Lazy neighbor turns her pet into coyote bait

A neighbor who owns a minature pinscher, like that pictured at right, is so lazy she’d rather risk the dog’s life instead of take him for a walk.

In the post “Chained chihuahua barks, owner snarls” (in which I mistakenly labeled a min-pin as a chihuahua), I described how this owner ties the dog each day by a short rope to a tree in her front yard and leaves him there for hours. Yesterday about 6:30 p.m., a coyote came into her front yard and for two minutes sniffed avidly around the tree and rope where the min-pin is tied before going back into the woods bordering her back yard.

Fortunately, the dog had not been out there.  A neighbor alerted the owner about the coyote. I rejoiced, believing that in the face of such clear and present danger, the owner certainly would stop tying the dog up outside, then ignoring the dog, his racket and the disturbance his barking caused her neighbors. But this afternoon, less than 24 hours after the coyote thoroughly investigated exactly where to find his prey, she tied him out there again.

Earlier this week, she came out of the house with a newspaper and hit the dog with it, even chasing it behind the tree it was tied to while yelling at it to stop barking. She correctly deduced, after a visit the next day from an Animal Control officer, that I was the person who had called them. She yelled insults at me from her front porch about the “lies” I had told.

I”m guessing she’s not bothered by the possibility of having to tell her children that a coyote ate their dog. Given how little attention any of them give the dog, it’s unlikely she or her kids would witness the gruesome event. It’s far more likely that I will, since my office window looks directly into her front yard.

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Chained chihuahua barks, owner snarls

A neighbor recently acquired a chihuahua after her previous dog, a tiny terrier, disappeared. The terrier never got walked, just let out the front door to wander around the cul-de-sac until his owner would step out on her front porch and holler at him to come back. He might have been stolen, or might have been carried off by a coyote from the national park nearby.

Unfortunately for her neighbors, the owner’s method for “protecting” her new dog from these possibilities is no improvement. She simply ties him up to a tree in her front yard and leaves him there for hours.

Naturally, he yips, yowls, barks and fusses, a daily annoyance for everyone but his owner. People who chain their dogs outside seem capable of ignoring them indefinitely, no matter how much noise they make, much like parents who’ve numbed themselves to the noisy outbursts of their children. It’s no coincidence that this person’s children also are the noisiest on the block.

One day after two hours of continuous canine commotion, I walked over and asked the neighbor if she’d mind bringing the dog back inside for a while.

Her response was a verbal assault of aggressive denial, obfuscation and inaccuracies. He’s only been out 10 minutes, I put him out now instead of at midnight when people are sleeping, he’s supposed to bark at people, I’m tired of snowblowers and lawn mowers waking me up at 7  a.m. but I don’t go into other people’s yards telling them what to do and I want you to tell all the neighbors that…etc.

Yesterday, when the temperature rose to 100, he was out there for three hours. Since he has a water bowl and shade, his situation meets the almost nonexistent standards that prevail in Gary, Indiana for outdoor dogs.  I know from experience how little good it would do to call the city’s animal control department.

What we really need is an owner control department, one that would issue licenses only to people who met the same standards for pet care that good shelters and rescue organizations use, with enforcement and fines that would make it too expensive for people like my neighbor to keep behaving irresponsibly.

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