From an old post of mine:

[The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze] particularly reproaches dogs for barking, what he calls the very stupidest cry, the shame of the animal kingdom. He says he can better stand (although not for too long) the wolf howling at the moon than barking.

From a book (Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors ) I read a week or so ago:

Dogs have lost their working status in most modern societies. But they spread like wildfire in the prehistoric world. They could be trained to help hunt other animals. They made good bed warmers during cold Siberian nights. They would have been a self-transporting source of meat in case of emergency. But probably none of these is the reason that dogs spread so quickly from one end of Eurasia to another. In antithesis to the Sherlock Holmes tale that hinges on the dog that didn’t bark in the night, a crucial problem of dog origins is why they do. Wolves almost never bark. Barking was probably a character that was selected by the dog’s first domesticators. That suggests they weren’t much interested in using dogs for hunting, where a bark is no asset. But if the first use of dogs was in sentry duty, to warn of strangers, intruders, and attackers creeping in for a dawn raid, then a fierce and furious bark would have made a dog an invaluable defense system.

What the philosopher failed to see (and what would be apparent to any student of evolutionary anthropology) is that the shame of the animal kingdom is, in essence, human. Dogs bark because humans want them to bark. We selected the stupid dogs that bark and not the smart ones that don't. That shame, that stupidity, which might have been worthless in the wild, turned out to have great value in the niche of human sociality. Howling at the moon has no such value.