Neighbor vs. dog: a war of the woofs

FOR Southern Californians at odds with their neighbors, the source of the problem is often simple: It barks night and day, pees on your flowers, poops on your lawn. It escapes from its yard to terrorize cats and terrify kids.

Of all the ills that beset the urban scene, the domesticated dog would seem least likely to offend. Man’s best friend, and all that. Yet here in L.A., it is a reason friendly neighbors turn hostile to one another, a wedge that reduces peaceful coexistence to anger, and sometimes war.

Last month someone tossed poisoned food into the backyard of a West Hollywood house with two dogs. “The little one, Giant, used to bark endlessly. The big one, Baby, you never heard,” says a maintenance man who works next door and who loved Baby. The perpetrator, believed to be a neighbor irritated by the barking, tried to silence Giant but killed Baby instead. The worker next door, who asked that his identity not be revealed out of fear of retribution, has posted signs on Orlando Avenue asking neighbors for help finding who took the life of his canine friend.

An extreme case, perhaps, but hardly unprecedented. In North Hollywood early this month, police arrested a man on suspicion of trying to silence a noisy boxer by tossing meatballs laced with rat poison into the yard.

As Los Angeles grows, disputes over dogs are expected to get only more prevalent. County animal control officials say they do not tabulate canine complaints separately, but anyone who listens to the rants of dogless neighbors or sees the militant don’t-poop-here signs on front lawns can’t help but sense a growing rift over what some see as a four-legged nuisance.

No authoritative count of the local dog population exists because more than half are believed to be unlicensed. But Michelle Roache, deputy director of the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care & Control, estimates the number to be at least 1 million in her county alone. About 36% of all households own a dog, and as the human population rises, its canine community keeps pace.

It’s not just a matter of quantity, Roache adds. As density increases, more conflicts arise because of sheer proximity.

“L.A. is changing. Neighborhoods that used to be all single-family dwellings now have condos and apartments going up,” she says. “There’s that whole new residential loft area in downtown L.A., which is one of many with an increased population of pets.”

That means more poop, more barks, more dogs running loose, she says. And more confrontations.

Cabrini Schnyder, who lives with three dogs in a loft at 5th Street and Broadway, has appointed herself a kind of poop monitor for the loft district downtown. She takes mental notes on dog owners who don’t pick up after their pets, and she plans to find a neighborly way to encourage greater cleanliness.

“This is a great new community, but I see it becoming uncomfortable for people who don’t have dogs,” she says. “They get up, get dressed and want a pleasant walk to work. What do they see? I’m talking huge piles of poop.”

Off-leash dogs are another problem. Lisa Burton of West Hills says a trip to the local park playground with her son Adam, 4, often sets her on edge because some neighbors let dogs roam freely.

“Little kids walking from cars to the playground get scared and start to scream,” Burton says. “Then the dogs do their business right there on the grass. I can’t let my son play on grass filled with germs.” She’s found herself losing control and screaming at dog owners, she says.

Scott Robinson, a Woodland Hills real estate broker, recalls a neighbor so incensed by deposits on his lawn that he rigged a special sprinkler with an electric eye, drenching all dogs and their walkers who set foot on his property.

IT’S no surprise, then, that one category of mediation services is related to canine disputes.

“The dog owner sees the pet as a family member; the dogless neighbor sees the dog as a dog -- with everything that brings, meaning noise and mess,” says Mary Culbert, director of the Loyola Law School Center for Conflict Resolution, a nonprofit mediation program for L.A. County.

“As L.A. gets more densely populated, whatever one neighbor does impacts the other neighbor more intensely. Sometimes it starts with a small dog problem and escalates to more than that -- loud voices, harsh words and threats.”

Fear floods Liz Sinderbrand’s voice as she tells how a neighbor tried to have her dogs taken away. Sinderbrand has lived in the same house in Calabasas for 30 years, she says, the last 10 of them with Sam, a black bearded collie, and Joe, a rat terrier.

“I never had problems, no neighbors had a bad word to say,” she says. Then one day a note on the door from county animal control said her dogs were disturbing the peace. The complaint came from a neighbor in a nearby building. Sinderbrand went to talk with him, hoping to make peace, but to no avail.

“Their favorite place to sun themselves was on my balcony,” Sinderbrand says of Sam and Joe. “I don’t let them out there any more.”

Disputes often begin with the perception that neighbors aren’t acting responsibly or respecting each others’ boundaries. The most common complaint is noise, Loyola’s Culbert says. Dogless people may want peace and quiet, while dog owners may be willing to put up with a healthy bark -- or, in some cases, a constant racket. Is barking part of the urban landscape, like noise from passing cars?

“Our job is to help each party understand the perspective of the other,” Culbert says. “Once they understand, we get them to talk about solutions -- what each is willing to do to help solve the problem.”

