New Animal Control.Org
A Nutshell Description of the Most Common Types of Barking Laws
The two most common types of "anti-barking" laws are the multiple-household laws and the consecutive-disruption ordinances.
The Multiple Household Laws:
The multiple-household law is the catch-22 of animal control ordinances. According to that set of laws, the barking of your neighbor's dog is only deemed to be illegal after the case goes to court and a judge rules that it is so. The catch is that the court will not agree to hear your case unless you are first able to persuade some of the people from the neighboring households to join you in pursuing a legal case that is sure to be as contentious and upsetting as it is long and drawn-out.
But precious few people want to get involved in a big legal battle. So try as you may, the neighbors will almost never sign on for a thing like that. And that's the end of it, as the authorities deny you legal protection based on how your neighbors choose to behave.
Imagine a parallel situation in which someone repeatedly burglarizes your home. But when you turn to the police for help, they refuse to arrest the culprit, because after checking with your neighbors, the cops learned that the people who live in the houses around yours don't care if you get ripped off or not. And based on that, the authorities then conclude that the thief should be allowed to victimize you all he wants, and that, indeed, they will arrest you if you are too zealous in trying to stop him.
That would make no sense at all, of course, yet that is the essence of the multiple household laws, which are the only criminal ordinances in existence that require more than one complainant to come forward before law enforcement will agree to take action.
The Consecutive Disruption Laws
The consecutive-disruption laws really just barely make a pretense of trying to prevent chronic barking.
Under a consecutive-disruption law a dog can bark habitually, as long as he does not continue on for more than a certain number of minutes in a row. For example, allowing one's dog to bark is only deemed to be illegal if he does it for more than twenty-minutes consecutively. However, if the dog falls quiet for more than sixty-seconds during that twenty minute period, then the clock resets, and the dog can bark on nonstop for yet another twenty minutes without violating the law.
Please note that being exposed to a dog that barks just a few barks at a time, and repeats the process once every few minutes, is more than enough to ruin the health of everyone in your family, destroy your marriage, and render you so dysfunctional as to do your career irreparable harm.
Hence, a law that protects you only from the noise of a dog who barks virtually non-stop amounts to essentially no protection whatsoever.
Under that kind of ordinance, if you have two or three neighbors who each keep a highly vocal canine, you can have the sound of somebody else's barking dog going off inside your house once every forty-five seconds, 24-hours a day, and legally there still isn't anything you can do to stop it.
The Impact Upon the Public
The real effect of both of those types of ordinances is to legalize chronic barking, since they make it next to impossible for the victimized neighbors to do anything about it.
For More Information About Our Bogus Barking Ordinances
For a better understanding of our fraudulent "anti-barking" laws, see The Barking Laws, Law Enforcement, and the Courts.
To learn how these unenforceable laws threaten the welfare of the general citizenry, see The Noise of Barking Dogs as a Threat to the Public Health and Safety.
To learn how these ordinances endanger those who attempt to get them enforced, go to How Danger to the Complainant Necessitates Anonymity.
For more on how these laws endanger the public, go to How Our Unenforceable Barking Laws Position Disturbed People to Use Their Dogs as Weapons, and also, be sure to read The Violence in the News.
To learn how the failure of these laws to address ambient barking, serves further to render them ineffectual, go to A System of Impossible Standards.
To read some news stories that exemplify the system, go to The Usual Legal Runaround.
For a better understanding of how we came to be saddled with these unenforceable laws, go to How the Animal Control System Was highjacked, and How that Usurpation Spawned Systemic Failure.
For a better understanding of how those phony laws are slowly killing people in their homes, go to The Deleterious Impact of Exposing People to Noise.
This page is part of the Failed System section of New Animal Control.Org