Paws for thought
Hello pup fans! Wow, am I dizzy from all that howling at the moon I did last weekend?! I sounded like I belonged on stage with Her High Howliness Lady Gaga herself.
Did you see the moooooooon? Erm, sorry, here I go again ...
Anyway, that big beautiful full moon was just magnetic - a giant roll of cheese in the sky that pulled my muzzle upwards and drew a howl right out of my throat. That's the wolf in me for ya eh, he he!
Okay, I confess: I was misleading you there a bit. We dogs don't really howl 'at the moon'. We just kinda howl, period. It's people who have forced this moon thing on us in their stories. I keep telling that to team YP, but they just look at me like I'm crazy or something. I blame their ignorance on the popularity of werewolves, myself.
So, good journo pup that I am, I decided to sniff out the truth behind the legend. Here's what I've found out. Canines - erm, that's like me and my family of wolves and coyotes and jackals - are very social animals. We like being around our homies. And we're hunters, so at night when we go hunting, we might roam far and wide. Okay, I know it's a bit hard to picture that in Mong Kok, but it's not my fault that Hong Kong has steak around every corner!
Anyhow, with all that roaming and hunting, we have to stay in touch with each other. Hence all the howling. We keep track of each other that way.
So, if you think you're clever with your built-in GPS on your smartphones, think again, my two-legged friends. We dogs were using our own GPS system long before you even lived in caves. We use it to communicate over long distances - sometimes up to 15 kilometres. We talk about all sorts of things: the weather, food, pup music ...
But the wolves, man, are they great howlers or what! They get together in groups called packs and do these little wolf concerts, with many of them howling at once. That sort of thing tends to freak you humans out, but it's music to our ears.
Dogs howl at night because we're naturally night creatures. Wolves own the night and we dogs like to rent it a bit if we can.
Long story short. People see dogs and wolves howling at night and think we point our snouts at the moon for a reason. But we don't give a hoot about the moon. It's all about the howl! By putting our noses up, we can really belt out the sound.
If you've ever watched Glee, no singer sings loudly by tucking their heads down. Their faces are always up, like ours, for the very same reason. So now that you know the secret, you might like to try out for American Idoooooolllllllllllllllllll.
