The reasons Romanians keep dogs so widely seem inexplicable at first glance. It can rarely be out of love for animals, as many Romanian dog owners frequently mistreat their "Caini" (dogs). Keeping dogs chained up is commonplace in rural areas. A dog deemed superfluous is often heartlessly abandoned. This is evidenced by the miserable strays that trudge through their pitiful existence, circling garbage containers with their tails tucked between their legs, constantly on guard against a thrown stone or worse.

The toughest and most resourceful among them, having learned from their mistakes, manage to avoid car traffic (you might see veterans limping across zebra crossings), evade the dogcatcher, and even reproduce – which exacerbates the problem. This leads to the formation of veritable gangs: three to five former best friends of the person who abandoned them band together in small packs, each with their own role to ensure their collective survival.

The small, stubby one is sent ahead – he squeezes through many gaps in the fence, assesses the situation, and sometimes even digs his way through. He's the scout and always finds something to eat. The larger ones stay in the background but are always ready to jump in and devour his prey.

Sometimes the whole moribund gang roams past the front gardens together, past every caged dog ("Cățeluș"), as if for fun. The chained dogs then go berserk, barking wildly and climbing the fences until they are almost strangled. The vagrants don't care.

Raggy, filthy, matted, and infested with ticks they are, that much is true; one is lame, another is missing an eye. Romanian has many derogatory words for them: "Javră," "Dulău," "Potaie," "Corcitura"—the sheer number of names speaks for itself. And yet: the starving mixed-breed dogs stroll past the kennels, thin but with a provocative freedom, as if mocking the domestic dogs that chew their dry food every day.

Do the reluctant guerrillas perhaps join in the chorus in the evenings, which often spreads from chain to chain after sunset; in this canine call-and-response song, which a dog starts somewhere, which the neighboring dog picks up, passes on to the next mutt, until finally, after minutes, the wildfire dies down with a last curly squawk – only to flare up again when the bear roars by, perhaps even when wolf howls rise from the forest and compel a related response?

Ah, they are probably too exhausted, the ragged ones without safe shelter; breathlessly happy to be lying somewhere protected in a bush for this one night, far away from any doghouse from which their housed companions can bark well, again and again.

A dog that barks is doing its duty. This is certainly true in rural Romania, where all sorts of things can happen around the house. This innate guarding instinct is probably the reason why many locals acquire dogs, not as cuddly companions, but as cheap alarm systems. Unfortunately, some local dog owners—not the shepherds, whose sheepdogs obey their masters' commands perfectly at the slightest flicker of an eyebrow—are incapable of training their pets, only of traumatizing them. The result is neurotic barking machines that erupt in hysteria even without any provocation.

Even in the secluded, mostly quiet small village, this sometimes gives rise to fantasies of killing dogs.

The so-called "summer Saxon" is a climate eccentricity that occurs only in Transylvania, completely independent of global warming. The summer Saxon grew up here as a year-round resident, but then preferred to leave his homeland, for which he had good reasons – back when, in the bitterly cold Romanian winter, one sometimes had to stand in knee-deep snow for hours for a liter of milk, possibly without success. Or when the Securitate had already taken away one's uncle and aunt at dawn, and one had to wonder if it would be one's turn at midday.

Since Romania joined the EU, the summer Saxon has been happy to return – at least temporarily. He appears with the arrival of spring. As soon as the growing season begins, he busily starts to awaken his summer residence – perhaps newly purchased or built, or possibly, though rarely, returned to his heirs after a long legal battle following the expropriation of the previous generation – his summer cottage or house, from its winter slumber; to scrub it, spruce it up, tend the garden, and revive old memories.

Then he notices: all around him are Romanians, a group he never considered himself to be, even though his long-since surrendered old passport indicated otherwise. Now Romania is almost entirely full of Romanians, and the summer Saxon has to deal with that. Next door.

The Popescu family recently moved in; they just built a house on the adjacent property. We would have liked to buy that piece of land ourselves, just to prevent something like this from happening. But we didn't have the money, not even the well-off Saxons of the summer.

