Disturbing the Peace

Small dogs are notorious for their high pitched ear drum ravaging barks. Odie lives up to that reputation with vigor. He has his throaty gurgle noise that comes before full growls, his full growl mainly sounds like a little kid trying to sound like a big kid. His alert bark which comes when someone (human only) approaches the house, it's a sharp clipped bark that will make you jump a mile if you don't see it coming. Then there's the "theres a dog outside I can't get to who looks like fun and I want get to them and play" bark with is a whine/bark/growl/fear noise all rolled into one. This will seriously shake fillings from your head (as my mom would say) as it hits a pitch that is just this side of glass shattering, and goes on for a good long while.

Most often, the bark we get to witness is the "unknown presence entering yard uninvited" bark. It is used for humans, dogs, the neighbors cat, squirrels, birds, oppossums, yard workers, postmen, trash bags floating on the wind, leaves being rustled by the wind, someone on their phone in their yard next door, etc.

So yeah, we hear it a lot.

What's really awful is our neighbors hear it a lot. A damn lot. Every time we let the little felon out into the yard, he does it. 7am on a saturday- BARK BARK BARK. 2am on a saturday BARK BARK BARK. 11pm on a Wednesday BARK BARK BARK.

Less then charming to say the least.

We do our best to put an end to it as quickly as possible, but by the time we hear him and get to the back door to get him to quit it, he's already pissed someone off I'm sure. It pisses me off and he is ours. I can't imagine the 8 year old boy next door is doing anything but trying to sleep at these hours. Hell, I want to be asleep at these hours most of the time.

Odie gets let out, all bursting with energy, goes charging across the yard to where he has previously seen an intruder and starts barking. I'm fairly convinced that half the time there's nothing actually there, he's just making sure that he's ruling the non-existent roust. And because of where we live, we have possums and outdoor cats visiting our yard often. They had grown confident with the last dog who was too old and deaf to really care if anyone shared his grass. We have pictures of him laying in the sun with birds mere feet away and everyone was groovy. Odie is here now, and he's trying to change that all.

He has learned that if he hears the back door open, he needs to cut it out. He does not want us getting all the way to him if he's still barking. That is a sure fire way to get put back in the house for a while, where is the fun in that? So now as soon as we open the door to yell, he shuts up and just looks at us, all "it wasn't me! what?" as if we didn't know any better.

Short of buying our neighbors ear plugs and some apology cookies, there's not a lot we can do about this. It's his instinct to sound off. I just wish he sounded a bit scarier if he was going to make all this noise. I mean, really, who is scared of a high pitched call that sounds vaguely like a very heavy squeaky door? Not the squirrels, clearly.