Originally Posted by
SCSwitchback
I'll give you my experience and maybe you can learn something from my 15 years of dealing with a dipshit neighbor. I bought land where my house now sits in 2008 from a distant cousin and this land has been in family since the devil was a little boy. Said dipshit was given 1.5 acres from his dad directly across the dirt road from me around the same time. He and I are very distantly related....probably like 8th cousins, so all of this dirt has been in our family forever. However, he was born and raised in downtown Columbia. Upon being gifted his 1.5 acres he decided it would be cool and quaint to bring his wife and move out to the country. He quickly found that living in the country is great until its time to do country shit. He built his house within 35' of a dirt road, across which sits a 40 acre field (part of which I bought) that has been worked for the better part of 200 years. Complaints from him started the first time I crunk a tractor to bush hog and escalated from there. He really got butt hurt when the dove shoots rolled around. Cops were called multiple times every year. At one point, he told me he'd have my field shut down which I took as a threat. I figured he'd be out there dumping corn/wheat at night (I hadn't built my house there yet) so I responded to him that I'd have a game warden there at daylight the next morning (day before opening day) and if one piece of bait was found in my field. Ofcourse he sees me follow through the next morning and decides to come join us and play the victim to the game warden, which he did not buy. At one point I told the game warden to either remove the trespasser from my property or that I was. Eventually, all of this escalated to him strategically placing security cameras all over his postage stamp lot in a way that you literally cannot be on my property without coincidentally being in the background of his videos. I've caught him numerous times videotaping my kids in the yard playing, my wife cutting grass, etc to the point that I had to stage events and belly crawl through corn/sunflowers so that I could catch him videoing my kids with my phone camera. Basically I had to video him videoing us which made me feel stupid. The important part here is that all of this (and much more.....y'all would love to see the texts/voicemails/etc I've saved over the years because I know this stuff will come to a head one day) is that this was during and after YEARS of me trying to "do the right thing." I invited him and his son to shoot for 4-5 years in a row, never shot in the mornings, would give him a weeks heads up before we were shooting, not crank a tractor in the field until after 9:00 (he actually asked me to stop plowing at 8:30 on a Wednesday one time because "people are trying to sleep") or after 7;30 in the evening (because "his daughter goes to be early"), cut his grass for him numerous times when his mower was broke (while he bitched that my 5 year old was riding his bike on his property watching me cut his grass), etc, etc, etc. Essentially, I went above and beyond 1000 times what I would have ever thought I would do to keep peace with a neighbor.
During the time I've lived there, I've had two other neighbors complain about me shooting doves. Both times, after a discussion with them and an explanation as to what we were doing, they both apologized and I haven't heard a word from them since. My advice to you would be to extend that common courtesy exactly 1 time.....let them know a few days beforehand that you're shooting. If they respond correctly and reasonably, your problem is likely solved. If they don't respond correctly, you will likely have a long term problem that you'll just drag out for years if you keep trying to keep the peace. Regardless, I would go ahead and talk to a gamewarden about it and get in front of that potential problem, just in case they were to try to bait your field etc.
One more thing....you'll have every badass you know telling you I'd do this and I'd do that. No they wouldn't. When you have a neighbor like I have, or just dealing with people like that in general, I've determined that there are really only two ways to deal with them and stop the problem. I also determined that both of those ways likely wind up with me going to jail. So for the past two years I've simply ignored him. He tries to call me, I don't answer. I don't respond to his texts or him trying to flag me down going down the road. I have blocked from my mind that he even exists in my day to day world. If he wants to call the cops/gw on me for something, I'm not doing anything illegal anyway.
Hopefully you can extend a little extra courtesy and your problem will go away. But if not, don't get into chasing your tail trying to appease them because the more you concede, the more they'll want.
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