My Dogs Don’t Bark
This blog aims to fully document our experience in dealing with a nuisance dog barking problem relating to unauthorised and unlicensed dog breeding in a small residential rear garden.
The account of our dealings with our local authority in connection with the unlicensed commercial dog breeding on the site and subsequent noise nuisance has been accurately recorded and written without the aid of hindsight together with my own thoughts as the story unfolded over a four-year period.
All correspondence sent and received when dealing with this matter from the many levels of the councils well oiled machine are made available for inspection within this blog.
Our problem with noise and odour nuisance caused by unlicensed dog breeding had been a blight on our lives for around six years and after conveying our displeasure to the owners and discussing their inability to control the source of the said nuisance, it became apparent that stronger action and help was needed.
After contacting our local council, and engaging them in ample correspondence we were given the standard advice, mostly as published on the local authorities own websites, in short we were advised by our local authority to follow their well documented and set procedure. It was largely because of our previous, five-year experiences in dealing with the various council departments that in May 2009 after taking advice from a former member of the councils own staff we set out to fully document and record our experience in implementing the councils well publicised set procedure.
The local authorities advice, and all instructions have been all fully adhered to and complied with and the subsequent results obtained together with all the steps involved have all been accurately recorded and documented within this Blog.
It was purely for future reference, that we set out to record and document the interaction between various parties involved and subsequent action taken by the local authority.
At times it is clear that the author is less than complementary towards “The Council” and its officers, this was born out of the sheer frustration in trying to constructively interact with the various levels of our local authority, their various department heads, and beyond to the Councils own Chief executive (Christine Fisher)
All information contained has been compiled in real-time as and when the situation developed together with a sometimes liberal interjection of frustrated humour and comments. It is hoped that the subsequent documentation will give any interested reader a good insight into the way local authorities and the employees charged with running the various council departments deal with this and other very common nuisances.
What has been a complete surprise is the way the council-run departments have been able to stall, stonewall and fudge both the law and their own well-defined and documented processes, and do it in any way that they see fit. This is usually done until the due process has become so over complex, exorbitantly expensive to police and therefore deemed not in the public interest to pursue. The rules governing any legal time constraints, are another added problem to the complainant and many times they give up out of sheer frustration.
It might be fair to also mention, that throughout this ordeal, the various council departments
have always purported to serve the various parties with impartiality and fairness, but as with all things, nothing is quite as simple as it seems and although this may help to highlight some of the flaws and failings within the system, it did not set out to be a crusade against the local authority, right over wrong , good over evil, or whatever other well-worn battle cry is in vogue at this moment in time.
Law Enforcement
It was the sheer frustration in trying to get our local authority and in particular their Environmental Health and Planning Department to act in accordance with the stated rule of law on the practice of unauthorised dog breeding together with the local authority’s Enforcement officers unwillingness to answer our correspondence and the later denied phone calls that were the driving force behind these few hundred words.
These few pages should also give an insight into the mindset of our local authority, shine a light, and help the reader with a blow-by-blow account of the actual due process as set down and practised by various departments within our local authority, The North West Leicestershire District Council.
Although a generalisation, all local authorities in the UK should be singing from the pretty much the same hymn sheet, so in theory, the procedure for dealing with a reported problem of noise nuisance to any local authority in the UK should be similar if not the same.
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Officially Sanctioned
by Chief executive N.W.L.D.C.(Christine Fisher)
In order to give a fuller understanding of the problems likely to be faced by others in a similar situation, all letters and documents, answered and unanswered pertaining to this case can be viewed or downloaded from the mail section. These include all the documents, emails, and other supporting correspondence relating to the alleged noise nuisance from the various departments of the North West Leicestershire District Council our locally elected Councilors, and our local MP, there are also accurate transcripts of telephone conversations and face to face meetings with various officialdom over the full five-year period.
Shown are some of the hurdles and frustrations encountered when dealing with issues through the well publicised official channels, all officially denied, ignored and unanswered correspondence, relating to our noise problem will be published via the documents page.
