and a half can of pink Krylon spray paint. I believe my neighbor will stop putting his dog out at night to run freely through the community randomly pooping on my lawn and many others nearby. Cleaning up after this thing is a chore, especially when it doesn’t live here. Two years of this is enough.
While I think emotionally that revenge your is sweet, logically I think you've opened yourself to retaliation and maybe prosecution for animal cruelty.
I had two big, usually very friendly dogs when alone without the other dog in my neighborhood. They were from different owners, and turned wild when paired. We have a leash law here, but the neighbors would turn them out, and when they'd pair up, they ran all over the neighborhood, crapping all over our lawn and others, running through our gardens breaking shrubs, crushing flowers. After asking the neighbors several times to keep the animals at home, one evening the dogs came snarling up on my deck and went after my cat, who was in my wife's lap at the time.
That was the last straw. I chased them down, tied a rope as a temporary leash to their collars, tied them up and called animal control.
Animal control took the dogs and I heard nothing further. I never saw them running loose again either.
Cut to ~6 months later, talking to a neighbor about 'stuff'. He related how he saw animal control stop at the [dogs' owners] house, staying for a long time. Seems animal control told them:
1. They'd have to come to the pound and pay a leash law fine to get their dogs back.
2. The dogs had one strike against them for attacking a person, and a second strike would lead to the dogs being destroyed, and a bigger fine.
The neighbor said he was glad someone finally took action against those irresponsible neighbors and their uncontrolled nuisance dogs.
When I told him I did it, he told me that I was a hero to a bunch of people in the neighborhood.
The takeaway from this tale is that you have to bite the bullet and get the lawful enforcers in the act to address the problem. In our county, all complaints of this sort are anonymous, so there's not likely going to be any retaliation. One of my offending neighbors asked all over he neighborhood who turned him in, pleading how we should have come to him first. Well, we'd been to him numerous times, and he never did deal with it.
Tough. He's a weasel who never looks after the neighborhood, ignores zoning and building code laws, always trying to get over, so nobody broke the code of silence. A legal version of shoot, shovel, shut up.
