A family in Asheville, North Carolina says a tense neighborhood situation has gone from uncomfortable to flat-out scary. They’ve got a three-year-old Rottweiler mix named Groot that they describe as gentle and well-known around the neighborhood—even with kids coming over to play with him.
But in the original post, the dog’s owner explains that one neighbor is so afraid of Groot that she now walks past their house multiple times a day with a gun in her hand, openly threatening to shoot the dog if it ever gets loose. The part that really twists the knife is the fear that, under North Carolina law, a threat like that could actually be carried out legally in the right (or wrong) set of circumstances.
A dog behind an invisible fence, and a neighbor who doesn’t trust it
The owner says their front yard is set up with an invisible fence. Groot and three chihuahuas will sometimes run out into the yard when cars go by or when other dogs are walked down the road, but they’re staying within the boundary of the property—about 40 feet from the road.
That detail matters because an invisible fence doesn’t look like anything to a passerby. A person walking a dog sees a large dog moving fast toward the road and they don’t see a barrier, they just see a potential problem. Even if Groot stops every time, the neighbor’s fear isn’t based on a fence line she can verify.
The yelling incident kicked off the spiral
Things reportedly escalated a few months earlier when the neighbor walked by with her dog and started “yelling bloody murder” that Groot was going to kill her—while Groot wasn’t even outside. From there, the owner says she began threatening that if the dog ever got out of the invisible fence, she would use her husband’s gun. The husband, the poster adds, is a retired police officer…