I lived in the cheek-by-jowl
suburb of Observatory in Cape Town for seven years, and from that experience
realised that I don’t like having neighbours. From the students over the road
who partied hard and loud into the small hours seven days a week, to the woman
next door who left rude notes on the windscreens of friends’ cars if they
parked on ‘her’ pavement, my neighbours weren’t people with whom I’d ever want
to form lifelong bonds.
So I decamped to the
(then) thinly populated village of Riebeek Kasteel, and for several years lived
blissfully across the road from the town cemetery – better neighbours I simply
couldn’t have asked for.
At around the same
time as I bought a house a little further into the centre of the village, there
was a sudden property boom, and it wasn’t long before the large plots around my
home had been carved up into smaller ones, and I was once again surrounded by
neighbours – and the niggles that came with living with them.
Aside from one lengthy
incident involving a neighbour’s questionable decision to import a pair of rabbits
into his garden, and allow them free-range freedom (with catastrophic results
for both the rabbits and their gazillion babies, which were relentlessly hunted
by the neighbourhood cats and birds of prey, and often got run over when caught
in the headlights of some hapless driver-by; and the neighbourhood, which, many
years on, was still dealing with the multitudinous garden-devouring offspring
of the original pair), almost all incidents of ’burb rage were sparked by dogs.
Our road became known
as ‘Blafstraat’ (‘Bark Street’), as every one of its eight houses had dogs –
except, for several years, mine. The hound population of the house at the top corner
ranged from an annoying four to a fury-inducing six – and it was these that
raised the alarm if someone walked around that corner into our road, barking
hysterically and setting off every other dog all the way down the street. When
this happened at night, I would lie in bed biting my duvet in frustration,
wondering how the hell their owners could sleep through the din, if I, all the
way at the other end of the road, was being kept awake by it.
But the surrounding neighbours
at the end of the street waged that war and, finally, won a victory of sorts –
the owner agreed to put up an interior fence so that at the very least their
dogs wouldn’t be able to race all the way around their house, thereby cutting
in half the length of time the frenzied barking went on. And so a kind of peace
reigned for a while.
Then the people over
the road from me, who already had a Staffordshire terrier, acquired three
miniature dachshunds. Crikey, they were cute. And by god, they could yap! They
yapped at each other, at their owners, at their owners’ kids and friends and
popper-inners; they yapped at passing people and cars and other dogs; they
yapped at birds flying by and insects on the ground; they yapped at breezes and
sunshine and rain. And, because the garden in which they lived was enclosed by
only a chickenwire fence, they yapped at all the cars and people and birds and
insects they could see all the way up and down the road.
Not only that, but they
were escape artists – so it wasn’t enough that they yapped their little bloody
heads off inside their garden, they often got out and ran up and down the road,
snapping at passerbys’ ankles, attacking other dogs (I once had to
rescue a stray puppy from certain death – miniature dachshunds might look
endearing but, make no mistake, they’re little killers; they were initially
bred to hunt badgers) and generally causing havoc.
Now, up until then, my
over-the-road neighbours and I had lived in a state of détente. Neither of us
was a perfect neighbour. I, for instance, occasionally had loud parties that
went on into the small hours and sometimes beyond. They, on the other hand, ran
an unlicensed crèche from their house, which meant that three mornings a week,
twice a day, I was treated to the exhaust fumes and noise of parents dropping
off and collecting their little darlings, and also several hours of kids’
playtime (consisting of mainly screaming and crying) in their front garden.
They also ran some sort of chemicals business out of their garage, with people
coming and going at all hours of the day and night to collect huge drums of
I-don’t-know-what.
But the dachshunds
changed that status quo. And, just so that you know I’m not Mrs-Nigglypants-Neighbour,
I didn’t actually register any complaints at all for about a year. Then several
things happened to prompt action. First, there was the near-death-of-the-puppy
incident – in trying to rescue it from the dachshunds, I got my jersey snagged
on a piece of barbed wire, so all I could do, since I was trapped, was hold the
puppy up out of reach of the three hysterical little would-be murderers and scream my lungs out in
the hope that their owner would hear. You can imagine my astonishment when only
one of their children – a little boy aged about 6 – responded. Why? Because his
parents were out at the time, and the only ‘responsible adult’ in the house was
a 12-year-old cousin who was too scared to come out.
