April Letters - #7

**Where is #6, you ask? #6 fell asleep at 8:00 last night and she didn't raise her pretty little head until the morning of #7, so let's just leave it at that.


November 27, 2006


Dear Neighbors:

This letter is in reference to your dogs. We are hoping we can come to an amicable agreement as to how to handle this situation.

As you know, we have had trouble in the past (early last winter) with your son’s dog coming onto our property and harming our chickens. At that time, I came to your house and mentioned it to you and you stated that you would try to keep him home or that I should just yell at him to ‘go home’.

Since then, we have noticed that there are now several loose dogs on your property, we have seen as many as 6 at one time. This poses many problems. We are continually, at least 5 times a week, having to chase these dogs off of our property. They run together as a ‘pack’ and chase anything in their sight. We have had to stop them from chasing our chickens, our dog and our children. Before you decided to build across the road, our children frequently used the road in front of our house to ride our 4-wheeler and their bikes, this cannot happen anymore as they are continually chased by this pack of dogs. I myself rode the 4-wheeler up the road to check on some trees on our property and an entire pack of 5 dogs chased me clear onto my property. If they are not up by our house, they are continually in our woods where our children play. As a result, the children are scared to play there in fear of the dogs. We cannot even get our mail or take garbage out to the dumpster without them seeing us and running onto OUR property and barking at us. About 2 weeks ago, we had friends over and our kids were riding 4-wheelers. As the kids were riding through our woods, they came out on a path and onto the road. As soon as they did, your dogs saw them and chased them back into our woods and clear up into our yard. It just so happens the girl that was visiting is scared of dogs and came into the house crying and that was the end of them riding 4-wheelers.

We would like to try to resolve this problem before something major happens as a result of these dogs being loose. They have shown that they will chase and possibly hurt anything that comes their way. One on one, I believe the dogs are friendly, however, as with any type of dog, when they pack up together it can be a different story.

As I stated last winter, we raise free-range chickens. We sell the chickens for meat and the eggs to local stores for extra income. We cannot afford to take the chance on them being killed or hurt. Just today, my children had to chase your dogs out of our pasture because there were 4 of them chasing our chickens. When we are home, we can keep an eye on them, but does it seem fair that we should have to be around to make sure that your dogs are not on our property harming our animals?

We also have extensive gardens as we run an organic CSA. There have been numerous times when I have had to chase at least 3-4 dogs at a time out of these gardens. Needless to say, dogs are not very careful about what they are stepping on and we have had to replace plants as a result.

As you know, we have a Beagle that is loose. I asked you in February if our dog was causing any problems at your place and you stated to me that he wasn’t and that you rarely even saw him. As far as we can tell, Riley steers clear of your property and pretty much sticks to his home ground. If this is not the case and he is causing harm to anything on your property, we would obviously want to know so we can correct the situation.

We definitely do not want to have hard feelings among neighbors and are happy to see other families in the area. We are looking forward to hearing from you on this matter.

Thank you.

John and Angie "Whats-their-names" - last name removed to protect the bitchy.

**Holy Shit, I just published my neighbors address for all to see. What an idiot. Any stalkers out there? Please disregard. Thank you.