In two-party consent states, is it legal to record noisy dogs?
The intimacy neighbor altercation that sparked noise complaint questions about pets
I’d had it up to here with my loud upstairs neighbors and the sounds of furniture moving, bags slamming down, drawers banging open and closed between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., and loud sex noises that could only rival Trillville’s song “Some Cut.” I’d been a single woman who lived in a multi-unit before and fully understood that neither I nor my neighbors were nuns who only walked on their tippy toes.
However, after apartment living below a couple who always fought at 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. and jogged on a treadmill at 9 a.m., my patience for chaotic neighbors has worn thinner than thread. There is a middle ground though.
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For six straight years after leaving that apartment and purchasing my condo unit, I could prove it. I never heard my prior upstairs neighbor at all. Quietly living one’s life was clearly a possibility — even with the television blasting or a radio playing — and my long-gone neighbor (and a few others through college and apartment living) were valid examples.
But these two newer neighbors were something else entirely. On one particular day of mattress squeaking and bed dragging that I could hear from my kitchen, I marched past the bar counter, the dining room table, my living room, the hallway and took one giant leap onto my own bed to punch the ceiling wall.
“Knock if off or I’m calling the cops,” I shouted, then jumped off of my bed.
It had been more than 365 days of mattress squeaking and bed posts moving on laminate floors — and this couple somehow never considered the idea of rugs and music to drown out Tube Galore-style moaning. (If you know, you know.) I had turned into the “get off my grass” neighbor, but I simply didn’t care. I’d already tried having two face-to-face conversations with the tenant, and it didn’t work for more than a week. Same noise.
A few minutes later, I heard a knock at my front door. Without any help from me, that was my dog’s queue to immediately announce she lived here too and was fed up with running into her crate to get away from this same noisy couple. With my leg positioned to make sure she couldn’t run by me, my dog was still barking away. It was one thing to see one-half of the couple walking down the street and a whole other for the tenant’s boyfriend to knock on my door.
He scowled and said, “I can’t hear you” while motioning to my dog.
I raised an eyebrow, primarily because I wasn’t talking and was waiting to hear what he had to say.
Junee, still barking away, was behind me and had no intention of being quiet.
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“Did you say you were going to call the police?” he asked loudly.
I noticed his phone at an awkward angle in his hand, in the same manner I would use if I was completing an interview. I looked from his phone to his face.
I doubled down, complaining about nonstop noise in their rental and told him I had been trying not to complain to his landlord, another condo unit owner whose number I was not shy about using after I came home to a raining kitchen — and more than $1,000 in repairs that my insurance company (luckily) covered. I told him they needed to figure out how to do it quieter because I didn’t want to hear it.
When I said I was trying not to call his girlfriend’s landlord, he nonchalantly said, “Call him.” (Her boyfriend is not an official tenant nor is his name on the mailbox.) But then something odd happened. He jogged up the stairs without another word.
Twenty-four hours later, I got a spam email from a blocked address. It came from a condo board member I have never fully gotten along with for almost eight years, claiming he had “proof” that I was “bothering” the people upstairs. Apparently these two guys had been gossiping about me.
My first thought was, “The audacity of these two — after almost a year of me desperately trying to tolerate and ignore nonstop pacing and noise, they ran and tattled to the same person who walks into lobbies and rips tack boards off the wall when he’s not too busy leaving post-it notes complaining about people he’s recording on the basement lobby camera.”
Suddenly, the phone positioning of the tenant’s boyfriend came back to my mind.
He’d apparently been ballsy enough to record the two of us talking without telling me — in a two-party consent state where you cannot legally record a conversation without letting the other party know. As much digging into law books as I had to do for a pro se Small Claims case, I knew Casper put him up to it and thought that was dumb. I grabbed my own phone, called the tenant’s landlord first and spoke with my legal counsel second. It’s been much quieter ever since and promises were made to buy rugs to avoid this repeat situation.
Is it legal to record a noisy dog in a two-party consent state?
But that altercation also made me wonder how neighbors handle complaints when it’s a noisy dog instead of a noisy human. In my own dog’s case, she’d been a church mouse through 95% of the banging, dragging and moaning for over a year. She would occasionally growl and then take off running to one of two crates if the noise was prolonged. However, it was only when it arrived at my door that the tenant’s boyfriend finally heard how unhappy my own dog can really sound.
But what if the tables were turned and I was the loud neighbor? Would my upstairs neighbor be at risk of a felony (Section 5/14-2 is a Class 4 felony, or one to three years of imprisonment) for recording my dog — and possibly private conversations in my unit — without my knowledge and at my front door?