AITA AND a bad dog owner?
I genuinely want to know. AITA and a bad dog owner? I've never owned a dog before and moved here because of my girlfriends childhood region and dream to live here. I'm from another state and have never heard of anyone asking for this or anyone doing anything like this.
My downstairs neighbor is complaining that I need to put down a tarp on my patio floor to remove dog hair falling through the cracks.
She claims, "The dog hair is killing her plants."
She hasn't used her patio much since I've lived here (since October). So i don't know if the dog hair is the issue gor her or if she's just never outside. Her patio is a storage pile, with junk lumped around leading me to believe that she's somewhat a horder.
The only time she's out there is to scream at her grandchildren about how or what they're playing with. Or to tell a local boy with a mental disability to leave her grandchildren alone and go play with children his own age.
I'm home, with the dog all day, 7 days a week. I take her out 5 times a day. I'm never gone more than 4 hrs and if I need to be, she gets taken to a sweet boarding school to play with other dogs for the day.
I've asked if downstairs can hang a tarp below my patio, but her son told me that this is my dog and my responsibility as the owner.
I'm definitely interested in relieving her problem, but a tarp would cause many issues. I live in the PNW, and it is humid and rains A LOT. A cheap, simple tarp would cause molds on the wood below and create water retention issues that even the rental manager has said is a bad idea. It would also make my patio mostly unusable for us.
I have a plan to put down a rugged mesh, but it's not inexpensive. I'm partially disabled and live on a fixed income- let alone the cost of living here. My dog is a support animal and keeps me alive and active. We live in a pet friendly building, so the neighbors dislike for dogs isn't just a me problem most of the tenants have dogs around us.
My dog is a purebred Husky, so she does have a lot of hair. It's part of the breed. My home has plenty of hair bunnies because of her. She claims that the dog is "left outside for extended periods of time," but my dog is very intelligent and tells me when she wants to go out or in. I brush her once a month for one to two hours each to try to control this for all of us.
One major piece to cover is that my dog is non-verbal. She's extremely well trained and even more naturally calm and shy just as herself. She's fully quiet and the "sweetest dog they ever met," according to my other dog owning neighbors.
More than that, I'm genuinely curious if this is widely considered a reasonable request? Do dog owners usually do this? I don't want to make problems for her, but the financial stress of trying to fix the issue in a functional way that doesn't harm the building or the use of the space is extremely stressful and has already hospitalized me overnight once freaking out about it.