My Neighbor's Dogs Are More Annoying Than Mine

My neighbor has two Jack Russell Terriers who LOVE to fence-fight. They're absolutely serious about it too.

Celeste barks a bit but is really more confused with their behavior than anything.


Mina is a terrier too, so she is pretty firm in her belief that fence-fighting is a dog-given right.

But she has met her match with these two dogs. They are dedicated, obnoxious, and serious. Mina isn't really serious. If the two dogs made their way to my yard, the worst thing that would happen is Mina would paw them. She generally doesn't eat invading dogs. I can't say the same for these two terriers. I'm pretty sure they want to rip Mina's throat out.



What once required me to stand directly in front of her and point in the direction of the house now only requires me to say, "COOKIES, DO YOU WANT THEM?" and she is all "Finally, minion, I tire of these shenanigans." Seriously, Mina is 12 - she uses words like shenanigans.

Thing is, I don't let Mina fence fight. If she starts, I immediately get her to stop. I'm always around to supervise her and intervene when she starts barking at the other dogs. I hate it when the neighbor's dogs bark for prolonged periods of time, why would I inflict that on anyone else? If she starts to fence-fight, I don't just stand there stupidly and wait for her or the other dogs to stop.

But my neighbors do. In fact, my neighbor tried to have a conversation with me over the din of three dogs barking. It was weird. I had to interrupt him and put Mina inside. He didn't do the same with his dogs. For the rest of the day, every time I let my dogs out, his dogs would go crazy. Which sort of worked in my favor, because their constant yapping started to desensitize my dogs. By the end of the day, Mina was ignoring them.

At no point, though, did the neighbor call his dogs inside. He didn't reprimand them (which is fine) but he also didn't just come out and get them. I'm trying to understand why someone would find it acceptable that their two small dogs are trying to sink their teeth into a dog twice their size. Am I unreasonable for expecting this from my neighbor? The dogs weren't alone in the backyard (although I cringed when my neighbor was hoping to just leave his dogs outside in the future). In fact, for the most part, the guy was right there with his dogs. I just found it baffling to let his dogs get into such an aroused, hypersensitive state. It's just self-reinforcing.