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Without doubt the one overriding frustration has been the total time wasted in chasing unanswered letters, emails, and phone calls. This fact has been reported to, investigated by, and pushed to, each and all the relevant council staff involved. Their documented findings after a full investigation by The Council, has concluded that there was no evidence to support the allegations of unanswered / ignored correspondence and so ultimately there was no case to answer, this was surprising given the hard evidence supplied to The Council in the form of the actual unanswered correspondence, and our own actual experiences. (Please see their findings)
The validity of the councils written denial concerning the councils widespread practice of stonewalling awkward questions and Ms Fishers reasoning behind her advised denial of reply from elected councillors can be examined in detail via some of the many unanswered letters and emails sent to council employees.
It is also hoped that the reader can get a rounded view of the events that have taken place regarding this practice and the way that council staff, at the highest level, even try to discourage communication between elected councilors and members of the public they purport to represent.
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The Line Of Fire
What to expect
It should be mentioned that there have been some serious attempts at intimidation in connection with our complaint to the local authority, but like most, for reasons of proximity, anonymity was never really an option, but it did allow Officialdom to make an assurance to us that although they do have a duty to inform the relevant parties that a complaint has been made, they would not divulge the name and address of the complainant.
OK I know it’s not quite in the league of a new identity and a safe house for life but I guess it’s the best Officialdom can do (So we all should sleep easy in our beds tonight).
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
(Gandhi)
I’m listening to the dogs during monitoring as while writing this. This is the most grotesque acoustic/environmental conditions I’ve ever heard.
Are any of the dogs still barking? Did they do this at night? Good God, I love England, but am shocked, horrified, that your local officialdom ever, ever permitted more than 2 dogs to be within hearing distance of any domestic residence! Even then, 2 intermittently barking dogs is way too many!
Most people who have been subjected to this would be suffering from post traumatic disorder.
I just cannot wait until some irresponsible dog owner becomes the subject of a massive damages/personal injury claim.
I do hope that you are not being subjected to more than A COUPLE OF BARKS per hour! That’s more than enough for any human to be delivered and it should be a globalised human health standard.
Thank you for putting your experiences there for everyone to read. I feel your pain.
First let me thank you for your comment, and say that your words of support do make a significant difference.
And although I do try to interject some humor into the situation, the frustration of dealing with this has most certainly had an adverse effect on our lives.
As for the number of dogs officialdom permitted, the owner was originally permitted 6 dogs including litters, this is a number which officialdom took from recent case law.
Then of course without proper checks and because of the financial incentive the dog population multiplied very quick.
Unfortunately Officialdom omitted to explain that the previouse case law pertained to a breeding kennels sited in open multi acre site which is very unlike our own case of a breeding kennels built without permission at the rear of a narrow domestic garden in a residential area. OOPS…
What staggers belief, is how officialdom ever thought for one second that a Commercial Dog breeding kennels was suitable or could function without major major problems in such a small area of an ordinary domestic rear garden.
You really couldn’t make it up..
Keep up the good work. You are not alone.
Thank you so much, that’s exactly how you do feel.
With my Australian state’s local councils being so defiant about enforcing the barking laws, and never accepting my offers to supply taped evidence of barking on audio cassettes, I now use NCH software to transcribe the cassette data into an audio file.
I then email the file directly to the computers of my council’s Animal Management section, together with a note declaring that I will testify in court as to the integrity of the file. I sprinkle the data with the date, and periodic voice-over time stamps.
This gives my council no excuse to deny remedial intervention according to the Dog Control Act 2000.
My council has never challenged evidence I’ve supplied this way. They can hardly deny it when their own ears have heard it on their office loudspeakers.
An Animal Management Officer (AMO) discussed the matter with the dog owner and a citronella collar was fitted free of charge for a week. This worked fine, but the owner would not buy one herself – but for the first time she did actually excercise some control.
