Barking Meters : Relentless Howling of Pets at Night Pits Neighbor Against Neighbor

“HoooOOOf! Hoooof! HoooOOOOf! HooooOOOOOf!”

Ethel Jean Bradford was mimicking the noise she claims to hear every night in her neighborhood--the gruff, relentless barking of the dog next door. “A hoarse bark . . . powerful . . . an ugly, fierce bark,” she said, groping for ways to describe it. “It makes you shake all over.”

The barking goes on week after week, month after month, all hours, according to the longtime Los Angeles resident. For more than a year, Bradford has been involved in one of the classic conflicts of modern urban life: the battle between man and man’s best friend, a clash pitting neighbor against neighbor.

Bradford has made nearly a dozen tape recordings, kept written logs of barking outbursts and debated the dog’s owner--who insists there is no problem--at two city Animal Control hearings. With a third hearing pending, Bradford talks of torment--how she can’t watch TV at night; how she wakes up in the wee hours, anticipating the noise; how her daughter at college stopped coming home on weekends.

“This dog has made my life miserable,” she said. “The lady on the other side (of the dog) . . . put her house up for sale!”

In the vast sprawl of Los Angeles, 3.4 million people share space with nearly 500,000 canines, many of them quiet, loyal and well behaved. But the exceptions are out there, the kind of animals that give dogs a bad name: shrill yelpers, lonely howlers, indefatigable woofers.

On many nights, in certain neighborhoods, a cat runs by, or a car squeals, or some primitive switch is triggered for no apparent reason in a dog’s brain, and it starts to bark. Soon, others join in, creating a chain reaction that can go on for miles--street by street, leaping boulevards, fanning across the city. For some animals, it is a moment’s diversion; for others, it is the start of a nightlong tirade.

The human result is measured in frayed nerves, fisticuffs, shouting matches, threats and hastily mortared walls. Each year in Los Angeles, 2,500 people file barking-dog complaints with the Department of Animal Regulation, and 130 of those cases go to formal hearings involving logbooks, tapes, photographic evidence and live testimony, said Linda Gordon, who oversees the process.

Justice is meted out by animal control officers in various forms: charges dismissed for lack of evidence; dogs ordered locked indoors at night; dogs sent to obedience school, or outfitted with electrical collars that create a mild shock with every bark. In extreme cases, dogs are ordered removed from the city--a last resort that invariably sets the fur to flying.

“You’re talking about possibly taking away someone’s property,” said Lt. Willie McDaniel, who conducts two hearings a week at the city’s North-Central Animal Shelter. “It does get heated at times.”

Brentwood resident Dennis Dvorin remains bitter over a February ruling in favor of a dog owner two houses from his. Not only was Dvorin accused of splicing audiotapes to exaggerate the problem--a charge he vehemently denied--but a hearing officer found that his tapes, logbook entries and a petition signed by about 10 neighbors were insufficient to prove that the dog in question was the guilty one.

“The dog is still barking its head off,” Dvorin said.

The wait for a hearing is three months, and often, because of appeals and recurring incidents, a case may drag on for a year or more.

Reseda resident Jeanette Shaw was involved in such a dispute. She fought tooth and nail for a year and a half to quiet the Doberman pinscher next door. Ultimately, she said, the problem was solved by the construction of a canine “walkway” that keeps the dog away from her property; but until then her night life was a nightmare.

“The dog would come over to my side of the house and bark its lungs out,” Shaw said. “This dog would bark at anything--the falling of a leaf, that dog would bark. It was absolutely a living hell.”

Settling the case became rancorous. At first, a hearing examiner ordered the dog outfitted with an electrical collar. But the angry owners accused Shaw of inciting the dog to bark--and shock itself--by playing tapes of barking dogs.

Shaw labeled the accusation “ludicrous.”

Dog owners say the noise complaints are often exaggerated. Arnold Titan of Mission Hills, whose three dogs touched off a case that filled a 3-inch-thick file over two acrimonious years, was accused of allowing the animals to bark at 1 and 2 in the morning. But he has always kept his dogs indoors at night, he insisted.

“People exaggerate, lie, whatever,” Titan said. “The barking was minimal.”

Dog owner Luther Sherman has been involved in another long-running battle in the Crenshaw district. Like many dog owners, he described complaints as “harassment” by one or two individuals, insisting that most neighbors see nothing wrong with Mucho, his Doberman.

The dog’s presence has ended a string of burglaries at his home, Sherman said. But in January, a tenant in a triplex adjoining Sherman’s yard angrily moved out, insisting she could not sleep in her own bedroom.

Even after two years, the case is unresolved. The triplex landlord--who asked not to be named--expressed doubts about renting the unit, which remains empty for remodeling. “Who will move in there,” he asked pointedly, “when they can’t sleep in the bedroom?”

Violence against dogs is rare, according to Animal Control supervisor Gordon. But threats are common, and many combatants decline to be interviewed for fear of retribution. Barbara Mole of Shadow Hills, near Sunland, said: “Your blood pressure goes up. You want to kill.”

In one neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, the sound of dogs barking at night is “like water dripping,” resident Bill Vestal said, alluding to an ancient mode of torture. “It gets to you.”

Last year, after the Doberman next door had puppies, Vestal was awakened at 6 every morning by yelping and squealing noises, he said. Although the neighbors recently moved, the ill will lasted months. Vestal would scream out the window for silence, and during one wee-hour telephone argument, he heard “an explosion” downstairs--a brick crashing through his dining room window.

Retelling the story, he pointed at the spot on the floor where the brick came to rest. “The guy said, ‘You’re harassing me!’ Then . . . came the brick,” Vestal recalled.

The room was growing dark--another night was falling.

Vestal stopped a moment and listened. Somewhere outside, a dog was barking.