Friday, August 23, 2013

Good fences make good (dog) neighbors, except when your neighbor's dogs are assholes

When our neighbors moved in they had one dog, a tiny lassie girl, who was barky but not too much of a bother.

And then they adopted four more dogs. Let me repeat that FOUR MORE DOGS. A total of FIVE little yippy barky dogs.

Yay for dog adoption, I mean really, I'm totally all for it, all three of our dogs are rescues. However, our town has a three dogs only rule for a reason. Five dogs is ridiculous.

And if they were five nice dogs I'd be 100% fine with it. We love our dogs, I'm sure they love theirs, I can handle barking. But these dogs are huge assholes. They are vicious. They come out in attack mode, racing at the fence and growl-barking at our dogs. Our dogs don't disappoint them either. They give it everything they've got to get at these little yippers. Jasmine rips giant holes in the fence with her face and comes in covered in blood with wood splinters in her mouth. She doesn't care if it hurts, she wants at those bitches. Get it? Bitches! Because they are female dogs?!

We haven't been able to let our guys outside very much because the neighbor dogs instantly bark at our pups when they are outside and our neighbors oddly let their dogs out without checking to see if perhaps the reason their dogs are barking is because our dogs are in the backyard. I am so tired of the dog fights.  

Our other neighbors on the right side of us have always had large dogs and our dogs love to see each other through the fence. They play together, they couldn't be bothered if our neighbor's dog Jethro is out. Jethro is not mean like the nippers.  My dogs get hurt because of them. Our yard is no longer peaceful. They bark around the clock. So today we took drastic action and extended the kids' play area the entire length of our yard so that the dogs have an extra barrier between us and the neighbors. 

I'm sad to do it because it makes our yard smaller for our guys to run around--Avery especially loves to play ball in our yard and run circles--but it has to be done before someone's dog is seriously injured...or eaten. We take our guys running a lot anyway so they still get plenty of exercise.

It was a long day of working in the yard to prepare for the new fence. I spent an entire hour trying to get our weed whacker ready to cut the grass in the play area with new gas and new line and could not get this thing to start. Pops came over and had it running for me within a few seconds. Well then. He and Dylan mowed the lawn while I weed whacked.

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And later Gramma came over to hold Kate for me while Dylan and I trimmed back bittersweet and removed spruce trees.

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Here's before we rerouted the fence:

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Kate was pretty content relaxing in the yard today.

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Here Dylan is making her smile as he swings on the swings:



When Sean came home from work we got to work. We finished the fence in about two hours. I still need to paint the fence and do tons of yardwork.

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We have yet to test out the new barrier with the neighbor's dogs outside. I'm pretty sure our life is about to get a lot more peaceful. I'll be glad to never see Jasmine with a bloody face again.