These first three pictures my neighbor took about 13:30 this afternoon out his window into the back yard. He came right over to show us. I have been seeing something at night for just a second when I flip on the outside lights. It is about 24 inches at the shoulder, young, gawky but quick and very shy. Seems to be all legs like a colt. (forearm bone seems to be extra long) It does move well, just out of proportion.
Is it a American Thylacine? Half coyote/dog? Half wolf/dog? A combination of all four? ( kinky ) Looks like it could end up pretty big…
So, any ideas on what this could be? Ever seen anything like it?
I’d go with probably coydog, too. The tail does seem ‘brushier’ than is common for most domestic breeds. But at 24 inches, as an obviously adolescent animal, I think it’s too large to be pure coyote.
OTOH, given the popularity of wolf-hybrids with some [del]idiots[/del] ahem people, and the difficulties that many would-be owners have keeping them once they reach 3 years of age, I don’t think it’s possible to rule out a dog-wolf hybrid, either. I just think it’s less likely than a coydog.
Looks exactly like a few of the coyotes that lived around my former residence. Most were lighter colored but every so often you would see a darker version just like the one pictured.
I’ve seen gray foxes once or twice in the wild, the immediate impression is of an animal with very SHORT legs. Really, the things run like they are almost hobbled.
The OPs description and pictures indicate an animal with proportionately very long legs. My guess would be coyote.
Each year I judge a coyote hunt/chili cook off sponsored by a local bar. There is a big cash prize for the largest coyote, and the bar is concerned about somebody shooting a big dog and demanding the prize.
My differentiating a dog from a coyote is based on dental formula, so I cannot help with this case.
BTW, the event has been put on annually now for 5 years. The hunters typically return from the woods pretty liquored up. So far there been zero fatalities (hunters or coyotes). My payment is free booze and all the chili I care to consume.
Obviously, when you domesticate canis lupis, you end up with canis familiaris, or man’s best friend the dog.
I saw on TV that when the then USSR started breeding foxes for tameness they started getting similar variations of color and ear droop in the foxes that we see in dogs. Is there any reason to believe that we couldn’t domesticate foxes and/or coyotes over a few hundred or thousand years the way we did dogs? Or perhaps I should say we are doing with urban coyotes right now, since they now theorize that initial domestication of dogs was by virtue of their scavenging garbage and only eventually being ‘adopted’ by humans. Of course the latter way is much slower than intentional domestication.
But my point is, is there any inherent difference in coyotes from wolves that would make them harder to domesticate than wolves? Or did wolves just happen to get there first, know a good thing when they saw it, and make sure that they weren’t going to get any competition from any coyotes?
Coyotes only appear in the Western Hemisphere, ie the Americas, while the Gray wolf appeared all over the Nothern Hemisphere, both in North America and Eurasia, where there was a significantly larger population of humans.
The reason coyotes didn’t get ‘adopted’ by humans is that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. By the tie humans came to the Americas, the dog was already part of our family.
To the best of my understanding, (and I could be wrong) all the canis species are interfertile, i.e., they’re all dogs. So if you live in North America, it’s possible that the smiling guy with floppy ears licking at your fingers has some coyote ancestry.
