I have a friend who is in the dark as to whether or not it is possilbe to get a mix of a Malamute and Irish Wolfhound. She has a way to get at male and female of both, and is wondering what the perfect equation is to get a dog with the “size and height of the Wolfhound, with more of the look of the Malamute.” I know absolutely nothing about dogs and how to breed them, so if anyone else has any insightful ideas, that would be great.
Adrian
PS If there is another dog besides a Wolfhound that would be good to breed the Malamute with to get a large, Malamutish dog, that would work also.
I’ve always wondered myself about such issues- can a male chihuahua and a female great dane have offspring? What if artifically inseminated to avoid logistical problems?
Does your friend want such a dog just because it would look cool? This is not a good reason to breed dogs. Please remind her of the thousands of dogs euthanized every week in shelters.
Yes, they can breed. Yes, chihuahuas and Great Danes can breed, especially if you get the chi a stepstool.
No, I will not give advice to someone who doesn’t even know that mixed-breed dogs are possible advice on how to breed her dog. That’s just a disaster waiting to happen.
All domestic dogs are the same species, Canis Familiaris, so yes, they can,but it is not advisabel that just because they can, thet they should. It’s pretty irresponsible to just breed dogs if you have never done it before and are unsure of the outcome. So she wants something with “size and height of the Wolfhound, with more of the look of the Malamute.” Well, there’s no guarentee that’s what she will get. In fact, odds are she won’t get anything like that. it takes generations of very careful and selective breeding by experienced professionals to achive proper mixes.
Just an example of how this can be a very bad idea even within the same breed, if you don’t know what you’re doing: misguided Australian Sheperd breeders routinely try to cross “merles” (the ones with the really pretty patchwork coats) with one another in order to produce more merles (which fetch more $$ than the bi- or tri-color aussies). Recessive genes + recessive genes = bad idea. Many of the puppies of such unions are blind, deaf, both, or worse, and often completely white, which has earned them the nickname “lethal whites,” because they are often put to death early on. My dog, Esther, is one such aussie, who I was lucky enough to be able to rescue. She’s deaf, but she doesn’t know anything’s wrong with her. As happy as I am to have her, it continues to be a problem among certain breeders. You want a mixed breed? Rescue a mutt! Leave the mixing to nature.
Regarding the Chihuahua/Great Dane question, it is not only possible, it has been done. I am a volunteer with an animal rescue organization, and once at a citywide dog adoption fair I met a Chihuahua/Great Dane mix. He looked much more like a Great Dane than like a Chihuahua, but his voice was a bit yappy and Chihuahua-ish, compared to the voice of a fullblooded Great Dane.
So how did a tiny male Chihuahua manage to inseminate a huge female Great Dane?
My theory is that someone must have put him up to it.
OTOH, if you try to breed a male Great Dane to a female Chihuahua, she’ll probably die. When I was a kid, we had a beagle/Chihuahua mix that nearly died having puppies fathered by a collie.
The world is full of mutts, like the puppies of this cross would be, and many of those mutts end up dead in pounds because nobody wanted them.
Malamutes and Huskies, in Australia at least, turn up in pounds ALL the time, because people buy cute, fluffy puppies and aren’t ready for the responsibility of a big, independent dog. I could pretty much guarantee that some puppies out of this kind litter would end up in the pound sooner or later.
It’s not as if there aren’t enough pound puppies out there already, the product of puppy mills and backyard breeders.
There’s a lot more to breeding dogs responsibly than just putting a male and a female together. There are any number of inherited diseases which good breeders spend years trying to breed out … just because you’re putting two different types of dog together doesn’t mean you’re not going to get inherited diseases.
Hip Dysplasia is one which comes to mind, it’s certainly a problem in Wolfhounds, but there are others.
Malamutes and IWs are very different types of dog in terms of temperament … bred for different purposes out of different dog types. This kind of breeding could result in something very big with a fairly unpleasant temperament. Is your friend prepared to handle big dogs with the independent temperament of Mals and the prey drive and “yeah, yeah, I’ll recall sometime in the next century” of a sight hound?
I don’t understand the ‘equation’ part; what other combination is there besides one Malamute and one Wolfhound? There is an equal likelyhood of getting a mutt with the size and height of a Malamute, and the look of a Wolfhound.
Average price for a C-section on a 20 pound dog at my practice is $1200.00. Because I am in a relatively economically depressed area, this means that dystocia often results in euthanasia. Just saying.
Why doesn’t she just get another big breed of dog.
Newfoundlands, Pyreneans, St Bernards, Bernese, something like that.
That’s got the size and height bit sorted, and those dogs have nice temperaments and are fluffy like Huskies (but aren’t necessarily the brightest bulbs in the box-our Pyrenean used to jump through windows).
She needs to think very carefully about the type of dog she want, the life expectancy of the various breeds, the amount of space and time she can give the animal, and how much she is willing to pay on food and vet bills. Then she needs to go and find a breed that suits, rather than create one herself.
My mother’s friends ended up with a litter of Yorkshire Terrier/English Setter pups shortly after they moved in together (hello? neuter your animals!) which she has described as “an abomination before nature”. From what I gather, there is a good reason that particular crossing has never been popular. Think small, ugly dishmops with the quick temper and yappyness of terriers and the boundless energy of setters.
Of course, sometimes peculiar crossings work out well. My mom’s dog is, as near as we can figure, a cross between a German shepherd and a beagle (pound puppy, and stray before that, so we don’t exactly have pedigree charts), and he’s a great dog: Smart, well-behaved, and very good-looking. Of course, it’s impossible to tell how much of his good characteristics are due to genetics, or if those traits would be consistent in other crossings of whatever-he-is. And he has a broad spectrum of food allergies to every single brand of commercial dog food, too.
The point being, that dog crossings are almost impossible to predict. Sometimes you get good results, sometimes you get bad, and sometimes you get a mix of them in the same dog.
