With my neighbour?

[Katinkka]

Just had a row with my neighbour who was asking my ex to fit an electric windchime in his garden. I said I didn't like the sound of it and asked if they will be noisy. He said 'yes. Really noisy'. I can't bear windchimes and have asked another neighbour previously to take some down as listening to them on a night was sending me into a homicidal rage.

He went off on one saying he can't stand my cats who crap in his garden. They're not all my cats round here! I feel like the bad guy but am I?

You can't really compare the inconvenience of cat poo to the constant noise of wind chimes. You can't control where cats poo, unless you keep them inside permanently. You can choose not to put something in your garden which is going to cause a noise issue for your neighbours though.

Don't get me wrong. I hate cat poo and get annoyed when they use my garden as a toilet, but I understand there's not much their owners can do about it.

YANBU OP. Your neighbour knows these wind chimes are going to be noisy and disturb people. He's being very inconsiderate.

Wind chimes are annoying - nearly everyone who doesn't own windchimes would agree.
But really, they aren't so annoying that you can't keep quiet for the sake of neighbourly relations, when your 12 cats regularly roam his garden
Even if only one cat shits in his garden every week - which lets face it, is bloodly hopeful, he's still clearing up 52 cat shits a year. Imagine if someone let a dog shit on your front garden every week - and gave you a choice of that continuing, or having windchimes next door....

You can choose to not have 12 cats that shit in other peoples gardens.

I would much rather hear annoying windchimes than have my neighbour's cat crap in my garden.

I don't know why everyone is so determined to connect the two issues, btw.

Ah ok. I repeat my earlier post:

"If you have 12 cats, even though you do all you can to keep their poo in your own garden and give your neighbours devices to help repel the cats from their gardens, your neighbours are still perfectly entitled to run a cannabis plantation, have weekly raves, hire out their roof as a rocket launch pad, blow fag smoke directly in your window while flicking you the finger and cover their windows with posters of Ed Milliband."

You can't compare the relationship between a cat and its owner to that between a wind chime and its owner. Does the wind chime come when it's called, entertain the neighbour by chasing other ornaments and sleeping in funny places? Cuddle up to the neighbour at night? Yes it would be terribly unfair to upset that by asking the neighbour to get rid of the wind chime. How would he live without it? Where would it go? Would he be able to find a new home for it where it could get the love it deserved, or would he have to scrap it?

Yabu.
I'd rather listen to ^12^ electric wind chimes furiously tinkling day and night than have to put up with 12 disgusting cats crapping in my garden.
Sorry.

" Its give and take too, isn't it? "

Exactly, op.

Claiming that shit in the garden is not as bad as noise is bizarre - clearly that's a matter of huge debate, as it's a totally subjective claim.

Maybe if you have children who you can't let out in the garden without having to clean up cat crap from your garden each time because someone had a ridiculous number of cats.

Maybe that might be more annoying than tinkling bells.

It certainly is to me. Give me a windchime any day of the week.

YABU. You can't dictate what someone else has in their garden. Plus - I had to give up my little veggie patch (after spending weeks carving it out from the lawn and several years working hard planting it, etc) because my former neighbour developed a serious cat habit and every time I turned the earth over, they'd rush out and poo. It got to the point we could only plant potatoes - no more salad or anything close to or just above the surface.

And the following year it got so bad we just had to give up.

I have two cats myself. Am not a cat hater. But the cat population got to critical, went nuclear and from that point finding the odd cat poo as I had when my neighbour had one cat and I had two, turned into finding a bit of soil in a sea of cat crap. On the scale of Bad Neighbour Things - I think having a cat can be worse than wind chimes.

BTW, I only have two cats because the cat 'lover' moved out leaving about a dozen feral cats and several house cats. We found one house cat crying behind her freezer in the out house. My sons brought it home as it was clearly a house pet and couldn't have survived.

Op, are you an animal hoarder?

Animal hoarders:

www.peta.org/issues/companion-animal-issues/companion-animals-factsheets/animal-hoarders-illness-crime/

www.peta.org/issues/companion-animal-issues/cruel-practices/hoarding/

www.adaa.org/living-with-anxiety/ask-and-learn/ask-expert/what-animal-hoarding-it-hoarding-lots-objects-can-peopl

www.psychiatrictimes.com/obsessive-compulsive-disorder/people-who-hoard-animals

I detest windchimes

I detest clearing up cat shit.

He's only got one windchime. You've got 12 cats.

I think the NDN wins

YABU

As for "what are you supposed to do when someone offers you another cat"? Try saying "no!" I think the MN wisdome is that that is a complete sentence

They are separate issues.

The wind chime can constitute an unacceptable noise. Anything can if it's loud enough, continuous enough, night or day.

Several people upthread have said she cannot dictate what he has in his garden. She didn't, she asked. If he puts them up, she can get the council to have them taken down.

I think that tactically she's at a disadvantage with the shitting cats, but legally I don't think the NDN can do anything about it.

I am still trying to get my head around how an electric wind chime might work. One thought does occur though, if it's electric can it be turned off. If so, perhaps a compromise can be reached where NDN turns off said chime between 6pm and 8am?

I do bloody love a wind chime though and this thread has inspired me to go an buy one at the weekend!

Yes, in our experience living next door to a cat hoarder - 1-3 cats the poo situation was not noticeable. 3-6 cats, started to be a PITA. 6 - ninety million cats... a nightmare. It really affected us as we were used to having fresh homegrown salad and financially I even kind of relied on being able to grow some of our food in the summer, as I had 5 kids to feed.

Weird thing was, the cat hoarding neighbour started with only one cat. She had that one cat, which was spayed, for years. No sign of cat hoarding. Then out of the blue, she got a second cat - a feral that turned up at her door that turned out to be pregnant - 5 kittens - very pretty markings. She kept all the kittens. Then she couldn't afford to have them neutered and... next thing we knew she was 'finding' and 'rescuing' cats (ie: stealing them in the street) and having to buy £50 bags of dried cat food to scatter in her garden for ferals.

All that happened in the space of about 4 or 5 years. The worst part of it? Her oldest cat was 18. That's the original, lone pet, single cat. When she moved out, she took the 3 prettiest cats. And dumped all the others. Last winter the 18 year old cat survived being fed by a nice neighbour who also put a cat flap in her outhouse for it to have some shelter. It's since been adopted by her son. She moved out and left a pet of nearly 20 years behind to fend for itself.

Yes, I want a wind chime now. I used to live in the US where everyone round our way had wind chimes. I missed them when we came back to England!

I was with you until you mentioned the 12 cats! we have two and the amount of poo they produce in the garden is unbelievable so 12! YABVU and have nice neighbours.

I don't know whether it's me going deaf, or too many noisy kids, or if I'm just an oblivious person, but I don't understand how wind chimes could bother anyone. Especially if you have double glazing. I doubt I'd hear, notice or care if I heard tinkling.

Is it a tinkler or a bonker, op? One of those big bamboo ones which bonk together in the wind.