It’s hard to stay calm when someone else’s negligence puts your pet in danger.

What would you do if a neighbor’s reactive dog broke free and attacked yours, then they told you to change your schedule to avoid it happening again? Would you go along with their rules to keep peace in the neighborhood? Or would you speak up to protect your rights?

In the following story, one couple finds themselves in this very predicament with their difficult neighbor and his reactive dog. Here’s what happened.

AITA for telling my neighbor to keep his dog under better control

We have a GSD that gets daily walks.

My husband had him ready to go on a walk this afternoon before a potential thunderstorm came through. Most days, he walks in the evening.

Another neighbor was also walking his dog.

They were in the driveway and he saw a neighbor with a reactive dog (maybe Irish Setter cross?) that was walking daily on a retractable leash, coming down the sidewalk.

They backed up to be far away from the sidewalk for their passage.

Somehow, the guy’s dog spots our dog and, being on a retractable leash, easily pulls out of the guy’s hand and comes to attack our dog.

Her husband was able to grab both dogs and separate them.

My husband managed to grab the other dog by the collar and hold it away from our dog while holding our dog on his harness at the end of his arm.

Thankfully, neighbors witnessed and helped hold the other dog, and the other dog’s owner came running up to get him.

The guy took the dog home, and my husband, after checking out our dog for injuries, went on the promised walk.

The guy just came to the door, gave me his phone number, and said he wanted my husband to call him whenever we went for a walk. And that we “shouldn’t walk this time of the day” because they “always do.”

His sob stories weren’t working with her.

I told the guy to stop using a retractable leash and get control of his dog better.

He gives me a sob story about being disabled and not able to pick up poo and keep control of his dog.

I shut him down because I also am and if the husband can’t take the dog for a walk, I go only at times I know no one will be out because I know if a dog comes running up to us, I can’t defend us well (which has happened more than once).

Finally, she came up with a good solution for him.

My final advice to him was to get a dog walker if he can’t control his dog after it poops.

We knew this dog was reactive because when we were in our yard with our dog and the guy and his dog passed by, his dog would bark and rear up on its hind legs to try to pull into our driveway and into our yard.

After recounting the story to a “friend,” I was told that I’m being mean for not being sympathetic to his “injuries” he said he had (the ring camera shows it would have been not from our dog because the neighbor had the dog 15 feet away from ours by the time he arrived) and not agreeing immediately not to walk our dog in the afternoon.

AITA?

Wow! The neighbor sounds very entitled.

Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit suggest.

This person explains why retractable leashes should be outlawed.

As this person points out, if you cannot control a bigger dog, get a smaller one.

Here’s someone who thinks there are just a lot of bad pet owners today.

Great point here.

The neighbor is out of line.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.