Why you may want to reconsider buying a house next to me

I will not hesitate to call the cops on you.


On Wednesday evening when Clinton and I got home from Lowe's, he went into the backyard and discovered our neighbor's dog had knocked a board down in the fence and was in our backyard.


I'm no dog breedist, ok. Have a pit bull or Rottweiler or Doberman if you want, but treat it with respect, socialize it with other people and other dogs, or you're going to have an angry dog. And angry dogs are like live grenades, you just never know when something is going to spiral out of control.


So this dog is a chow. A chow who as far as we know, and this is also the consensus of the neighborhood, is only visited by humans once a month or so. Seriously. I see our neighbor's car at her house once every 4 weeks. She does whatever it is she does and sometimes spends one night there, but then returns to where ever the hell she came from.


During the school year, I see her daughter dropping her son off and waiting for the bus, but they never go to the backyard. That poor dog has only seen a human about once a month. Which means, he's scared to death of people and that he doesn't know any other way to react than to growl and protest.


I confess, I knew about the dog. I knew the dog was in the backyard. But I was under the assumption that...I dunno, someone looked at it every once in a while or something. At a minimum I thought, maybe she had an automatic feeder (which still may be the case). Basically, I assumed that a person with a medical degree was on top of her own pet situation. I thought for sure she had enough brain cells to get that far in life, that she must have enough to know to care for her dog.


When Clinton asked me to contain Landon so that I could help him corral the dog, I went into the backyard with the intentions of seeing a fairly healthy dog, corralling him back into his own yard and going about my business.


That did not happen. While that dog may or may not be malnourished, he is certainly not well cared for.


That dog had huge mats of fur hanging off of it. As I stated earlier, the dog is a chow, he's pretty fluffy, so there's no telling if he's malnourished. But I know this in the very depth of my soul. That dog is wearing so much extra fur in 100° weather, I'm surprised he hasn't died of heat stroke. That's how matted he is. We are not talking about your average fully furred up chow. We're talking about a dog with twice to 3 times as much hair as he should have. In knots. Pulling at his normal hair.


When I saw the condition of that dog, my first reaction was "dammit, I do not want to have to be the person that deals with this." If it were an episode of "Animal Cops: Houston." I'd be the one they're talking about when they show up and say "We got a call..."


So I called animal control. And I waited about 30 minutes and no one showed up. So I called again and specifically asked that they send someone. And while it wasn't the 12 year old I got last time, this one wasn't much older. Unfortunately, by the time he arrived, since the dog had already retreated to his own yard, there was nothing he could do legally.


He "fixed" the fence. And yes those are intentional quotes - we aren't going to be able to fix the fence without going in her yard, and we can't get into her yard until that dog is gone or contained. And said that based on my description of the situation and the dog, that he would definitely have animal control send someone out in the morning to look at the dog.

We left town the next evening, so I have no idea what happened while we were gone. I have not heard the dog, but I also have not ventured over to her driveway to see if it’s still there. I’d like to pretend they came and got him.

Also this weekend, I was wandering around the outside of the house during the fireworks war zone. And I came across an old, female chocolate lab. No collar. Scared shitless. Do people not realize that there's a reason they tell you to bring your dogs inside during fireworks? They get spooked and take off! We tried to find her owners, but were not successful. We gave her some water and in the morning she was gone. Hopefully when things settled down she was able to find her way back home.

(Lighter topics to come this week. I promise)