Now the Popescus are their neighbors. There's nothing inherently wrong with that – well, the construction noise dragged on for a long time; finding tradespeople who work quickly and reliably in Romania is a challenge, as anyone who's experienced knows. They prefer to earn better money elsewhere in the EU – that's freedom of movement for you.

The Popescus' inauguration ceremony was also quite lavish, stretching, as is typical in the region, over three days. Popular music blared, and sleep was out of the question. But one could turn a blind eye, even if not completely.

The neighborly relationship remained untroubled for a while. Until the Popescus got a dog. And then apparently another one.

“The Popescus have a new dog, I think,” says the Saxon woman who has returned for the summer holidays, while she thoroughly applies sunscreen to herself on the rose-crowned terrace.

“Ah,” says her husband, born far from Sibiu, but with a proper Saxon accent from many stays in Transylvania. “Is that other incessant barker finally dead? It was about time. Did someone perhaps poison him?” The husband lies exhausted in the second deck chair; he has spent all day battling weeds in the garden.

“You get three guesses,” she says, rolling each R as she always does when she returns to her native language. “There’s a second dog next door now.”

He'll make his presence known right away. No one knows why. It was the same with the other mutt. Nobody walks past either property, no stray dogs are making their rounds; even the garbage truck, the arch-enemy of Popescu's dog number one, who wheezes his lungs out twice a week whenever a bin is emptied, isn't there today.

The barking continues, now in two-part harmony.

"The new one's more of an old bass, I'd say. Whereas number one emits more of a castrato squeal," the Saxon woman's husband analyzes the sound performance, plucking leftover weeds from his fingernails. "Does glyphosate work on dogs too? You could sprinkle it on a sausage and push it through a fence. Or buy a shotgun. Is it really as easy to do that here as it is in West Virginia?"

Both people remain silent. Both dogs do not.

"Well," says the man from Saxony, "I'm going to put on my headphones. Pink Floyd, 'Animals', Track 2: 'Dogs'. Sounds better. Great song, by the way, haven't heard it in a long time."

When he takes off his headphones after a good fifteen minutes, his wife has fled into the house and plugged herself in with earplugs. Next door, dog number one is beside himself: his owners have returned home from work and are being greeted joyfully; the loud enthusiasm seems endless.

Oh, what whining, squeaking, and howling! Bass, on the other hand, remains quiet. As it later turns out, he's only there for a few days as a visiting dog and has little reason to welcome his foster parents as enthusiastically as his local counterpart. The latter has only a small, towel-width, securely fenced refuge in the garden, which he now has to share with the hefty Bass. This confinement became necessary after the young, agile dog had dug up and wrecked the entire Popescu garden, driven by sheer energy, which few people seem to satisfy with a walk or playtime.

Since the dog isn't allowed to proudly carry a ball back to the thrower at home, nor even fetch the tiniest twig, the clever animal found an alternative way to relieve itself some time ago. During their extended absence, it dug its way under the fragile fence of the neighboring Sommersachsen property.

The man from Saxony gazed absently at the garden shoes on the terrace, which showed clear signs of chewing and had only recently been unearthed after a lengthy search in the garden. He sighed.

He actually likes dogs, maybe even this one, if only it had turned out better. He knows: with more attention and training, the little guy could amount to something. But how?

A week later, the solution is becoming apparent. Things have noticeably quieted down next door. The unpredictable guest bass is now back in his own home, annoying the neighbors. And there's so little noise from the castrato that the woman from Saxony and her husband are starting to wonder if he was perhaps euthanized, because he was apparently getting on his own owners' nerves too.

But they were wrong: The little guy is as lively as ever and probably happier now, too. Another neighbor, who owns an aging dog, took pity on him. He decided the dog needed some company now and then to keep him active. So he offered the Popescus the opportunity to regularly take their little rascal into the exercise area he had set up in his spacious garden.

So now one dog helps another. They can't count on much help from people here.