Michael P. Wright
Norman, Oklahoma

I have lived in the University of Oklahoma area since my college years in the late 1960s and early '70s. In 1980 I began to observe a strange development in some of the campus bars. Large TV screens were being installed, and bar owners were adopting the practice of turning on the TVs but without sound. Instead, they would play loud entertainment noise from their stereos. One could be watching a TV newscaster without hearing what he was saying, while from the stereo there would be ugly screeching amelodic noise with thumping bass and percussive effects in the foreground.

I turned 33 in that year, and my ideas about what music was all about had been formed at a time when melody was considered to be the essence of music rather than booming bass and frenetic percussive effects. The noise blasting from the stereos struck me as garbage and I found it irritating. It was also loud to the point of making me uncomfortable. At that time I had never seen any literature nor heard any expert opinion on the problem of noise-induced hearing loss, but I had an intuitive feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong and even unhealthy about this arrangement.

From my common sense perspective, it seemed stupid to have the TV on without the sound. What were we supposed to do? Read the newscaster's lips? At that time, I didn't quite understand what was happening. The way in which my understanding developed about this problem is described in my essay about Audio Stimulus Dependency Disorder.

Barking Dog Hell

I had enjoyed the conviviality of the campus bar scene in the 60s and 70s, but noise pollution became a big factor in ruining it for me. Thus, the first negative impact of the Age of Noise was upon my social life. Noise did not start to invade my residence until 1985, when I moved into a neighborhood which was saturated with barking dog nuisances.

I was living in a house on the south side of a street called Ferrell, which intersected Miller to the east. My east bedroom window was exposed to the back yards of the Miller Street homes. Every one of them had one or two dogs, and every night I had to suffer a barking session which seemed to last forever. Numerous dogs participated, and they would always begin their noise torture at that early time of the morning when we should normally be enjoying our deepest sleep. I suffered this hell for about three years. I would lie helplessly awake in bed, night after night, a complete prisoner of the dogs, who had decreed that I should not sleep until they tired of their barking. In the late 80s, hoping for relief, I moved to a place on Boyd Street three blocks west of the OU campus.

Barking Dogs in the Next Neighborhood Too

There was no relief in the second neighborhood. The woman next door to the east had five dogs in her back yard and they were all noise-makers. To the west was a woman with three little barking nuisances whom she continually neglected and kept confined to a small pen. One night, I had to hear the miserable beasts howling to high heaven as a thunderstorm beat down upon them. In the back yard next to her, and plainly audible from my house, was another nuisance barker.

While at this residence, I began to look to the city for relief, but there was little to be had. I inquired and learned that Norman has a well-written noise control ordinance, but like so many other places, enforcement efforts are weak. I also learned that animal control law allows residents to keep only two dogs without a kennel license. I reported both violators, but the city never required the woman to the west to comply.

The woman to the east, with five dogs, reduced the number to one. He was a large ugly threatening nuisance, and I suppose she kept him as a “watch dog.” The animal had no sense of where his turf was. He had a very loud bark, and he would start barking whenever he picked up a pedestrian’s scent on the sidewalk a half-block away. Since a good number of school children and OU students used these sidewalks, I suffered continual torment from this noise-maker. At the time I was applying for federal grants from the Small Business Innovation Research program and trying to write applications from a home office. The daytime noise interfered with my work and the night-time noise often kept me awake. I had descended into noise hell.

The house across the street from me on Boyd came to be occupied by a gang of cretins who liked to blast their stereo noise at such volumes that it invaded my bedroom when I was trying to sleep. I had a feeling I was in for trouble when they first moved in and displayed from their porch a white flag with a black circle surrounding the letter A. I am told this is the symbol of “anarchy” but sometimes is used by Satanists. I have serious doubts about whether any of these morons have ever heard of Kropotkin.

I called the police a few times to report the noise-makers across the street. Each time they responded, the noise would cease for that night only, but they would crank it up again the following night. I was once told by a Norman police officer that their policy is to issue a warning only, unless they are called back to the same violator’s house a second time on the same night. Thus in Norman a noise-maker can potentially get away with his crime every night of the year without suffering a citation.

Vandalism Follows Calls to Police

Late one night I heard something like a door slamming in my driveway, but there were no visitors. I assumed it was from the driveway next door and went back to sleep. I awakened the next morning and checked my radiator. Someone had poured oil into it. The only people in town who had a reason to retaliate against me with such criminal vandalism were the noise-makers across the street. Since I was directly in the path of their speakers, they assumed correctly that I had called the police. The sound I heard the night before was the criminals slamming the hood. In 1983, I had also been vandalized in another neighborhood under similar circumstances. Go here for that story.

Animal Trainer Says Neglect Is Why Dogs Are Barking Nuisances

When the barking dog problem first entered my life in 1985 I didn’t know what to think. I assumed, quite wrongly, that it was in the nature of dogs to bark and that little could be done about it. I had not read the noise control ordinance, which prohibits barking dog nuisances. Finally, after several years of this torment I contacted a professional dog trainer in Oklahoma City and asked her to write me an opinion in response to the question: why do dogs bark?

Her reply was two and a half pages, but could be summarized in one word: neglect. Dogs, she explained, have for centuries been domesticated by humans. They do not know how to survive in the wilderness any more, and know that they depend on their owners for livelihood. Most dogs are house dogs by nature, and attention from humans is assurance that they will be fed. When they are neglected and left alone in the yard, they experience what she called “separation anxiety” and bark to express it. The explanation makes perfect sense. In Norman people often treat their dogs as though they were little more than animated lawn ornaments.

Dogs also bark to express territoriality and to be protective of property. Still, this is no justification for barking nuisances. Watchdogs should be professionally trained so that they will only bark when there really are intruders.

Drowsiness and Fatigue

In 1991, after four years of submitting and resubmitting applications, I was awarded three federal grants under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. These were for health research, and one of my collaborators was a physician. By then I had suffered an enormous amount of sleep deprivation caused by barking dogs, and I was feeling daytime drowsiness, fatigue, and loss of energy.

I asked the good doctor if, in the interests of the project I was managing, he would write a letter to the Norman City Council and explain the health hazards of sleep deprivation. This was to be in support of my request for serious enforcement of the noise control ordinance. The doctor did not cooperate. He told me that he owned three dogs himself. Although he lived in another town, I had the sense that he did not want to break solidarity with other dog owners. Instead, he did the typical doctor thing: he gave me a drug. These were free samples of some sleeping pills he had been given by a pharmaceutical company. I read some literature about them and learned that they caused hallucinations. I never took them. There are no pharmaceutical solutions for the problem of noise pollution.

To Be Continued

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