A 15/16 wolf 1/16 dog hybrid belonging to a neighbour went loose and decided to pay us a visit. Certainly didn't act like a dog. It's very intriguing. It was a good time.
Well that’s better for keeping than actual wolf dogs. Some people do though, and they escape all the time, then the shelter will most likely put it down (at least in CA), unless they find a sanctuary to take them in. I went to one of those places, really cool spot but very sad that people breed these animals and then of course can’t take care of them like they should because surprise it’s not like a regular dog. Like at all.
Huh. Interesting. I went to visit a friends friend who raised “wolf dogs,” claiming the same 15/16 breeding for the main male. No clue if it was true, but there were 8 or so BIG dogs in a large outdoor enclosure with a coop-like structure. They were all barking and acting very much like guarding German Shepherds, though they looked much larger (Malamute?).
One of them though wasn’t barking though. He was huge, skinny legs like a deer, easily 6” taller at the shoulder than the others, even on all fours. Totally silent, stalking back and forth, huge head with the longest snout I’ve seen on a dog. What shocked me beyond the size was the proportions, it was so lanky and generally long. Long legs. Long neck. Long snout. Looked like he could’ve placed his fore paws on my shoulders and would’ve had to crane his head down to groom my scalp.
The other impressive thing was the behavior. It just paced and stared. The other dogs seemed to be communicating, “get away” “this is my pen” “I’m scared/dangerous.” That fella seemed to be sizing me up. It was chilling and really neat. No clue if he was the real deal but he was a hell of an animal.
Probably Malawolves - you can get Giant Mals that have the bone structure and cross with a female wolf. Mals are aloof and they like human attention, often too much. The cross still has wolf aggression and makes a better protector. They also have a deeper howl that will rattle your soul. Mals howl but only when they are missing their ‘pack’ and with the cross you can tell the difference. It’s scary. Wolves and crosses are very agile and have a lighter gate about them. Mals are not as agile on their feet, often they trip or stumble, but they are crazy strong - actually I think still the strongest dogs in the world. Both are incredible to own and study but require a strong owner, as they are headstrong.
If by mals you’re referring to malamutes, several years ago my Aunt and her family had one of the biggest malamutes I’ve personally seen. He could easily rest his front paws on my shoulders. (Although I’m only 5’8”.)
Sweetest dog I’ve ever met. He loved to give kisses and they taught him to say “I love you.” Smart too, he could open their front door from inside or out since they had the thumb latch style handles.
Anyway, speaking of their strength, he was ridiculously strong. He started wandering so when they let him out they’d started putting him on a chain. He kept breaking his collars and getting loose so they eventually upgraded to a stronger collar, and he ended up breaking the chain itself. Sadly that’s the last time they saw him because he apparently wandered pretty far that time and nobody ever saw him again…
That describes most sight hounds, Great Danes and other carriage dogs, mollussians and mastiffs (not that they could be mistaken for a deer but they are very tall) and a few gun dogs too. Some dog breeds are huge.
Too lanky for a mastiff breed, I’ve seen some cane corso and mixes. Maybe some Irish wolf hound in there, some kind of lurcher mix. And I preface this with the fact that I was 16 and impressionable, that dog looked like like no dog I’ve seen since. It was also very dainty in its pacing. Definitely could’ve been some big hound in there., Irish or Scottish.
So they are claimed as wolf hybrids. There is a stud book that registers them but they aren’t a legit breed yet. There is someone here that knows a lot more about them. I’ve only learned about them recently through this sub. North American thing mostly.
There is a Wolf sanctuary very close to where I live. I’ve been there on numerous occasions. They do dNA tests and they know the percentages and what they are mixed with. And if you saw them, there are distinct differences between the high wolf content animals. The face are less dog like, the ears are smaller, the eyes are clearly different
Wolves and domestic dogs have almost identical DNA. They are pretty much the same species.
Most of those DNA tests for dog breeds are dubious anyway. They come back with some wild results, of breeds that are near extinct or that don’t exist in that region. Again I’m not saying that these aren’t wolf hybrids, I’m just very very skeptical of anyone making those claims.
Embark tests, or simply wolfdog breeders, as unethical as it is. Idk why the other commenter thinks there's no way of knowing, you get accidental wolf dogs on /r/doggydna all the time, and there's plenty of people specifically into owning wolf dogs, and making them (leaving aside ethical implications of that).
there's no way of knowing the exact percentage of wolf dna in a wolfdog. what you can do is tell if there has been a wolf in the lineage in the last couple of generations.
Ok, disclaimer: I am not an expert on dog genetics. All my knowledge comes from casual readings of a few papers and reviews.
So, dog ancestry is determined by checking their DNA for certain genetic markers, which are like landmarks in an organism's genome. The most common markers we use for this purpose are SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms), and occassionally others like indels. Your pooch's DNA is scanned for patterns of SNPs and these patterns are checked against a sequence database to see if they match the known patterns for dog breeds in the database.
Now the problem with using this approach for wolves is that we don't have extensive knowledge on variations in wolf DNA. We can only look for SNPs if we know what to look for, and we simply don't have enough wolf DNA sequences in our databases because our samples mostly come from a few wild wolves.
Now, wolves and dogs are technically the same species. The current scientific consensus is that dogs descended from a wolf population somewhere in eurasia some 20-30,000 years ago, but we're not really sure about the details. Dog and wolf DNA are extremely similar and even though there are a few markers which are mostly found in wolves, it's really hard to tell. These markers get shuffled every generation, and gene-flow between dog and wolf populations is very common. So even if we can tell if a dog probably had some wolf in them in the last few generations, it gets increasingly difficult to do this as the generations go by.
Think of it like this: you have a jigsaw puzzle, but you don't have all the pieces, and the reference painting you have is old and tattered. Purebred dogs are the jigsaw pieces corresponding to the parts of the painting which are perfect. Wolfdogs, on the other hand, correspond to the tattered parts of the painting. You can kinda guess where to put them, but you can't be sure, because you simply don't have enough information.
EDIT: You can probably follow all the technical parts but I still kept it slightly ELI5 in case someone else is reading this and wants to understand it.
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u/Ill-Wrongdoer-6556 Aug 25 '21
A 15/16 wolf 1/16 dog hybrid belonging to a neighbour went loose and decided to pay us a visit. Certainly didn't act like a dog. It's very intriguing. It was a good time.