"Most of the dogs in Skyrim are domesticated, and serve as faithful companions to their Nord masters. They also look very similar to a Muppet Baby, or a fake, stuffed puppet from Sesame Street. When they bark at you, their face looks exactly like the head of a mentally handicapped stuffed puppet dog, with an amateur puppeteer hand in it, making it bark."

I think that's what the load screen should say.

Don't get me wrong. I am a dog lover, and own two myself in real life, but for goodness' sake, the dogs are so annoying, I now have high blood pressure.

These look and act nothing like the wolf-hounds they were modeled after.

Barbas would be the perfect follower for you.

They can be really annoying when trying to do crafting things in houses.

I think They do look like Irish wolf-hounds.

LOL, nope.

He has all of the above mentioned "qualities", along with Doc Lesko's voice from Fallout 3. No thanks!

Only until you look them in the face.

this irish wolfhound looks like the dogs ingame. http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/images15/IrishWolfhoundFrankBrendan.JPG

I never take dogs with me when adventuring. I just let lucia keep meeko.

Oh my God, you're right!

But do they really bark 60 times per minute?

I dont know. it would be funny though.

Dogs in Skyrim make me want to kill every last one of them in extremely painful and sadistic ways. Fortunately, not even my characters are really like that, but damn, they get on my nerves, this is why I've stopped using them entirely.

The only gripe I have against the dogs is the constant barking, so I modded my game so that they no longer bark; privilege of playing on pc, you know. Beside this, I don't care if their behaviour is realistic or not, all my character adopt Meeko. He is the best dog in the game (well, I've never used the huskies and other dogs added by Dawnguard).

I read someone say on another forum, that they used every random encounter dog as kills for Dark Brotherhood or something like that?

I just hope there are other options for pet adoptions in Hearthfire.

Agree completely and I'm not just a dog lover, I'm actually obsessed with dogs and studying their utilitarian applications through history. The dogs of skyrim are idiotic doofus pets, and the fact is such dogs didn't exist in medieval times or any rugged sort of culture anywhere around the world through history, barring tiny toy dogs. The medieval ancestors of the modern wolfhound (or debatably the original working dogs the modern wolfhound pays homage to) certainly would have been serious no-nonsense hunting dogs.

Relatives of mine have working boar hunting dogs, some of which incidentally are wolfhound crosses, they rarely bark and they don't look at you like a goofball pet, they're serious animals. Practically all dogs were like them in medieval times. They didn't have time for the silly pet dogs we keep today.

Lol no. In fact they very very rarely bark. They're members of the sighthound family which are some of the quietest dogs, and precisely because they're used as hunting dogs that hunt by sight with a relatively short chase, meaning a hunter needs to lead them up to prey, close enough to see it, before slipping them from a lead to run it down. A skyrim wolfhound couldn't be lead up close to any animal, they'd be heard from miles away.

When I first got Barbas as a companion I thought 'Great, I finally have a dog, it'll be just like having Dogmeat back!'. I was genuinely pleased, so much so that I decided that I wouldn't complete his quest so that I'd get to keep him for longer.

But then he started speaking...and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In the end I just facepalmed.

It didn't take long before he started barking incessantly, and blocking every doorway. It's as if he anticipated where I wanted to go, and moved there instead.

No, I do not look back on my time with Barbas fondly.