Does your Podengo sing? And what sort of songs does it sing?

I  played this clip on my computer screen.  Maria our Podengo Medio was fascinated, listening with her ears right forwards and looking with her eyes boring in to the screen.
Here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZOLca_ocRo  if you would like to hear it for yourself.  Maria has never seen a Basenji. But she knew that the curious sound that she heard was made by a dog. I am also sure that she recognized a distant relative, since she takes no notice of many dog calls that she hears on television with Cesar Milan.

The Basenji is an african hunting dog, that looks very like a Podengo Pequeno. The sound that it makes is called a yodel. It is not the same as the noise that Maria makes when she sings. Nor is is like the howl of the New Guinea Singing Dog.

The Basenji is known from ancient Egypt, but is now found in countries to the south such as Sudan and Congo,  It is used primarily to hunt game, by driving the prey into nets.

It is probably a descendant of the pale-footed wolf of the Middle East like the Podengo. But whilst the Podengo was carried by Roman and Phoenician ships to the Iberian peninsula, the Basenji moved southwards and south-westwards by overland routes and up the Nile and down the Congo, with itinerant peoples.

The Basenji trots very neatly and gallops in a double-suspension gait like the Podengo. It also breeds just once a year.  Colors are red-brown or black and white.  It has the erect ears, curly tail and white socks of the Podengo. Have a look for yourself.

Maria, our Portuguese Podengo Medio from the Cape Verde islands. is the spitting image of the New Guinea Singing Dog filmed in San Diego zoo.  The only discernible difference between the two dogs is that Maria has a pink nose, whilst the zoo dog has a black nose.   Every other part of her face and neck and upper body, which is all that I can see in the clip, is identical. I am convinced that the New Guinea Singing Dog is a Podengo Medio, brought to the island, a former Portuguese colony, just to the north of Australia, by Portuguese seafarers.

We do now know from DNA evidence taken from live dogs and from skeletons up to 2,000 years old, that the Dingo which lives wild in nearby Australia, was introduced by seafarers from India. long before the arrival of Captain Cook and the British. The Indian Pariah dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_pariah_dog is found all over India, from Nepal and the Himalayas to the Andaman islands.  It must have been taken to the islands by ship and also to Australia by an Indian people who inter-married with the Australian aborigines. It is clearly related to the Podengo Medio and likewise to the pale-footed wolf of the Middle East and India (canis lupus pallipes). This has been confirmed by DNA. Singing Dogs, Dingoes and Pariahs were probably all once domesticated. A few still are. Like Podengos, they breed annually, and do inter-breed with other types of dog introduced, more recently, by Europeans.  
 
The zoo keepers of San Diego, believe the dog in the clip is singing for a mate. That was certainly not the case of Brando and his pack of Labradengos, who were baying at the moon in apparent admiration. If they were human, we would say that it was a religious ritual. Dingoes have also been recorded howling, but observers cannot explain why.  They very rarely bark.

Maria does not bark, when she is hunting prey. But when a squirrel escapes up a tree, she yelps vociferously with a high-pitched sound, as she tears at the tree-bark in frustration.  Her singing is quite different. It is a series of soft sounds, in the human soprano range. She once did this to a soprano singing Wagner on the radio, to whom she listened with ears forward, like the HMV dog, for over an hour.   She tried to join in with single notes in the soprano range. She is not searching for a mate, for she is entirely  monogamous and guards her husband Brando against other females.

My view is that she sings when she is relaxed and happy. She will sometimes do this for a visitor, if there is somebody - usually a woman- that she really likes. The sounds are strange and quite unlike barking. Sometimes they start as a hum and then develop into individual single notes. The podengo in the Cape Verdes who yodels, does this when he sees us.  We think that it is a friendly greeting.

Do your Podengos sing?

Brando and two of his pack of Labradengos were heard baying at the moon one night in the Cape Verde islands. The three dogs sang in unison and raised their snouts towards the moon and opened their throats. The performance lasted a few minutes.  We thought very little about it at the time.  Brando was living free in our compound and though we fed him, he and his pack would knock over dumpsters/dustbins to get at the food, thrown away in them. The two dogs, in his pack, were later poisoned by the savages who run the condo and we never had a repeat performance. But when he is very happy after we have returned from a prolonged absence he will utter little sounds of happiness, which are not barks.,

When Maria arrived this Christmas, a perfect Podengo Medio, form Portuguese ancestors, who we think may be Brando`s sister from a later litter, she had a big vocal range. She emits a high-pitched shriek when she wants attention or is bored.  She can also make a wooh-wooh-wooh sound which is modulated and very different from a bark. When we mimic this, she comes running and licks us all over, so we surmise that this is some kind of distress call.  Another Podengo who lives nearby in the Cape Verdes emits a sound best described as a yodel.  We are unsure of the significance of this.

I googled singing dogs and had a real shock. The You Tube pictures of a female New Guinea Singing Dog in San Diego zoo are identical to Maria, even down to the ruff of hair on both sides of her throat where up-growing and down-growing hair meet up behind her prominent ears. White socks, white tail tip and even the white `apron strings` behind her front legs, along her sides, are identical. The sound emitted by the captive New Guinea Singing Dog was exactly the sound made by Brando and his pack. Here is a link if you wish to hear it for yourself. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwxV1wbBrfU‎

Portuguese explorers were the first Europeans to discover Papua and Jorge de Menenzes` ships would certainly have carried podengos to keep down the rats. Did a couple escape? The New Guinea Singing Dog is very rare and very hard to meet as it inhabits a range above 7,000 ft in the central mountains of West Papua and Papua New Guinea.  A few have been trapped by expeditions and their DNA has been tested. This was found to be similar to the Australian dingo and the Palestine Canaan dog, probably the progenitor of the podengo.  So could Brando have been singing the same song as the New Guinea Singing Dog?