Any Dallas laws against dog barking? (Plano: noise, affect, online)

[BigDGeek]

Originally Posted by Pete53FR

Source: Section 30.1 - Loud and Disturbing Noises Presumed Offensive | BarkingDogs.org

My dogs bark when people come to the house or slam their car door or cats walk in front of them but never for more than 15 to 30 seconds. If they do I check on them. I control the barking it is the responsibility of the owner. We have 2 goldens and they are pretty well behaved.

That's Dallas's rule, though. I'm in Richardson.

That being said, I wouldn't allow my dog to bark outdoors for 15 minutes straight.

[skids929]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

A Maltese. The guy from Richardson Animal Control laughed when I told him. He was incredulous. He was like "They're complaining about a MALTESE???????"

This isn't my dog, but he looks just like this.

http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/images23...eNutPupDog.jpg

Cute Pooch!

[BigDGeek]

Originally Posted by skids929

Cute Pooch!

Thanks...I think so too. I just got my dog in September and he's a huge jar of awesome sauce. Drives me nuts sometimes, but overall I'm so glad I got him.

[skids929]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

Thanks...I think so too. I just got my dog in September and he's a huge jar of awesome sauce. Drives me nuts sometimes, but overall I'm so glad I got him.

Everyone should have at least one great dog in their life. It's an indescribable bond that changes you forever.

Awesome quote you might appreciate:

'In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog."

-- Edward Hoagland

[angartist]

I posted here a while back about the neighbor's dog barking throughout the night. I thought I would give an update here for others to possibly benefit from:

The problem continued for a while longer. We tried speaking with them in person about it nicely, and they said they would be better about it. But unfortunately it continued. Many nights I would have to sleep on the couch or be woken up every hour or so. Then I went to a lawyer to discuss my options. We started making recordings of the barking and documenting the times in which the dog barked throughout the night. The lawyer advised me to gather as much evidence as possible just in case it did have to go to court. (Which I did not want at all. Who wants to have to do that? In my perfect world, they could have just been considerate and let their dog inside at night and this would have never happened.)

The lawyer also said that there is a 10:00PM noise curfew where I live, so I needed to call the cops when it happened to see if that helped. So during one visit, the officer came out and talked to me, and the neighbors came out too since he went to their door. (It was about 1AM and the dog was barking so loud it was echoing throughout the other houses in the neighborhood. Insane. The cop even noticed how loud the barking was.) During our conversation, I had also mentioned to the officer that I was collecting evidence in case this needed to go to court. I am not sure if the neighbors heard this or not (or if he relayed this to them), but if so - it might be what solved the problem. Before that particular call, the police had been called a few times before that. (And the people who lived there before us had also called the police a few times for the same reason and even contacted the City about it. We found this out later on.) So after that particular night, the problem seemed to go away completely. The neighbors now take their dog in every night. We can sleep peacefully (until about 7AM every morning which is when they let him outside and he starts barking sometimes). Although that is also a bother since there is no such thing as 'sleeping in' here at this house, I am just grateful that I can actually SLEEP at night now.

It has been about 2 years of peaceful sleep so far. We are certainly not 'friends' with those neighbors, but it is more pleasant now.

I would have loved for this to have been resolved without all of that. If the roles had been reversed, and if my neighbor would have come to me and said that he/she can barely sleep because my dog barks right next to their bedroom window throughout the night, I would have felt horrible about that and I would have immediately resolved that problem so they could sleep. This is because I would never want to know that something I was allowing was causing them to suffer with lack of sleep. But I guess some people just don't think like that. Obviously these neighbors didn't - and we weren't even the first neighbors to complain. They ran off the previous owners of the house. Don't you think they would realize that it is a real problem before the police and lawyers had to be involved? I really don't understand some people.

So if you are in this situation, here is some advice from someone that went through it:

1. First try to talk nicely with your neighbors about the problem to see if they will agree to resolve the situation.
2. If that doesn't work, find out if your City has a noise curfew. Most cities do, and if they don't, you should contact the City to ask why and see if that can be changed. There are lots of kids that need to be in bed by 9PM on week nights, so if a dog is barking and keeping them up all night, that can't be a good thing. If your city does have a noise curfew, you can call and report the barking after the time that the curfew starts. They will usually send out an officer to check out the situation and to nicely ask the owners to put the dog inside the house.
3. If you do that several times, and the problem keeps happening, you will want to make sure that you document each time you had to call the police and document (as much as you can) each time the dog barking started and woke you up, etc. If you can also record some of these to be able to prove how loud and frequent it happens, this will also help if you should ever need that in court.
4. If you are still having the problem, you may want to consult with a lawyer. Some lawyers will send a letter to the neighbor warning of a possible law suit and allowing them to resolve the issue before it gets to that (or offering mediation, etc).
5. And if everything above fails, you will need to gather your evidence, and talk to your lawyer about getting the lawsuit started. Although in most cases, it should not come to this, and hopefully it won't for you either.

