Imagine moving into a house that doesn’t have any other homes around, but then an HOA subdivision shoots up next door. If one of those new neighbors had dogs that would bark all night, would you talk to the neighbors about it, talk to the HOA, or learn to live with it?

In this story, one family is in this situation, and the new neighbors won’t even admit that their dogs are the ones that are barking.

Keep reading to find out the clever way the mom in this story gets the dogs to stop barking.

Clearly This Is The Perfect Time To Get To Know The New Neighbors!

About 2 years after my family moved to a smallish university town in a southwestern state of the US, the acreage around our house was sold to developers.

The building noise was awful a lot of the time, but we met some great people (the workmen on the various phases, not the real estate developers).

Once the first part of the development was finished enough to have neighbors living in them, the house sort of next to/behind our house sold.

Meet the new neighbors…

The new owners were veterinarians.

He taught at the university and she had just opened up a practice near our house.

They had dogs. Who apparently were not allowed into the house after dark.

One of the poor dogs was an elderly spaniel who was blind and she would get lost out in the yard.

The dogs barked…a LOT.

My parents’ bedroom is closest to these neighbor’s house.

The city has an ordinance about barking dogs, letting your dogs bark all night, etc…. And these neighbors also had a brand new HOA that specifically had fines starting at the how many times the dog barked in an hour.

Who was assigned to count the barks, I never did find out. But these vets let their dogs bark for hours.

The vets wouldn’t listen to anyone’s complaints.

We asked them nicely to make it stop.

Other neighbors would go and ask them to make the dogs stop barking, but they just wouldn’t.

The HOA got onto them. Didn’t seem to change anything.

Even having the cops stop by and give them a ticket for letting the dogs bark for hours every night didn’t stop them.

OP’s mom had a sneaky idea.

Mrs. Veterinarian told a cop and some neighbors gathered around that her dogs were angels and were not the ones barking. She would be kept up all night if her dogs were out in the yard barking all night! Clearly it must be someone else’s dogs and her poor babies were being picked on!

So a few nights later my mom asked me to make a big batch of muffins. She set up the coffeemaker, and made up a tray that had everything needed to go have coffee and muffins with the new neighbors.

That night when the dogs started barking, Mom got up to work on some grading.

About 2 am, Mom started the coffee and poured it into a thermal carafe. She made sure to make the tray look very pretty.

Here comes the best part!

Then she carried that tray all the way around to the veterinarian neighbors’ house. She knocked on the door and rang the bell until they answered.

Then just as sweet as pie she said it seemed like the perfect time to really get to know them since clearly no one in either their house or ours could sleep through their dogs barking all night!

After that, their dogs didn’t bother us at night. They made sure of it.

In the long run, they turned into very nice neighbors, thankfully!

That is really funny! I love how the mom pretended to be all sweet and made the tray look nice. That sounds like a very southern hospitality thing to do. But she wasn’t actually being sweet at all.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

One person thought it was going to be a completely different story.

This person shares a story about their late dog.

Here’s a laugh!

Another person shares what they did when the neighbors’ dogs would bark.

Southern hospitality can be effective.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.