VIDEO: Adopted Puppy Turned out to Be a Wolf Dog

They saved a helpless puppy by adopting it, but they were in for a surprise!

The cute little furball grew up to be a wolf dog!

That didn’t make his owner love it any less, of course!

According to Wikipedia, intra-hybridization between dogs and other subspecies of gray wolves are the most common wolfdogs since dogs and gray wolves are considered the same species, are genetically very close, and have shared vast portions of their ranges for millennia.

Such hybridization in the wild have been detected in many populations scattered throughout Europe and North America, usually occurring in areas where wolf populations have declined from human impacts and persecutions. At the same time, hybrids are also often bred in captivity for various purposes.

Inter-hybridization of dogs and two other North American wolf species have also occurred historically in the wild, although it is often difficult for biologists to discriminate the dog genes in the eastern timber and red wolves from the gray wolf genes also present in these wolf species due to their historical overlaps with North American gray wolves as well as with coyotes.

At the same time, because many isolated populations of the three wolf species in North America have also mixed with coyotes in the wild, it has been speculated by some biologists that some of the coywolf hybrids in the northeastern third of the continent may also have both coydogs and wolfdogs in their gene pool.

Hybrids between dogs and Ethiopian wolves discovered in the Ethiopian Highlands likely originated from past interactions between free-roaming feral dogs and Ethiopian wolves living in isolated areas.

The term “wolfdog” is preferred by most of the animals’ proponents and breeders because the domestic dog was taxonomically recategorized in 1993 as a subspecies of Canis lupus. The American Veterinary Medical Association and the United States Department of Agriculture refer to the animals as wolf–dog hybrids.

Recognized wolfdog breeds by FCI are the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog and the Saarloos Wolfdog.

One of the issues that many researchers and wolfdog communities are faced with is identifying wolfdogs from pure dogs and any of the wolf species mixed into the hybrid. The most common method used by various wolfdog communities is phenotyping, a method that involves observing the animal’s physical features.

This method is often favoured for many in determining the degree of wolf and northern spitz-type dog that is in a hybrid. However, a lot of criticisms have been made by opponents within some communities who tend to point out that phenotyping cannot always determine the wolf-contents accurately.

Another challenge involves determining exactly the domestic breeds and wolf subspecies involved in the admixture due to the fact that dogs are known to come in various breeds while gray wolves in turn come in various subspecies with many different regional ecotypes hence have different physical features depending on the subspecies used in the breeding.

Although wolves are often mixed with spitz types such as Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, and German Shepherds, hybrids between wolves to non-Spitz type dogs such as Poodles, Pitbulls, and Great Pyrenees also exist, the latter hybrids often having less lupine features.