Help with dog complaint Scotland

Hello. I have a problem with my dog barking and I would really appreciate some advice. We bought a house in June and my dog has had a very hard time adapting. We have always lived either in houses with no neighbours or in flats, so the noise from cars has affected her a lot.

My problem is that we live in a newly built area where lorries and vans keep using our allocated parking space. On top of that, our own parking space is not directly in front of our windows but further away, so there are cars coming and going all day long. It obviously took us some time to figure out what was happening, and now my dog stays at home with a brown noise machine. I’ve recorded her, and she is doing much better.

However, I’m worried because before we started using the noise machine, our neighbour complained about us to the developer. That was when we discovered that there are Deeds or Conditions saying that it is forbidden to have animals that cause a nuisance. The issue is that this neighbour has targeted us, and although my dog no longer barks like before, the other day she accidentally got upstairs, had access to a window, and barked for several hours without us realising. Obviously, this person doesn’t understand that sometimes incidents happen. It wasn’t during unsociable hours — it was between 12 and 8, and it wasn’t non-stop; she would bark, stop, start again, stop again, and so on. I understand it was annoying, but I also feel that this person is making our life impossible.

The problem is that the developer’s solicitor threatened us and basically told us to be grateful that we admitted we were trying to train our dog and that we should keep quiet because we had a lot to lose. Obviously, we want to train the dog, but money is also an issue right now, so we don’t know what options we have or whether we really have as much to lose as the neighbours’ solicitor claims.

We wanted to ask for advice on what we can do and what rights we have, especially because these “dog conditions” in the deeds were never explained to us until after the incident. We had already signed the contract for the house, and coincidentally the solicitor recommended to us by the developer never mentioned these conditions.

In addition to all this, we have the problem that the neighbour keeps making our life miserable — even standing outside with other people, telling them how “bad” my dog is right in front of my house. And he has a dog that barks exactly the same; he just happens to live on a corner plot, so his dog simply doesn’t hear as many cars as mine does, because cars constantly pass in front of my door.