I was at work yesterday when I got a phone call from animal control. Apparently our dogs had been barking contInuously since early in the morning, and could I go home and makes them stop? I asked the man if he’d actually been to our place and checked it out, but he said no, he hadn’t – he didn’t have access to a car so was having a desk day. I was a little bemused. Don’t get me wrong, I think incessantly barking dogs are a real annoyance, and I would hate to think our dogs were misbehaving – but I knew my husband was home in bed when I left for work. He doesn’t do “early in the morning”. I rang him at work and asked him to sort things out with animal control. I could have gone straight home, of course, but asking my unconscious patient to hold his breath for half an hour while I popped out is the sort of thing that’s frowned on in my profession.
It turns out my husband had left for work at 8:30, and the alleged barking had started about half an hour later. We discovered that afternoon that our new cleaner had come in at 9:30, and that had probably set them off. By now it was 11, so the animal control officer was going to ring the person back and check if the barking was still happening. It wasn’t. It was some neighbour who was new to working from home, and clearly was rather a sensitive soul. We only have one direct neighbour, and they have a newish baby and are quite reasonable, so it must have been someone even further away.
The complaint had caused much anxiety and disruption for us both, so we were quite upset by the time we got home (to our well behaved puppies). I was just happy to get the dogs away for the long weekend, to soothe the situation, but my husband had more elaborate plans. His idea was that we should make a recording of the dogs barking and then play it loudly while the dogs were away somewhere else. The neighbour would complain, but animal control would have no jurisdiction, since there weren’t actually any animals misbehaving. That would make it an issue for noise control, so we would need to make it loud enough to be annoying but not quite in the decibel range to trigger official noise control intervention. Is that not the plan of an evil genius? I tell you: do not cross this man.