When bad owners are not penalised they usually revert to form, and that’s the present state of matters.
And so this morning I emailed another file (5 megabytes in MP3 format) containing a representative 45 minutes of barking, but this time I included a note that the costs of my tapes and my software, together with a fee for my time and labour, would become a charge on the council.
Interested persons are invited to visit my main anti-barking website Quiet Tasmania at http://www.quietas.net and also its supplementary website Quiet Tasmania News at http://www.pebri.net
I can be emailed via tabs scattered throughout both sites.
Peter Bright
Tasmania
Australia
I listened to the recording. I’ve never heard a more grotesque, intrusive, debilitating racket from neighbouring dogs in my entire life. How on earth the local authorities permitted that disgraceful noise (and stink) to occur near a domestic residence is beyond me.
Thank you very much for putting your unhappy experiences here for the world to see.
Without exaggeration, I feel that any person subjected to that kind of abuse would be a candidate for post traumatic disorder.
I wait for the day when someone who is psychologically damaged from the noise of dogs is rewarded with a big fat compensation payout.
THEN WE WILL SEE HOW MANY OF THESE WONKERS CONTINUE WITH THEIR BULLYING, AND HOW MANY TAXPAYER FUNDED LAW ENFORCERS DENY US OUR RIGHTS TO QUIET.
I can not understand what on earth si the hold up on dog barking issues. I have had two years of it myself. Is the pet industry so powerful as some have said, that dogs have a secret unwritten law especially for them?
I have looked into the monitoring equipemnt and into running my own dog barking recording business so that victims own the evidence taken from their own properties. These things cost around $7K AUD.
There are problems here, the courts will ask if I m qualified to use this, about calibration and the like. I suppose that I could answer councils refuse to use them so their practice of using these would be questionable also, besides amature video evidence has been used before, so what the difference.
We really need to group up some how. Form our own private animal control companies. I bet a pretty penny would come our way easily!
Matty.
It’s often difficult for councils to secure direct evidence of alleged barking offences.
In my Australian state of Tasmania this fact has been recognised and since 2001 the mere opinion of an authorised person that an offence has occurred is sufficient cause for remedial intervention.
This is mighty powerful legislation – but councils refuse to use it. Their mindset is stuck in the past where only the direct documented evidence of their own officers is deemed safe.
When my council repeatedly ignored my offer of barking evidence in the form of audio cassette tapes, I downloaded software that digitised the noise and made a file of it.
I then emailed the file to my council’s Animal Management Officers as an attachment.
Councils often bleat about the need for legally acceptable evidence.
Well, there it was on their own computers – together with my declaration that I’d testify in court as to its integrity.
Faced with this barking evidence in their own ears, the AMOs took action.
The experience described in your post sounds almost identical to our own, the only difference being that when confronted with our own digital recording of the noise nuisance the council officials told us that the recording would not stand in a court and therefor inadmissible as far as they were concerned, I hope to be publishing all documents to highlight the full response received.
It was also suggested by a council official that any investigation and enforcement was competing for funding with other more worthwhile cases and so dependent on the councils budget.
Councils staff will usually dodge duty using any specious argument they think will sound plausible. Most ordinary folk are ignorant of law and its quaint procedures and often insidious procedures.
They can lie, as in your case.
I make the assumption here that UK law is much the same as Australian law.
Your recorded evidence, in any form, when tested in a court while you are under oath and testifying as to its integrity, becomes legally admissible evidence upon the court’s acceptance of it as such.
When there’s no serious challenge to its integrity then the magistrate is prettymuch obliged to accept it as it stands.
If he is in doubt, he can ask you directly on the spot while your face is just a few metres from his. Magistrates develop honed skills at spotting bullshit.
You must be prepared to take the stand and endure whatever cannonballs your opponent’s representative chooses to fire at you.
You must not allow yourself to become flustered when he does this because he sees it as his job to unsettle you, ridicule your demeanour and smash your credibility, or at least to sow seeds of doubt in the magistrate’s mind.
