There is an unwritten rule of dog ownership that most people learn pretty early: if your dog makes a mess, you clean it up.

A homeowner in a small town spent weeks picking up after her new neighbors’ dogs, who were regularly let loose to roam the street and handle their business wherever they pleased. She had just lost her own dog the month before, which made every single cleanup hit even harder.

Despite the fact that this new neighbor had already been warned by multiple people on the street, she kept letting the dogs run loose anyway.

So after patience didn’t work, the homeowner decided to try something with a little more impact.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

AITAH for not calling bylaw on my neighbors loose dogs?

I (45F) had a young (probably mid-20s) couple move in to the rental duplex across from the home I own in a small town (population 2,500).

They do not have a fenced yard, but there is fencing on two sides of their corner lot.

There’s one big problem with these neighbors.

They have 2 medium-sized dogs that she will let out of the house to go do their business, while she goes back inside.

It’s clear these dogs aren’t the most well behaved.

Obviously, they don’t stay in their yard and will roam as far as a couple blocks to find somewhere to poop.

I often hear her calling from her doorway the dogs’ names for up to 10 minutes straight, because they can’t be bothered to get an anchor and some leads to keep the dogs in their yard.

The homeowner tries to hold her tongue, but it gets harder and harder.

I didn’t say anything the first — probably like 6 times — I was forced to pick up her dogs’ poop in my front and back yards (which is fully fenced but usually the gate left open).

The next time it happened, though, I got ticked.

Up until they arrived, everyone in the neighborhood was always diligent about keeping their surroundings clean.

My dog had died of kidney failure about a month before they moved in, and I was always good about picking up after him.

The first couple times I picked up after her dogs, I told myself I had just missed picking those up after my pup, even though the size difference made it unmistakable.

Finally, she couldn’t swallow her anger a second longer.

This day had already been a bad one for me, and I was really missing my dog, and when I saw her dogs poop in the middle of the front yard, I saw red.

I had been told by multiple other neighbors that she had been talked to and warned not to let her dogs run loose multiple times, but she obviously didn’t listen.

She decided if her neighbor wouldn’t respond to politeness, maybe she needed someone to be a bit more direct.

When I picked up the poop, I bagged it, tied it shut, and waited until after the garbage truck did our street, and then I put the bag on top of their garbage bin.

The next time I had to pick up after her dogs, I bagged it, tied it, and left it on her doorstep.

The next time I had to pick it up, I wrote a note that threatened to call bylaw the next time I saw her dogs loose, and to pick up her dogs’ stuff before it got smeared on her front door, then I taped the note and a bag to her front door.

The neighbor clearly got the message, but not enough to fully change her behavior.

I watched her run over and pick up the poop in my front yard from my living room, making sure she saw me watching.

It didn’t stop them from letting the dogs loose every once in a while, but they did build an enclosed area for the dogs, and any time they were out in their yard with the dogs off leash and they heard me outside (as I made sure they would), they’d immediately take the dogs in.

If there had still been any young kids in our neighborhood, or I had ever seen the dogs act with aggression to anyone, I would have called bylaw, but since there weren’t, and I didn’t, I chose not to.

However, her family all has differing ideas of who’s in the wrong.

When I told my parents the story, my mom said I had been an AH, but dad said I should’ve gone straight to bylaw or animal control.

So AITA?

If you have a dog, you need to pick up after it. Not just sometimes — every time.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an apartment tenant who is being called petty for blocking her parking space with trash cans.

What did Reddit have to say?

Leash laws exist for a reason.

This neighbor deserves even more punishment than they’ve already gotten.

This commenter has already given her neighbor a lot more patience than she deserved.

Letting your pet roam around free just isn’t safe — for the dog or for the other neighbors.

At some point, quietly cleaning up after someone else’s dogs stops being neighborly and starts being a habit that needs to end as soon as possible.

Losing a beloved dog is already hard enough, so constantly being reminded of it by picking up after someone else’s pet is just the worst possible outcome.

This homeowner had a lot of choices. She did not call bylaw. She did not escalate to animal control. She simply made sure the consequences landed closer to home. It’s what any reasonable person in her position would have done.

Sometimes the only thing that moves a problem forward is sending it back where it started.