[moderator note]
You’re in the GQ forum. Let’s tone back the moron talk, especially since there are people participating in the thread who own (or have owned) wolf hybrids.
[/moderator note]
And now, with my moderator hat off…
To answer jhankin1’s OP directly, yes they are possible, yes they exist, and they aren’t even uncommon. People have been breeding wolves with dogs ever since there was such a thing as a domesticated dog.
Wolf crosses tend to be strong, and if raised properly as a pup they are wonderful family dogs. They understand pack hierarchy and since wolves engage in communal raising of pups, they are good with other pets and children as long as there’s a human in the household that knows how to be the alpha.
What on Earth makes you think that wolf crosses are new breeds? How many sled dog teams have you seen that don’t have a wolf hybrid in them? Wolf/malamute crosses (like the one I used to have, by the way) are common in Alaska, as are wolf/husky crosses. They have a clear use and there’s nothing new about it.
Certain, eh? Care to cite?
Since it only takes one counter-example to blow off a claim of certainty, my wolf hybrid never challenged me for dominance. He was perfectly happy with me as the alpha male, and extremely gentle with my family, including the kids and cats.
There are some wonderful wolf/dog hybrids out there. They’re called domestic dogs. Clearly the more wolf they are the more wolf-like they will be, and breeding dogs with wolves isn’t likely to result in less wolf-like offspring.
While it may be possible for a wolf or dog to actual break wire of sufficiently low strength with it’s teeth, they aren’t stupid animals and they wouldn’t try to break wire through a wire fence by using their teeth.
Wolf mixes are not just big dogs. They do not act like big dogs. there is no comparison between a first generation wolf cross and a pit bull or a German shepherd. Wolves are wild animals.
Everyone saying wolf crosses make good pets-- this is GQ. Put up or shut up. I’ve provided multiple cites from several respected organizations (and that was only scratching the surface; I can get many more cites) that say, unequivocally, wolf crosses are not suitable as pets. Anecdotes are not data.
Hey, look, I owned 20 tigers and they all slept on my bed every night and cuddled with infants and toddlers and put fallen baby birds back in their nests. Tigers are wonderful pets for a family! I don’t care how many cites you bring, tigers are good pets and I know because I had 20!
Also, living in Alaska and having a sled dog team is the same as having a pet in my living room. That’s why lots of people keep sled dogs as pets. It really suits their nature. :rolleyes:
I guess my cites don’t count, but my 20 tigers were a lot better than your wolf cross. I mean, did your wolfdog save injured baby birds??? No.
Felis, not Panthera - oddities like ligers don’t really count as fully inter-fertile, especially as some aren’t ( fertile, that is ) :).
ETA: And two species of jackals can’t make it work with other Canis as well due to a loss of chromosomes - they have 74, while the rest have 78.
A favorite pastime during the Iditarod start was to watch tourists walk up to a mobile kennel and try to pet the dogs that had their heads stuck out of the kennel holes. nomnom
Their is not an absolute answer to the argument.
Anyone who has had a different result in this type of thing can not have a ‘cite’ because no one has ever tried to see if their are exception.
Some here are using absolute words on a subjects that due to it’s nature, can not ever be proven beyond a doubt.
Due to my personal experience, I feel that saying this thing should never be done because ‘the experts say’ is not going to happen. If I have been successful, more than once, I may not be able to prove it but that does not mean the nay sayers are correct & my opinion or experience is not permissible, or that I am lesser for knowing that in some/many cases the experts with absolute opinions are not always right.
I’m on mobile until Monday so no cite now. But the cite I provided up thread shows a regulatory authority taking action based upon the summary conclusion of significant danger. Anecdotes like yours are not sufficient to overcome actual data. Semantic quibbles (“certainty”) do little to advance the readers’ knowledge. If you want me to retract the “certain” and substitute “almost certain”, I’ll accept the modification. But that does nothing to change the significance of my assertion.
Where are you getting this information from? I would imagine a wild hybrid to be more cautious, timid of humans, more independent, and to be perhaps capable of exploding into violence more easily when stressed… but I don’t know about this ‘one day they will try to challenge you for the pack leadership and threaten your physical well being.’ That sounds like an outdated understanding of wolf pack dynamics, in which it was assumed struggles for dominance took on a much greater importance.
The offspring may be infertile, but the “inter-fertile” applies to the parents.
Are you certain? As you know, many species with different chromosome counts are inter-fertile; horses and donkeys being the most common.
It’s great to have so many posters who are wise to the ways of wolves and the results of cross breeding.
If I had a choice of walking into an area with a wolf or walking into an area with a wolf-dog hybred, I would choose the wolf. Generally, they try to avoid human beings. The hybred should not be trusted, even when “trained.” She or he has many of the strengths of the wolf, but do not avoid people. Therein lies the danger. They can and do turn on people. They may be as cozy as a cashmere blanket, but they are never fully reliable despite any anecdotal information to the contrary.