This can be very hard to endure when you’ve endured long-term health-damaging injustices and are desperate for officialdom’s understanding of your plight.
This can be hard to get. Try not to lose your temper while under duress.
Don’t accept everything your council staff say at face value – there’s sometimes no substance to it. They want to be rid of of you. They see you as a pest.
If they were military personnel at war they’d all be shot for dereliction of duty.
Just downloaded the noise file for the whole of January, it took over 3 days, how sad is that.
Best of luck with this mate.
What a travesty..as I read this listening to my neighbor’s 3 dogs trading barking contests all day long. Can you come to the U.S. and stay for about 4 months to take care of my neighbors and city council?!
Maybe your coucil should hold one of their meetings in your backyard.
Hi Willie
Thanks for your comment, and hope you are coping with your own noise nuisance; I guess your councils in the U.S conduct themselves in much the same way as they do here in the U.K, all be it a slightly different circus it’s still run by the same clowns.
Yes you’re right Councils and their workforce should be forced to endure this abomination themselves once in a while to give them some idea how destructive this type of constant din can be. Although there’s a good chance that ever eager to exploit a given situation that most would be on sick leave by the end of the week claiming some sort of work related stress syndrome.
There remains for me to discern a simple but accurate explanation for why the so-called enforcement authorities refuse to implement the procedures so obviously necessary to secure neighbourhood peace.
My current evaluation is that the personnel in these institutions are simply ignorant (and prefer to stay ignorant) and that this ignorance provides the basis for universal perennial incompetence.
With no remedial action at any level this means that employees are taking home their pay packets without earning them.
This is theft.
Hi Peter
Thanks for your support; I agree totally with your take on this thing, I also feel that this is almost a policy thing based not on the rule of law but on the cost of enforcement.
Will be waiting next for their well worn phrase “not in the public interest” to be trotted out.
Yes, you are right. The so-called “rule of law” in barking matters doesn’t exist.
The relevant legislation has been usurped by every councils’ perceived self-interest and the main culprit is every council’s manager. He can easily “pull the plug” on barking investigations for example, and so the offence continues for years with the offender smirking and laughing – indeed some of these swine derive sadistic joy from the hurt they know they cause. Many owners are narcissistic.
What usually takes priority is a council’s fear of enforcement costs. The anguish and suffering of barking victims is never a serious consideration for its staff, most members of which are entirely without empathy or sympathy.
Yet here in Australia the proceeds of a barking infringement notice ($240) become council property. With that financial incentive you’d think that every council would be diligent about enforcement, for example one ticket a day pays the wage of two council rangers for that day. All extra tickets that day are profit.
With the infliction of monetary penalties and the power (in Tasmania) to impound any dog whose owner is merely believed to have committed any offence, a council’s diligence can terminate the barking problem in any area.
This isn’t done. Why?
Councils obviously don’t want the job of dog policemen. They hate it. Perhaps the enforcement role should be entirely taken off them – but allocated to whom, or what?
What digusting behavior from the council, maybe this situation will blight their lives one day (lets hope), certainly no sympathy from us, we think the council are afraid to follow through with any enforcment orders because of the cost involved of course money is the only thing that matters not peoples lives.
As we have deduced, the reason councils wilfully ignore barking allegations is their fear of the costs of barking law enforcement.
In view of my revelations above that councils can make good money by issuing infringement notices, the question becomes .. why don’t they?
In short, it’s because of the nature of our legal system, particularly on its demand for proof that an alleged offence actually occurred.
This insistence is our protection, but it’s also an ongoing curse on an offender’s victim. The noble intention is to prevent an injustice occurring.
To forensically prove an event in court is often far harder than one would first think. The victim of barking knows all too well that he’s being assaulted by noise and he naturally thinks that any fool and his uncle who hear the din will instantly agree. Alas, it ain’t so easy.