Second, the dachshunds
got out of their garden (again!) and into a neighbouring empty plot, where my
chickens were quietly peck-pecking away, and attempted to kill one of them.
With the help of another neighbour, we managed to rescue it.
And, finally, there
was the incident of the woman walking past with a boerboel (which, in case you
don’t know, is a BIG dog), and the three little yappers getting out and going
for both her and her dog. I responded to her cries to help and burst out of my
front door. By then, the dachshunds knew me as an avenging fury, and ran away
when they saw me, but the woman was distraught and her dog was in murder-mode
(and, believe me, you don’t want to be around a riled-up boerboel). While I was
trying to calm both the woman and her dog, I looked over at the neighbour’s
house – and saw both the owners watching what was happening from behind their
security gate. They had heard and seen everything, and hadn’t lifted a finger!
It really was the
final straw. Later that day, once my temper had cooled to simmering, I went over
to have a word with the owners. They were (surprise!) not at home, but the
mother-in-law was, and when I explained the situation to her, her response
amazed me. She knew about the problem, she said, because they’d received
complaints not only from practically all the people in our street, but from several
of the home-owners behind them as well. And, she added, I could speak to her
daughter-in-law, but she could guarantee that nothing would be done – ‘Her
attitude is that they’re her dogs, and that’s that.’ (She said this in
Afrikaans; this is an approximate translation.)
She gave me her daughter-in-law’s
cellphone number, and I called her. We had a short and unpleasant conversation,
during which she told me exactly – practically word for word – what her
mother-in-law had said she would.
I’m going to cut what’s
becoming a very long story short here: I applied to the municipality for their
bylaws concerning dogs, and quickly learned that the owners of the dachshunds
were contravening all of them (too many dogs on the property; property not
properly fenced; dogs’ barking not controlled; dogs being a nuisance; dogs harassing
passers-by; and so on). I wrote a polite letter, which my neighbours on either
side co-signed, and added a reminder that we were all dog-lovers in our street,
and were prepared to help in any way possible to solve the problem (including
but not limited to a neighbourly effort to properly secure and screen their
front fence). I stapled it to a printout of the municipal bylaws and delivered
it.
Well! Let’s just say
that hell hath no fury like a woman whose dogs have been scorned. In a huge
argument on my front verandah, she told me that she would have all the dogs put
down the very next day – WOULD THAT MAKE ME HAPPY??! Not at all, I said; there
were several other ways to handle the problem.
What happened over the
next few months was, for me, very telling. The dachshunds’ owners didn’t do a thing
to make their front fence more secure or less see-through, but they did make something of an
effort to control their dogs, in that, every fourth or fifth time the
dachshunds went into a yapping frenzy, someone would scream at them from behind
the security gate. But all that this ‘awareness’ of the constant noise did was
apparently make them conscious – for the first time in over a year – of the
fact that their small dogs had become a sizeable nuisance.
And so, a few months
later, the dachshunds suddenly disappeared. I don’t know if they were given
away or put down, because, since the shouted confrontation on my front
verandah, my over-the-road-neighbours have never spoken to me again. I continue
to greet them; they not only ignore me, they actually turn their backs when
they see me.
This doesn’t bother me
– we were never going to be lifelong friends. What is interesting, however, is something
that happened a few days ago. Another neighbour acquired a new dog – a collie/husky
cross – who is also an escape artist, and gets out of their garden every morning
to wander around in the street. But (and this is a big ‘but’) the collie/husky
never barks, and it’s a nervous dog, so when a passer-by approaches, it runs
away – in other words, it’s not a nuisance. What does worry me is that it seems
to have no road sense, and a couple of times I’ve watched while a passing car
has had to swerve at the last minute to avoid it.
For this reason, the
other morning, when I saw it in the street, I went outside to let it back into
its garden (it seems to find ways out, but can’t find a way back in again). At
the very same time, my ex-dachshunds-owning-neighbour (the husband, this time)
came shooting out of his house, screaming – and when he saw me, he went into
overdrive. In Afrikaans, he shrieked, ‘You all complained about my dogs, but
what about this dog??!’ – then, incredibly, he picked up a huge chunk of stone
from the roadside and flung it with all his strength at the dog. The dog was terrified
and bolted off up the street.
And that, really, is
all you need to know about people who should never have dogs, never mind
neighbours.
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