I cannot speak about dogs that are twice removed from the breeding with a wolf. A malamute is a dog. Sled dogs are dogs. They are not exact hybreds. Neither of their parents are wolves.
There are people here that know more about wolves and hybreds than I do. But I was once a wolf docent at a wildlife park. And one thing that I was taught to caution visitors about was cross-breeding dogs with wolves.
And, of course, all dogs are decendents of wolves. They are just not all bred with wolves.
This is an interesting comparison chart:
I believe it was Ray Coppinger who remarked that the biggest reason wolves make lousy and dangerous pets was their innate and ineradicable fear of new things (neophobia). This is a survival trait in wild animals which has been to a large degree bred out of dogs. This enables dogs to meet new people and new dogs, travel, go to the vet, etc. without trauma or violence.
Also note that in this chart jaw pressure of a wolf is almost twice that of a similar sized dog.
Here is a link to a mention of wolves chewing through chain link fence.
I know this thread is about wolf-dog hybrids, but it seems likely that such a hybrid would have traits of both parents. So it is important to understand the qualities of wolves, which are, in fact, fairly well-studied.
Anecdotally, an experienced trainer once told me that many so-called wolf hybrids are just ordinary dogs that look rather like wolves. There’s a lady I know who has a Siberian Husky puppy who is a dead ringer for a gray coyote. If she told people the dog was half wolf it would be very believable.
[reluctant nod]I suppose[/reluctant nod]. I typically think of “interfertile” as meaning capable of producing reproductively viable offspring. But I suppose I could be being a bit narrow-minded in my definition ( or y’know, inaccurate, heaven forbid 
).
Same definitional issue as above, possibly. Nobody has ever produced a black-backed jackal/dog hybrid that am aware of and you’d think there would have been examples considering ancient human penetration of their habitat. One can apparently find evidence of such with the much more closely related ( to wolves and dogs ) golden jackals. But it may be they just don’t produce fertile offspring and thus the genes don’t show in sampled populations.
IMO, you are correct. I would not personally count species that produce sterile hybrids as being “fully interfertile.” I think the offspring themselves must be fertile for the species to be considered truly interfertile.
Differing chromosome counts are a common reason for hybrid sterility; however, there are cases in which hybrids between species with different chromosome counts may be fertile.
Actually, I didn’t notice the “fully” in front of “inter-fertile”, so I guess I can get on board with that. But note that I never used that term myself. I just said they were inter-fertile, which they are. That is, they can produce viable offspring.
What about gently carrying a baby in his mouth? From a burning building? While being shot at by drones? That counts, right?
The only reason for my anecdote was to address CannyDan’s use of the word “certain.” It is not “certain” by any stretch of the imagination. Your cites are fine. But, like many other things in life, your mileage may vary. Mine certainly did.
Precisely.
There is no such breed as “sled dog.” There are sled dogs that are 100% malamute (yep, that’s a dog). There are sled dogs that are Siberian husky. There are also a whole lot that are mutts. Some of those mutts had a wolf as a dam or sire. Some had it two generations back or ten generations back. Again, you’re trying to take a grey issue and make it black or white.
Yes.
Type “timbershepherd” into your favorite search engine. “Timbershepherds have been developed by crossbreeding high quality German Shepherds with the North American Grey Timber Wolf.”
Dogs and wolves are a lot closer than humans and monkeys. They are also closer than these other species that can interbreed: horses and donkeys, donkeys and zebras, lions and tigers.
In my city, it is legal to keep as a pet a dog that is 85% wolf, and I know an auto-body shop that has such a critter on guard duty. Big, fluffy, and loveable, but unmistakeably tough and threatening, and never ever barks.
That’s it? Just a semantic nitpick? I’ve already agreed that my use of “certain” is imprecise if a single contrary case can be shown. I’ll even agree that there is a continuum, ranging from hybrid animals that are behaviorally quite dog-like to others that are virtually indistinguishable from purebred wolves. But I still maintain that the hefty part of the bell curve will be animals that are skittish of change (including change of handler), and highly likely (although not 100% certain) to challenge the authority of their handler.
miss elizabeth in Post 7 offers several cites that specifically address this issue, including this from the fourth cite in her list:
I believe this and the other cites given support my original argument
where I’ve inserted the word “virtually” in recognition of the lack of 100% certainty.
Here are real stories of wolf and wolf hybrids. Nine gauge wire keeps them enclosed (they don’t chew through it), and there are biographies of the wolves regarding their behavior. They are there because they could not, for various reasons, be kept as a pet, and the regular animal shelters could not take them (because they are so different from dogs):