After a while you really don't care one bit why the little nincompoops doing it, you just want to make the barking stop. Does that sound about right to you?

Trust me, I know what you're going through all too well. How would I know these feelings of frustration so very intimately?

Simple, my wife got a small Poodle and the little bugger absolutely would not stay quiet for 10 minutes. I swear, if an ant walked across the driveway he would carry on for 20 minutes strait. I was just about to lose my marbles with the little loudspeaker.

Now, please don't get me wrong, I love animals and I especially love dogs. I don't know about you, but personally I love well behaved dogs. So, not really wanting to incur my wife's wrath for suggesting Fido be relocated several States away just to make the barking stop, I started researching to find a solution or at least find some options and find them fast.

Here are a few of the things to stop a dog barking that I discovered: All the books said "You need to find out why the dog is barking in the first place". And I'm thinking yeah, right! I don't care why the little dim bulb's carrying on, just make him stop.

But I do have to agree with them, there is good barking and bad barking. So when training your dog it is important to teach your dog the difference between nuisance barking and good barking (like if it's 2 am and I'm snoring keep quiet, but if you see a guy with a mask and a sack, Bark!).

As it turns out (go figure) there is actually a lot of different kinds of barking, there's reactive, territorial, separation anxiety, fear and warning barking. And without becoming a Sigmund Freud for Animal Planet tm I truthfully couldn't tell you which was which.

I did find a few things that actually worked really well. What the heck it only took 5 hours of reading & video's and it cost twice as much as the dog did to buy all those books to find the one that worked.

But here's one of the tips that it said that worked really good. Every time the dog starts barking give it a piece of bacon with 1/2 a Prozac stuck into it (ok, ok, so that was MY solution and not precisely what the book said, but the dog loved it!) Just kidding!

No really, what the book actually said was give the dog an alternate outlet. And you know, because it might actually take me an hour and a half to watch the TV show 60 Minutes, I'm thinking, alternate outlet, WHAT! they want me to plug the little bugger into a wall socket?

Well, turns out I was wrong, they meant every time he starts yapping give him a toy and shake it around for a second so he gets the idea to play with it. This way when the dog starts feeling anxiety, nervousness or separation it will look for the toy and find comfort in it.

Yes, I found more tips, but I sure hope this one helps, it worked for me even better than the Prozac and at a buck a pill that stuff gets kinda spendy after a bit.