find someone prone to hostility and/or altogether lacking in empathy. So trying to persuade someone to take responsibility for their canine can be a treacherous proposition, and taking steps to force them to do it can be downright dangerous.

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