Sammy has been a bit of a handful since she joined the family. But you can’t help but loving her anyhow. That is, until the neighbors start complaining…. again. In other places around the world, part of owning a place is getting to know your neighbors and building a true community. Here I think we are still trying to figure out how all of that works here. Allow me to explain.
When we first got Sammy, she was a little monster within the walls of the house. That is, until she realized that she had a voice in the family and that if she barked, we would quickly arrive to try and silence her. You see I think we try to be good neighbors. Sammy barking is one of those things that would really piss me off if I was a neighbor. We handled it rather badly. The more we responded, the more she barked for attentions.

About 5 months ago, the inevitable happened, the building management company called to complain on behalf of the neighbors. I am not sure what pissed me off more. The fact that I was frustrated with Sammy, or the fact that our neighbors didn’t have the guts to just come to the dorr and tell us that we were bothering them. No, like a 5th grader, they had to run and tell the teacher. What were we to do? Hell we couldn’t even apologize.

Things settled down a bit as we started to ignore her barking. After about the 2nd bark, she stops. Good news. The next unforeseen situation was when I would leave for work in the mornings. She would bark and I could hear her on the way down the street. She would stop after a few minutes so we thought everything was working out fine. But having gone through the previous experience, I was still concerned because someone was bound to complain about her barking at 7:30 in the morning.

So we consulted some professionals who suggested a series of toys that you put some sort of food into that she would have to play with to get to the food. We though that would do it, and it did. We bought a plastic ball that you fill up with dog food and as the ball rolls around it spits out bits of food. She loved it and it kept her quiet as I left in the mornings. She was at the point where she expected me to leave and didn’t bark at all. She accepted it as long as she had her toy.

O.K., here is some advice. If you have tile floors and a hard plastic ball, the noise generated by the ball rolling around, is a bit disturbing. But since we live in a concrete building we figured the noise was only in our apartment. Sound waves are a funny thing. They do travel through concrete. So we found out this morning when the management company called to complain on behalf of one of the downstairs neighbors. In this case I did feel bad. Lord knows how long she was pushing that damn ball around all day. It must have been driving the downstairs neighbors crazy.

Lucky for them we came home the other day and found the plug to the ball in bits on the floor. Sammy had figured out how to get the plug out, eat all of the food then carry and drop the ball all over the place. It was ruined, and we had to toss it. She is toyless again, but I think she understands that we are always going to be coming and going and she is getting much better at keeping her trap shut. If only we could get her to be quiet while we are there. If she sees us and can’t get to us she barks. I think she will get over it, after all she is only 9 months now and has come a long way so far.