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.”
