i think he is tho, i mean he did get raped by that dog girl, i think maitora even drew it on a twitter or a drawing on his site, and the way he drew, does look like hes suppose to be a male dog, guess he just transforms into a girl, also i think it was implied no one except ricotta could understand his barks until they reached fox village, translation software has a lot of issues hooking on to current wolf rpg which for some reason only translates a few words/skips some, though even before translations were kinda weird since maitora likes making a lot of jokes that dont translate well in english