A resident posted a public notice asking a neighbor to stop walking their dog past the house in the morning. The request was not based on noise from the walked dog, or on the walked dog doing anything at all. The request was based on a sequence of events that the morning walk is alleged to set in motion.
Per the notice: the neighbor walking their dog in the morning causes the resident’s dog to bark, which wakes the resident’s teenage son, who then becomes “in a bad mood and will not do his chores.”
The notice closed with a proposed alternative, walking the dog at dusk, when “the weather is cooler and my dog will not be able to see your dog,” followed by “Thank you for your attention to this matter neighbors.”
A few things worth sitting with here.
The notice asks the reader to follow a chain of causation across four households’ worth of consequence. A dog is walked. A second dog, seeing the first, barks. A teenager, hearing the second, wakes. The teenager, now awake, enters a bad mood. The bad mood prevents the completion of chores. At the far end of this chain, somewhere past the dog and the dog and the boy and the mood, sits a sink full of dishes that the resident has decided is the neighbor’s responsibility.
Each link is presented as load-bearing. Remove the morning walk, the logic goes, and the dishes get done. This is a remarkable amount of weight to hang on a stranger’s daily routine, and it requires the reader to accept that the teenager would otherwise be cheerful, and that the chores would otherwise be completed, and that the only variable in the entire system is whether a leashed dog passes a window at the wrong hour.
The proposed solution is where the notice achieves something close to art. The resident does not ask the neighbor to walk quietly, or to cross the street, or to choose a different route. The resident asks the neighbor to walk at dusk, specifically so that the resident’s own dog will be unable to see. The plan is not to address the barking. The plan is to wait for nightfall and disable the dog’s eyes.
This relocates the problem in a direction no one anticipated. The barking is a response to a visible stimulus, and rather than remove the stimulus or train the response, the notice proposes removing the dog’s capacity to perceive the world after a certain hour. It is, in fairness, a solution. It is also the kind of solution that arrives only after every reasonable solution has been considered and rejected for requiring effort inside one’s own home.
The teenager remains in a bad mood. The chores remain undone. The dog, come dusk, will see nothing, and the household will at last be at peace.