I hope this helps!

[Pete53FR]

I would suggest that a dog barking at 1 AM is being neglected or punished by the owner. Like I said earlier my dogs alert me and each other by barking usually just a few seconds. If they bark more than a minute I always investigate. Somehow it is comforting to me that if someone rings my doorbell or stands at my front door my dogs will alert me.

[lantan]

I hate to live in Dallas anymore Moderator cut: racist comments.They aren't respectful.Their dogs are barking all night,I cant complain because I don't know which dogs are barking.I think around 10 dogs are barking at same time.Sometimes I m waked up with honking at around 1-2 am.(for example yesterday, 15mins constant honking,nobody warned him, at last I threat him with calling police), Saturday and Sunday they listen songs with high bass to 2 am.My neighbor starts to cut metallic things at 6 am for all weekdays and weekends.I think their work place is in home .I think their work place is in home.I bought this house around 2 years ago.I m still paying mortgage,i dont know if i can sell it under this circumstances.But I cant save myself from this state.If I buy new house after that, I will rent it first for 1Moderator cut: racist

[MckinneyOwnr]

Originally Posted by lantan

I hate to.They aren't respectful.Their dogs are barking all night,I cant complain because I don't know which dogs are barking.I think around 10 dogs are barking at same time.Sometimes I m waked up with honking at around 1-2 am.(for example yesterday, 15mins constant honking,nobody warned him, at last I threat him with calling police), Saturday and Sunday they listen songs with high bass to 2 am.My neighbor starts to cut metallic things at 6 am for all weekdays and weekends.I think their work place is in home .I think their work place is in home.I bought this house around 2 years ago.I m still paying mortgage,i dont know if i can sell it under this circumstances.But I cant save myself from this state.If I buy new house after that, I will rent it first for 1-2 month.

While I can sympathize with living next to bad neighbors (my old Uptown condo had an apartment complex next to it for a few years that was packed with seedy people that I had to call the cops on multiple times) you should realize that you can get bad neighbors of ANY race living next to you.

This is why HOA's are becoming so prevalent... it's not because people like paying an extra fee to live in their house, it's because they want to have that assurance that if a horrible neighbor does move in next door, they're going to have to obey the rules of the HOA or get fined for it, and run out of the community.

My parents live in Plano, in a neighborhood with 300-400k houses, and the neighbors across the alleyway are very bad news, and they're white.

[doghelp]

angartist

I am in the position that you were in from your previous posts. I was wondering if you could tell me how you went about making the recording of the dog's barking?

[Lemastre]

Yes, indeedy! Dallas, Texas does have dog ordinances. They may be reviewed at the Dallas dog-ordinance page, American Legal Publishing - Online Library. That's the Dallas, Texas dog ordinance page, in case it's not yet clear.

And regarding this topic, let me say that dogs have so ingratiated themselves to humans that many of us, especially those with children, consider our households incomplete without a dog or two. Unhappily, noise ordinances acquiesce to this urge by impacting dog ownership as little as possible. General noise ordinances apparently serve well enough but seem rather too lenient regarding the barking and howling of domestic dogs.

In a city, where people must live shoulder to shoulder, the introduction of any unnecessary noise should be prohibited. With this in mind, ordinances regarding barking dogs should thus be quite simple -- you may keep a dog as long as no neighbor complains about its barking. If a complaint is filed, you get one shot at fixing the situation to the complainant's satisfaction. If you fail, the animal is removed to the pound. Obviously, who qualifies as a "neighbor" may need to be defined. But the definitiion will no doubt include the thousands of people who live next door or across the alley or street from a mutt or mutts whose yapping invades their homes during the day and destroys their sleep at night. So the first pass at enforcing such a law should clear up about 90 percent of the problems and require little quibbling over the term "neighbor."

I have suggested such laws to the City of Dallas over the years but received no response and certainly no improvement in the law.