I read somewhere, no cites, many years ago about a company, maybe in VA., that had found the perfect mix to be 37.5% wolf and rest germ. shep. A little extra smarts,quickness but no wolfe nervousness, non-flighty. You could choose a pup that looked wolf-like or shp. like I think the name was Timbershepards tm or something like that again maybe 20 yrs ago
Perfect mix for what!?* I swear to god, there are a ton of dog breeds, one to fit any lifestyle, and millions of mutts put to sleep every year, and you still have numbskulls making useless new breeds like wolf crosses and malti-poos. Why in the world do people do this? If you need to be creative, be creative with something that isn’t alive.
*I’m not asking you, I know you’re just telling a story
That’s pretty much my sense. Konrad Lorenz proposed at one time that northern European dog breeds were descended from wolves, while those of central and southern Europe had been developed from jackals, but he later withdrew that idea.
miss elizabeth, my personal experience and my research as a consultant to a wildlife regulatory agency indicate that wolf - dog hybrids are much more likely to be extremely dangerous than any domestic breed of dog. We (the consultants) concluded that these hybrids should only be maintained by trained individuals and should not be considered ‘personal possession animals’ or ‘pets’. In fact, there is little or no justification for creating them in the first place. You have my compliments and my support.
Ahh, no, they can’t.
I doubt very much that any animal on Earth can chew through through cyclone fencing. Certainly none can do it with “comparative ease”, and I am damn sure that it is impossible for a wolf to do at no matter how much effort it exerts.
What wolves, and indeed any large animal, can and will do is tease apart the mesh of netting fence, creating a hole. But even a human can do that. In the process no wire is chewed through, and only very rarely is a single wire even broken.
Which is a self-filfilling prophecy.
It is precisely that reputation that leads to them being kept by people who want a dangerous dog breed. And a a result they are more likely to be conditioned to become dangerous, and as a result they are much more likely to be extremely dangerous.
Exactly the same was true of German Shepherds when I was a child despite Shepherds being one of the gentler and even tempered breeds of dog. And when I was a teenager exactly the same was true of Staffordshire Terriers, and they are generally considered one of the least human-agressive breeds on the planet.
Any animal that is desired by people who want a savage dog will develop a reputation as “much more likely to be extremely dangerous than any domestic breed of dog”. What is lacking is any sort of evidence that this is due to anything other than conditioning by dickheads who want savage dogs.
That depends entirely on the quality and gauge of the fencing material. “Cyclone fencing” can mean anything from plastic-coated flexible wire for home and gardens that even a poodle can chew through with relative ease, up to very tough galvanized metal so thick it is difficult for a human to cut through it with wire cutters.
We had two rottweilers who absolutely could ‘chew’ through the chain link fence my parents had at their house. I agree it was more of a case of getting a bite on the fence and then yanking it back and forth until the metal broke from friction and stretching more so than biting directly through the metal like scissors, but the end result was the same - a big hole in the fence the dogs could go in and out of after using nothing but their jaws and teeth to create it.
They replaced that fence with a stronger, lower gauge metal and it took them longer but they ‘chewed’ through it eventually too. They replaced that with an even tougher and even thicker fence and, as far as I know, they haven’t broken that one yet but they are also getting pretty old and might not be trying as hard as they used to.
The male of this pair is so strong he can pull me right off my feet when walking on a leash if something catches his attention and he decides he can’t hear me saying “Heel!!!” Applying that much pulling force to just about any chain link fence will eventually break the metal with enough persistence, especially if it already has a little play in it to allow easy bending back and forth.
Can you provide any evidence at all of any dog ever having chewed through such wire? Iron or iron-alloy wire of any gauge is very hard, and tooth enamel is very brittle, and the cutting edges on a dogs teeth are not so sharp that they can apply the pressure of even a cheap set of wire cutters.
So do you have any evidence at all of a dog having chewed through wire?
Which is exactly what I said, and something that any non-disabled human can do.
None that you would accept, but you probably also aren’t visualizing the same ‘wire’ fence that I am talking about. This is green plastic-coated wire no thicker than say, a guitar string, barely able to contain a tomato plant. I could chew through it.
I wasn’t disagreeing with your point, I was actually reinforcing it. Dogs do “chew” through fences but in my experience it is by flexing the metal back and forth until it breaks, not by biting directly through it.
Accepting that semantic difference in the meaning of the statement ‘chew through a fence’, one can interpret the quote to which you replied as “A wolf can cause a fence to break using friction and pulling force easier than the average dog” - without having to get into a nitpicky argument about the wording they chose )(although I don’t know if that is the case or not.)
My late dog chewed through this at 8 months old, and got hit by a car for her trouble (she lived another 14 years, ftr). Is cyclone fencing wire more robust than this? And yes, she definitely chewed through it, it didn’t break at the clasp.
Have you ever chewed through it? And if not, why do you believe that you could? Having spent a lot of time with a lot of animals, and spent a lot of time snariing, trapping and caging animals, I find it difficult to believe that a dog could chew through any wire thicker than a few microns. Metal is very hard and malleable. To cut it you need to apply a lot of force to a very small area. A dog’s teeth are not fine cutting points like a rodent’s, and even rodents find it near impossible to chew through even the finest “chicken wire” unless they have several hundred hours.
