In the 1961 Disney film 101 Dalmatians, dogs across England relay a message at night using a chain of barks — the Twilight Bark.

The seed for this project came from a walk with my wife one evening in spring 2026. We heard neighborhood dogs barking as we passed, and she laughed that they were probably alerting every dog in the area about two strangers cutting through their territory. The idea took hold: what if, like the Twilight Bark, there existed a real relay network across America — dogs passing information from county to county, coast to coast?

This is a personal data engineering project built to answer that question. Using real Census data on dog-owning households and county geography, it finds the most viable bark relay route between any two addresses in the lower 48 — favoring rural counties where sound travels farther and dogs are plentiful.

Enter an origin and destination above to send your bark across the country.