Imagine living in an HOA neighborhood where you and all of your other neighbors have dogs. Everyone keeps their dogs on a leash when they’re outside, everyone except one neighbor.

Would you report this neighbor to the HOA, or would it not bother you if their dog was roaming freely in the neighborhood without a leash?

In this story, one couple is in this situation, and the husband is pretty upset by it. He was going to let it go, but then he saw the dog in his front yard. Now, he really wants the neighbor to keep the dog on a leash.

He’s thinking about contacting the HOA about the situation, but he’s wondering if that’s too extreme.

Keep reading to see what you think he should do.

WIBTA For Complaining to my HOA Before Talking to my Neighbors

My wife and I moved into our home a little over 2 years ago, in a new build nieghborhood.

Our neighbors that moved in after us have been nice enough, but we don’t talk all that often. When we have though, the wife often made comments about people’s and our homes/yards/etc. Stuff like “I don’t like how that grass looks. I would never let my grass look like that”.

She’s generally been very much “better than you”.

The husband is pretty nice though.

Almost everyone is a dog owner.

All of our nieghbors but them have dogs. We also have two dogs (1.5 years and 6 months).

Most of us don’t have fences yet, we all let our dogs go potty in our front yards.

Everyone has kept their dogs on a leash/lead to keep them in their yards as we do with our dogs.

When out walking their dogs everyone keeps their dogs on a leash.

But then the neighbors got a dog.

These neighbors recently decided to get a dog (9-wk old puppy), after not having one since they moved in.

From day 1, whenever they let their dog outside it has not been on a leash.

Initially I didn’t have a problem with it since it always stayed on their yard.

However, I noticed last week that they took their dog for a walk and didn’t use a leash for it then. Slightly more worrying, but again, they were right next to it and it wasn’t exactly running off.

Uh-oh!

This morning, I let my dogs outside to go potty (we let them out 1 at a time).

When I let out the 6 month old pup, I noticed their dog was in our yard, and the neighbor (wife) was standing on her porch about 30 feet away.

She didn’t apologize, or try to get her dog off, just said “I’ll get a bag”.

This obviously surprised my dog, who isn’t used to seeing a dog in her area, so she barked.

There’s a potential problem.

My other dog is generally loud, but incredibly friendly. When she’s in our front yard she’ll bark at any other dogs she sees passing by, but as soon as they’re close to each other she’s best friends with them.

The issue I have with this is I don’t know how she’d react first thing in the morning when I open the door to let her out and there is a tiny dog in her yard.

I don’t have any reason to think she’d be aggressive, but I also don’t have any experience with another dog in my yard.

I was annoyed with this.

OP is thinking about talking to the HOA.

I’m fine with whatever they do in their own yard, but not having control of their dog outside of that is pretty reckless.

I am debating contacting my HOA directly to see what our rules are about dogs on leashes outside of their property, and if there’s anything they can do about this (a friendly letter or something of that sort).

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The reason I don’t want to talk to them directly is because of her “better than you attitude” and I am starting to think that not leashing the dog was her idea to show the neighbors that they are better than us, and I’m honestly over that attitude. Plus then there’s a physical record of this if something should happen later on (with any of the neighbor dogs, not just ours).

So WIBTA for going straight to the HOA with this?

Should he talk to the neighbor before going to the HOA or go straight to the HOA? Let’s see what Reddit has to say.

This is a good way of thinking about it.

Here’s a vote for talking to the neighbors.

Another person thinks he should talk to the neighbors first.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about neighbors who were sick of their hedge getting demolished, so they put a surprise inside.

Here’s yet another suggestion to talk to the neighbors about the problem.

I hope the neighbors are open to listening to OP’s concerns and agree to put their dog on a leash when it’s outside. If they don’t, then he should definitely go to the HOA. If he goes to the HOA first and the neighbor find out who reported them, they’re definitely going to be upset.

They don’t need to give the neighbors a reason to be mad at them.