So I am just not buying that human or a dog can chew through *any *fencing wire. I’m sure that a dog could grab anchored wire and stretch it til it breaks, just as any human child could, but I do not believe that a wolf is anymore capable of chewing through it than a chihuahua or a child.
That will be true because the average dog is a large terrier/small gun dog, and wolves are considerably larger. It is equally true to say that a Standard Poodle or Labrador
can cause a fence to break using friction and pulling force easier than the average dog, by dent of being considerably larger.
So then your contribution to this thread is a meaningless debate over semantics rather than a discussion about wolves. IMO at least, that is all the post to which you replied was trying to say.
Wrong.
My contribution to this thread is to correct a widely propagated piece of ignorance about wolves: that they have the ability to chew through wire.
A wolf can *break *through a wire fence by bending the wire, but much more slowly and less efficiently than any adult human can do, and in a way which has nothing whatsoever to do with chewing ability or bite force.
I might also add that my contribution has corrected a piece of your own ignorance: that you have the ability to chew through wire. You do not have any such ability despite your claims.
I might take the time and effort required to prove it but the last time you challenged me for evidence about an animal behavior in GQ, a subject you claim you are a professional expert but were dead wrong, I provided it and you walked away from the discussion without so much as an “Ok, you’re right” after I went to all that time and trouble.
This subject isn’t important enough for me to take the same time and effort again. You might search youtube for “dog chews through wire” and the like if you really have difficulty believing it. Galvanized fence? No, I think they tear it apart rather than chew through it. Soft, flexible wire barely stronger than solder? Yes, they, and I can chew through it.
To the OP, yes dogs are sluts who will breed with coyotes or wolves it they have a chance.
I used to have a neighbor who had a wolf dog. That big boy didn’t need to chew through their 6 foot fence, he just jumped it and ran off to run and kill rabbits. His humans would chase him around in their truck, but he’d never come home until he was tired out.
He’d kill rabbits and once got into it with a feral peacock, but never touched cats. His owners didn’t know how to train him properly, but the cat he was raised with sure did.
Yeah whatever mate. Once again, no evidence for your claims, just repeated rounds of “It’s out there”, until everyone gets sick of it and leaves. Just as in that previous thread where we shot down your baseless nonsense and received the same response.
The fact that you’ve been asked for your evidence three times and been unable to provide any is all we need to know. Your claim is nonsense.
Much like readers could decide themselves if that’s the case after reading it, we will just have to leave it to them to decide if a human, dog or wolf can bite through soldering wire.
If you are making the moronic claim that they can’t, it is you who needs to prove it with evidence because it is as basically true as saying that we can chew through slightly al dente noodles or that scissors can cut through yarn. It would be very hard to find a study that proves these things since nobody would be stupid enough to ever question them.
In the mean time I don’t want to derail this thread further, and apologize to the OP for letting myself get pulled in this deep into a meaningless side show arguing the blatantly obvious about something that was already an irrelevant nitpick not really even worthy of comment to begin with.
Back when I worked in the printing trade, we had a customer with a beloved wolf/dog hybrid named Fremont. I think he was 25% wolf. A very old dog with not much time left on this mortal coil, he would accompany his owner to our facility.
One day, our Salvadoran cleaning lady and her preschool daughter wandered into the shop and Fremont loped over to them. Not realizing what a sweetheart this terrifying-looking creature actually was, they freaked out. I ran over, put my arm around the dog, and said to the child “El perro es muy sympatico! Se llama Fremont. Can you say ‘Fremont’?” She replied “Fwemont” and shook hands with the hulking dog. A few weeks later, he died.
Unless the owner was fibbing about the dog’s lineage, they exist and I met one.
No, it is a contradiction of the commonly made assertion that a wolf – dog hybrid is ‘just like a big dog’. It isn’t.
Wolves, and wolf hybrids, have a much stronger innate impulse to challenge for pack dominance, or at least to climb up the pack hierarchy, than domestic dogs. While these animals can be trained, and in many circumstances will follow the direction of you as pack leader, you can be certain that one day you will be challenged. If you are trained, and prepared, you will probably be able to maintain your position at the top of the pecking order. If you are untrained and/or unprepared, the results to your physical well being can be devastating. And the psychological results equally so. You may never again be able to control that animal, or even desire to try.
This is what makes wolf hybrids so dangerous, not any innate aggression nor some stupid human’s efforts at conditioning to make them more dangerous. And this is why the State of Florida regulates wolves (and demonstrated wolf hybrids) as Class II Wildlife (cite).
All members of the geuns Canis are inter-fertile. As are all members of the genus Panthera.
We have a thread about this subject quite frequently, where it is pointed out that there are many, many different species that are inter-fertile with each other even if they rarely, if ever, actually interbreed in the wild. Of course, if they did start to interbreed “too much” in the wild, they usually would be considered the same species.
Wait, wait. I was reading this exchange with amusement, but you’ve gone from cyclone fence to soldering wire in one page and the one has nothing to do with the other. Cyclone fence was actually a brand name for chain link fence, but has become an interchangeable generic for same. I’ve installed a lot of the stuff in my life, and no animal or person is going to cut through chain link fence (which is normally manufactured in either 9 or 11 gauge galvanized steel) with their teeth. Now, you may be thinking of something like chicken wire, which is more in the 19-22 gauge range, but even there, it’s unlikely that teeth will defeat wire other than to pull it apart. Solder, on the other hand, is fairly malleable and with some effort can be broken by bending it rapidly back and forth.