I can't wait 'til she uses that line on me...
Fortunately, the dog won't come onto our property since we moved in. It's afraid of me. I chased it off a couple of times and thankfully it's intelligent enough to stay away now. The problem remains, however, with the barking.
The local police here issued a statement about a year ago stating that they will no longer take nuisance dog calls. We are in the mountains, and unfortunately, there are too many jerks like this woman up in the hills, and not enough police to take care of the calls.
I have confronted the woman several times about the animal, and went over (armed concealed) at 3:00 am to tell her nitwit ex-husband to bring the dog inside. None of those visits have helped.
And yes, Moonman62, the thought of taking the dog out has crossed my mind, but as a dog owner myself, I couldn't do it.
The woman is a college English professor at the local university. The comical thing is when you view her profile on RateMyProfessor, she gets terrible reviews, and the comments are spot on for what we have experienced with this piece of crap.
My son is a bonafide rocket scientist. Currently he works for a firm in Huntsville, Alabama on the new generation Mars rocket. He has an idea we hope will help. He's designing and building a "Sound Cannon" which will direct a 200 Watt 120 dB 30,000-40,000 hz warbling signal toward the woman's house and yard that we would activate when the dog barks. We had to purchase the speakers from Germany as they are apparently not available in the U.S. I'm really hoping when we test this thing that it works. And if the woman suffers some ill-health from it, so be it (some people can be susceptible to high-frequency sound even if they don't hear it).
Yes, it's come to this. We've got our fingers crossed that this contraption will do the trick.
I had a barking dog problem a couple of years back. The idiot owner was leaving the dog on the back patio for several hours every day and it barked the whole time. It was obviously scared or lonely (it looks like a pit bull, they are chickens when left alone). One day I decided to go out and whistle like I was calling a dog. It took a couple of tries but the dog stopped barking. I had to do it a few more times, then a miracle happened. The idiot owners stopped leaving him outside. Perhaps they heard me whistling and figured it out. This was a problem that had gone on for months.
So it worked out for everybody — me, the dog, and about a 100 people who live near me.