We have two dogs. They love to play and wrestle together, so if they get going in the house we usually kick them outside so as to save our posessions. They are only outside when one of us is home, but we don't always go out with them.
There is an alley behind our house that people use for walking through the neighborhood. Our fence backs up to the alley. Jacko has always been a little barky when people go through there, though we've learned that if people say hi to him he stops barking at them permanently. Ever after when they come through he just wags his tail. He does the barking whether we are outside or not.
Recently some kids have started coming through the alley and when J starts barking they scream at him and kick/hit the fence. To my knowledge it's only happened twice. The first time I didn't even realize what was going on until I heard our neighbor yell at them for antagonizing the dog. The second time, today, I went outside as soon as I heard the kids. By the time I was out there, the same neighbor had already flown out of his own backyard and was chewin' on the kids good about how rude and disrespectful it was for them to kick and hit the fence, that our dogs are nice and if they would be polite the dog wouldn't bark.
Our fence is a privacy fence so it's difficult for us to see through it to talk to people, and there's just one big gate (like for an RV or truck) that we'd have to unlock and open to get to the kids should it happen again. Of course, we can't do that because then the dogs will get out. Is there anything you can think of that we can do, short of yelling at the kids to knock it off when that happens?