April 29, 2021

“Who Let The Dogs Out” is a cover of the 1998 song “Doggie” (or “Dogie”) by Trinidadian Calypso/Soca/Junkanoo artist Anslem Douglas. Douglas himself admitted that the song has nothing to do with dogs and actually has a feminist theme. In an interview that was published on his website, he said:

“It’s a man-bashing song. I’ll tell you why. The lyric of the song says, ‘The party was nice, the party was pumpin’.’ When I said the word ‘party’ I was being metaphorical. It really means things were going great. The ‘Yippie-Yi-Yo,’ that’s everybody’s happy, right? ‘And everybody was having a ball.’ Life was going great. ‘Until the men start the name-callin’ / And then the girls respond to the call.’ So the men started calling the women ‘skank’ and ‘skettel,’ every dirty word you can think of. The men started the name-calling and then the girls respond to the call. And then a woman shouts out, ‘Who let the dogs out?’ And we start calling men dogs. It was really a man-bashing song.”