Next doors kids are really starting to torment our 3 year old border collie and she runs up and down the garden looking for holes in the fence so she can bark at him he yell out their top window at her and makes her bark even more, then the other day we took her out for a walk and she saw the same kid and went mad barking and growling im worried that his tormentations are going to cause her to become aggressive. We have been to the parents door and their response was kids will be kids and its only a dog, im stuck for ideas on what to do we block all her spy holes and tell her quiet when she barks but it just keeps getting worse.

bloody kids??? can you move?
if she was mine id calmley go & get her if they started & quietly lead her indoors,
by shouting you are just joining in

I wish we could move but we really want to stay close to my nan and are paying off a wonderful thing called a morgage. The same little brats have been bombing the house with snowballs these past few days, some people really cant keep their kids under control. Were not sure but we think they are housing assosiation it would be so useful to find out as a phone call to them might help. We keep outselves to ourselves and this is what we get for it

Poor you!  Can you keep the dog indoors most of the time?  Just let her out when you're with her.  The inconvenience of doing that for a while might be beneficial in the long run.
My neighbours kid did the same thing with my dogs - leaned out their landing window to wind them up.  I stopped my dogs barking up at him and his parents when they were in the garden.  Shortly afterwards they got their car broken into overnight on their drive and complained to me that they thought the dogs should have barked :rolleyes:  He wasn't a bad kid - just a bored one!

the problem is as a collie shes soon going to get into a barking habit,which i wouldnt have with mine,they bark when someone comes to the door but shut up when i tell them. try to supervise her for a while,take some treats or a toy out there & have a game to take her mind off the childern ,then take her in.
id be worried because if the carry on tormenting her she may try to get out to get away Or to get to them,
i suspect shes now finding the barking highly rewarding so take her out of the situation

It must be awful for you :(  I really do sympathise with you as we had this problem many years ago. Luckily we were only privately renting, but the house next door was a housing association place and was home to 3 very unruly kids with a single mum that didn't have a clue on how to control them. (I am not casting aspersions on any single parents in HA places) :)

We had 2 GSDs at the time and the kids used to poke them with sticks through the back gate and throw fireworks into the garden The dogs used to go mad at them! (they were lovely dogs who usually loved kids before this) We spoke to the mother many times and she just said "I can't watch them 27/7 and kids will be kids" in other words, she wasn't interested. We spoke to the Housing Association people and they sent them 3 written warnings, we also spoke to the police about them as we were scared that one day the dogs would bite. And although sympathetic to our situation, the police did say that if the dogs bit any one of them then we would be liable to prosecution and our lovely dogs risked being pts!!!

All we could do was keep the dogs away from the garden, which we did, for their own safety and our sanity and then the day we moved, because we couldn't stand it any longer,one of the other neighbours told us that there had been an eviction order served on this family. Its called sods law.

I know that you shouldn't have to keep your dog out of the garden and it makes me really angry that it always seems to be the innocent that suffer in disputes like this, but it really is the only option. Even if you could change the behaviour of the kids, your dog has already been "conditioned" against them. Sorry but I have been there and I really can't think of anything else that you could do.

Good Luck. :)

You could try a water pistol, obviously to squirt at the dog because of the barking but if you aren't a good aim and hit the kids instead it might also train them.
If it doesn't deter them progress to a hose pipe.

we had the same problem but it was the man next door not the kids. We ended up putting an aboistop collar on our dog to stop the barking and it worked as soon as the dog stopped barking the man got fed up enoying him!!!

It is usually possible to stop a dog barking but it needs a training programme etc and someone on hand to see what is going on :) My dog is of a guarding breed but i trained her to run indoors to me whateve she was doing when i said "in". She will do this even if a cat is in the garden or the next door neighbour is barking at her :D I did it solely with rewards but it's important the dog doesnt get the chance to practice the barking etc between times, or the training will come to nowt.

Lindsay
X

Thsi sort of thing is so annoying.  These kids could cause big behaviour problems in your poor collie.  However, as you are going to get nowhere by complaining how about inviting the kids over and getting them interacting in a nice way with the dog, that the dog enjoys.

If the dog starts to fear these kids he could turn aggressive to them and it could generalise onto all kids.

You could also try doing a bit of training in the garden when the kids are about.  It would need to be before the dog has got too emotional, if he is too emotional he will not be able to think straight or concentrate.

Wendy

I think Wendy's is a great idea. Have a tea party or something and invite them round, preferably with a second person like another neighbour, and encourage a friendship between the dog and the kids. A similar thing happened to me, with kids running up and down the alley next to our house because it sent the dogs mad. I targetted the older children who the others followed, and made a huge thing about the dogs wanting to say hello, and 'oh, they like you, he's usually shy around children'. Now they go mad if kids run down the alley because it's upsetting those sweet dogs, then they have an argument about which is their favourite!

I know it's really annoying, but it is worth a try. Another tip for handling the kids: try to think of them as undisciplined puppies who had a crap breeder! Might help stop the urges to blow them up!!!

Good luck, Claire