My perch here at Legal Blog Watch following hundreds of legal blogs and developments sometimes allows me to detect important trends early. In this edition of LBW Trend Watch, I reveal a new trend for you to be watching out for in your battles with your neighbors: using pets to insult your neighbors in a passive-aggressive manner.
I thought the story I noted here back in September about the woman who lived 50 feet away from her ex-husband's new girlfriend and fiendishly trained her cockatoo bird to call the new girlfriend a "f*cking whore" was a one-off, outlier type of situation. This week, however, I learned that the use of pets in neighborhood squabbles is a growth industry. Metro News reports that in a neighborhood in northern China, a woman named Hu Lin had an argument with her neighbor, Wang Sun, over a building extension to Wang's home. In retaliation, Wang says, Hu named her dog after him, and whenever Wang was within earshot she allegedly started to curse at the pet loudly. "[W]henever she saw me she would start swearing and insulting the dog using my name," Wang complained in court. "Everyone knew what she was up to."
So far, it appears that courts are not willing to tolerate the use of pets to deliver insults. The owner of the insult-hurling cockatoo was charged with violating the city's animal-noise ordinance, and an apparently unimpressed judge denied the owner's request to dismiss the case. And in China, the judge presiding over the Hu-Wang dispute found that Hu's actions had caused Wang mental anguish, and ordered her to pay a £500 fine and apologize to Wang.
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