Pepper barks at 5 am when she’s let out, nothing major it’s her am patrol. I am right there and let her bank in after her business is done. So total time is less than 5 min and barking isn’t continuous.
My neighbor just text me to ask if I can get her to stop barking on weekends. Now I get it, it’s early and it’s annoying, but it’s a few barks and she is a dog.
I also don’t want to cut out her barking as she is a dog and a working breed dog. She should bark. Am I negligent? Nope, not at all.
How would one handle this? I text her back said working on it, but in reality she is a dog. A few barks I don’t see as an issue.
We’ve had our issues as well so this is just one more thing to add
Your situation sounds very similar to ours with the late Oji (save for the getting up really early!) I'll just tackle that part up front: I don't care what time my dog wakes up. He is not to wake me up though. As long as I'm laying down with my eyes closed he knows to leave me completely alone. I teach them this from the start. Now, I don't recall if Pepper is house training still, and if maybe that is the reason you get up with her; but I'm a super hard no on my dog deciding when I, or the family, gets up.
So, if Pepper can hold it, I would not let her out that early. Maybe you can gradually move the first let-out time later. This would likely help matters with the neighbor as well.
The barking:
Again, I had a very similar issue. I agree that these are working/guarding dogs and some vocalization is good. Moreover, some barking for any dog is normal. I remember when I was going to purchase and pick up my first Doberman. The owners had sire and dam onsite, as they were their only two dogs and their family pets. It was nighttime and they let the Dobes out into their yard. Right away, they charged out there and started barking. They were not barking at anything in particular as far as I know. They were just saying Hellooo world! We are here!! This is our territory!! I think this is a Doberman thing. Those folks lived on a good amount of property, FYI.
That said, I do detest having to listen to neighbors' dogs bark.
I agree with you that a few short bursts of barking are okay. Now, this depends on how close you are to the neighbor's house, and at what time of the day or night it occurs.
People's feelings on what is excessive barking is very subjective. Many people don't apply any thought to the matter. They just feel annoyed and react emotionally. Our situation with Oji, which I may have talked about in this thread, is that we live close to neighbors. The houses are about 15 feet or so apart! I never just let Oji out in the backyard and sort of left him unattended. I would be in that back part of the house and ready to respond if he barked. I couldn't even go the the bathroom and take a quick pee with him out in the yard because I needed to be ready to get him to stop barking.
That said, if he went after a squirrel, I would of course let him vocalize for that short burst. If he saw someone walking on our side of the street, I'd let him vocalize. Unfortunately, he was a major major barker at other dogs.
So, his barking bursts (which were always aggressive sounding, as that was basically his one type of bark) were brief – I'd say between 10 seconds to 25 seconds. One day I did choose to take my toddler out on her tricycle for one loop of our rather short street. I knew Oji would bark the whole time nonstop. He had separation anxiety and he just barked the whole time we left him. He just did. We only wound up making 1/2 a loop of the street before I decided to come back and put an end to the barking. Well, our nextdoor neighbor met us in front of his house an rudely told me to get our dog to stop barking. In fairness, Oji was barking right next to the man's house wall, as it runs alongside our driveway. I think also that his kid was just starting to do online schooling due to Covid lockdown and the barking was right next to that wall.
Another tine, maybe a couple years later, Oji had burst into barking at something as we were out on the back patio having dinner. The guy walks over to the fence and as I am securing Oji he is standing there glaring at me and says "It's getting old." I'm like "WHAT?" "You're crazy! It's not excessive!" He then said he was just going to call the cops. I'm like yeah, try that. (I knew the cops would not even respond)
So, relations were strained. A week or so later, I chose to be the bigger man and as I saw the man in his driveway unloading something, I said I needed to talk to him. I said I shouldn't have said what I said when I called him crazy. I said I did want to know what his complaints were though. He said my dog's barking just sounded aggressive. Um okay. ? He also had a concern that his elderly female dog (who in reality gave just as good as she got in the brief fence-fighting barking exchanges) they were concerned that it would give her a heart attack or something.
So anyway, I just tightened up my already stringent routine with Oji and eventually he passed away and that particular problem, went away.
Now we have another dog who is large and has a very big deep bark, but hopefully doesn't sound as "aggressive". I control him equally as tightly.
I think I've done that maybe twice since I got her 4.5 years ago.
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