Special attention has to be focussed on the matter during a council’s investigation, and it has to excercise extreme care in everything it does. It has to look ahead and plan for the offender’s legal challenge just in case there is one. It has to amass proof that can withstand hurricane and earthquake.
It’s all the costs associated with this task that send councils into denial mode. For them, this is their escape route – and they won’t close it no matter who suffers, or how many, or how much.
The only certain way to freedom from dog problems is No Dogs Anywhere. A petition of this name, and two others of lesser degree, may be accessed at
http://www.pebri.net/index_13.htm
I wish you had alerted me earlier
speak soon…
Oh yes, and what would you have done? Ain’t that just a classic statement. too little much too late as usual.
To the Author: Your fortitude and perseverance are astonishing . . . I don’t know how you have managed to cope with this irritating noise going on! You have a reasonable expectation of peace in your own home; this is such an unfair and absolutely intolerable situation.
Ms. Haines, if you or any of your staff are reading, kindly remove your head from your posterior and act on this immediately. Stop stalling. Do what you are paid for. MAKE THIS GO AWAY.
O M G, and to think I thought that I had drawn the short straw when it came to actions of our local council. I have just spent a happy hour reading about the excuse for a local authority you have over there.
The old saying “there’s always someone worse off than yourself “is ringing in my ears.
Yes you have a problem, but I always thought the UK had strict trading standards, does it not cover services? If not it should.
I think there’s something in there about a service being fit for a particular purpose and must be of a satisfactory quality.
On both counts I think you should have a claim. (No win no fee)
Good Luck
Annie
As I sit here writing this comment whilst being serenaded by the choir that abides next door to the complainant, I think that pastilla is right in what been said that the council should get there heads from up there backsides and have some gumption to proceed with the enforcement notice once and for all, and not keep passing the buck and trying to brush the problems under the carpet. COME ON COUNCIL GET SOME BALLS.
Believe me I live in the N.W.L area if you ask most people about what they actually do in terms of value for money most would find difficulty in bringing anything to mind, to most, they clear the rubbish bins once a fortnight, and they sometimes have problems with that.
we have been dealing with excessive dog barking for over three years here in New Mexico – I feel for you and applaud your exhausting efforts! our “neighborhood” is very similar to living in a full-blown kennel but you have just inspired me to take action to help stop this madness.
I don’t see any posts after mid-April – please tell me you finally have some peace in that beautiful garden of yours?
Hi Robin
Thanks for your support; our problem is still ongoing although there has been an improvement from our position in May 2009. Now the planning department has turned down the application for a fully legal dog breeding kennels, so they are now breeding dogs covertly.
It seems to me that this is a huge problem which is more often than not ignored by authorities. Here in the UK we have very strong laws against this kind of nuisance and plenty of advice, our problem along with many others, is getting the authorities to correctly police and enforce the statutory laws.
As for our own problem, as I write this the affected area is being monitored by a council installed recording device and the device will be taken away tomorrow after 72 hours of recording for analysis.
The big problem with this procedure is that the offending parties are always informed that they are to be monitored and obviously in doing so allows for a concerted effort by the dog owners to contain the excessive barking until the monitoring equipment is removed.
I know it’s all a bit one sided and the authorities, sometimes have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the fight for peace and quiet, but I feel the more this problem is highlighted the harder it is for them to ignore it.
Good luck with your own quest for some peace, I would be very interested in hearing about any future developments.
You case in not dissimilar to many of the cases that we deal with.
We are very much aware that the current local authority model and lack of experience of many individuals within Environmental Health Departments means that the situation for noise sufferers often becomes much worse after contacting their local Council. Individuals are often given the wrong advice and Council’s fail to make clear the difference between serving an abatement notice and the evidence needed for prosecute
http://www.noisedirect
I think we need to have a chat about the problems. Drop me an e-mail and I will give you my contact details for you to contact me.
There are many avenues to explore with this, Local Government Ombudsman, Section 82 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. All free advice from an ex Noise Officer.
Regards
Dan