Some dog owners are so convinced of their pet’s charms that they ask to bring the dogs to the mediation, Culbert says. They want their neighbor to know and love their pet. And when that tactic fails (no animals are allowed in mediation), there’s always a lawyer willing to help.

Shannon Keith, 33, of Studio City devotes her practice to animal cases. These days barking dogs and escaped animals keep her plenty busy, she says.

“The typical case is when a dog gets out of the yard and scares a neighbor or bites a person or another animal,” she says, adding she can’t help but think some owners are too righteous. “A few clients I’ve felt were irresponsible because the problem had happened again and again. In those cases, I actually make an agreement with them that they’ll correct their own behavior. It’s not the dog’s fault, but theirs.”

The city and county of Los Angeles have separate codes. In both, Keith says, dogs can be taken away for being a public nuisance -- barking excessively, getting loose, injuring people or harming property. The county code states: “Every person who maintains, permits or allows a public nuisance to exist upon his or her property or premises ... is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

MOST experts agree that excessive barking usually occurs when a dog is distressed. As much as a neighbor may feel sorry for an animal’s unhappiness or anxiety, hour upon hour of barking can turn sympathy into seething resentment.

West Hollywood dog owner Suzanne Camarillo has been surprised by letters to a local paper commenting on the poisoning of the North Hollywood boxer.

“The letters seem to sympathize with the poisoner,” she says. “I can’t understand that thinking. If a neighbor’s baby has colic and cries loudly and incessantly, do we have sympathy for someone who poisons the baby to shut it up? Dogs are just as innocent as that baby.”

Lawrence Palinkas, professor at USC whose area of specialty is people who live and work in extreme environments, says in highly populated urban areas, barking dogs might not disturb most people but can send a select few into a tailspin. “People who see themselves as isolated or confined have a way of magnifying very small, very insignificant things to the point where they become irrational,” he says.

On the other hand, Palinkas says, constant loud noise has been used as a form of torture. To some, inescapable barking might qualify.

“You have no opportunity to sleep,” he says. “You’re fatigued. Your ability to think clearly is impaired.” Under those circumstances, he says, an otherwise reasonable adult could be driven to extreme -- and reprehensible -- behavior.

“All the defenses we normally employ, the socially polite things we do to maintain good relationships, are affected,” he says.

HOW noisy was Giant, the West Hollywood target of a poisoning attempt? It depends on whom you ask. Neighbors on either side of the house say they weren’t bothered by the barking. They have dogs of their own. Neighbors in apartments behind the house, however, say the racket disturbed their tranquillity.

John Osborne, who lives in and manages a building behind the one where the dog was killed, says the yapping for hours on end was an irritant. But Giant certainly wasn’t alone.

“Where we once had two side-by-side bungalows, developers are building big upscale apartments, and bringing in people with dogs that are cooped up and barking all day,” Osborne says.

Some neighbors “can be driven to desperation,” says Kathryn Turk, West Hollywood community coordinator for Dispute Resolution Services, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the L.A. County Bar Assn.

She had a recent case in which a woman who worked odd hours kept two barking dogs in a house next to an apartment building.

“The neighbors couldn’t sleep, called animal control, code enforcement, the police,” Turk says. “She tried keeping the dogs in her bedroom, where she thought the noise would be less, but it didn’t work. One neighbor threatened to shoot her dogs.”

The dog owner and two sets of complaining neighbors finally sat down with a mediator and pledged to stop insulting and threatening each other. The complaining neighbors agreed to document exactly what times the barking occurred and to record the noise, so the absent owner could hear it.

“They eventually realized that it was another neighbor’s dog who was causing the problem,” Turk says. The other dog barked first and excited the others.

Turk has a case right now involving a dogless man whose West Hollywood apartment is close to the sidewalk. Every morning a young woman walks her dog to the patch of grass below his patio and offers her daily encouragement. “He hears her say, ‘Do poo poo now’ over and over again,” Turk says. “She carries no bag to pick it up; his window is usually open. You can imagine how he feels.”

bettijane.levine@latimes.com

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Do-it-yourself dog mediation

Sometimes neighbors ignore the obvious. Follow some simple steps, experts say, and you may be able to resolve your dog dispute before it gets out of hand.

Communicate. If a dog disturbs your peace or your property, don’t blame the dog. Phone or write the owner. Be friendly. Explain when and why you are being disturbed, and offer to discuss the problem. Say you hope to work together.

Don’t be defensive. If you’re the dog owner, don’t belittle or ignore a neighbor’s complaint. Listen and look for a solution. When appropriate, enlist the neighbors’ help. Ask them to make notes on when and where disturbances occur. Then think about fixing those problems by changing the way you care for the dog.

Be reasonable. If dog owner and complainer are open-minded and polite, solutions can be found. Some dogs offend only because their owners allow them to do so. Complainers offend when they yell, threaten and don’t give the dog owner a fair chance. If all else fails, take the dispute to a mediation service.

-- Bettijane Levine