(Written Feb-2000)

We Love Dogs! We don’t like irresponsible pet owners who do not care about their neighbors’ right to reasonable peace and quiet. When we moved here it was a pretty quiet neighborhood but slowly, people started moving in with barking dogs that seemed to bark continuously all day and night. At first we tried very politely asking the owners to control their animals. This did not work so we resorted to calling the police whenever a dog would bark continuously through the night. To make matters worse, our bedroom window is located about 6 feet from the fence so one of the dogs was barking right outside of our bedroom window. A really small dog with a yappy bark. We gave this method a few months but the police were really unable to do much about it and of course the neighbors retaliated.

Well, by profession, I am an audio engineer for a military band and I was using a CD with various test tones to analyze a sound system one day, when the idea hit me to use ultra-sonic sounds (inaudible to most humans) to solve my problem. Everyone knows about a dog’s ability to hear above what humans can and I had heard that dogs do not like loud irritating noises either. So I played some of these tones using our dog Sheba as a Guinea Pig.

When I played the first one, I heard nothing but Sheba ran out of the room. (Sorry Sheba) I knew I was on to something. So I continued with the experiment. I set up a speaker outside in my fenced yard one night, ran it to a power amp in my garage, then ran that to a portable CD player in my bedroom. When the dogs started barking that night, I played one of the ultra-sonic tones and the dogs stopped barking immediately. A few minutes later, one of them barked again, I played the tone, and he ran back inside his house never to be heard from again that night. After a few days of this, the dogs have pretty much stopped barking.

That’s when I thought that we can’t be the only people with this problem, and this is such a simple idea. So we decided to make this CD available to everyone who like us, were being driven crazy by annoying, barking dogs.