Look, Every breed has to start somewhere. It almost seems to me like you believe "reputable" breeders are like another species of being or ordained by God. They are just people and they all got their start with two dogs. They are just as capable of testing and researching the line of the purebreds they choose to cross as any other breeder. I am not sure where you get the info that would allow you to paint them all with such a broad brush......

My comment on "labs" is referring to the fact that labs are a popular breed and shelters and rescues toss that label out there to draw people in riding on their love and familiarity with labs with no actual tests to prove the dogs have any lab in them and are quite often pit-mixes but lab is less controversial and won't be prohibited on insurance policies, and land on the list of banned dogs in homeowners associations and apartment complexes.

No but I believe reputable breeders make sure they breed to make as healthy pups as possible and all the mixed breeders I have come across don't do that. That must be your local shelters and rescues like I said here it's mostly Pitts and they try not to fib or lie about breeds.

When people don't do the right thing with other species - it's the pits!!

I think the dogs prefer to be called hybrids, lol. Actually, they don't care, as long as you love em.


The common guy thing, is the misnomer that you're taking away the dog's sex life by neutering them. But neutering/castration only affects primates.
Other animals actually have a "bone."


Years ago my sister had a dog neutered. She came home to the boy & girl going at it again & thought the surgery went wrong.

No bad breeders refer to them as designer dogs. Hybrids would be two different species mixed together.

I was just joking. (A play on politically correct names.)


Maybe I should get a wolf-dog.

I'm hopping that's a joke too......

Fortunately, yes. Though I am not against them. (Just not looking for one.)


If I had money & resources; I actually would love to experiment & see if wolves can be domesticated (& become more doglike) the same way foxes can. I'm betting on yes, cause environment usually wins out.

It actually is illegal in many places and just not safe or a good idea.

Actually most states allow it, but some have restrictions or permits you have to get. I read a book on wolves, The Wolf Almanac, by Robert H. Busch,
and it talked about this too.

I still don't think it's a good thing or the right thing to do in my opinion.

Well it isn't good for everyone. That's why I said if I had the means.
You know money for equipment & bigger property to set up proper enclosures that are not cruel for them.

You sound like a naturally curious person who loves to imagine 'what if'. I too am like that to a great extent but have learned many have already been there, done that when it comes to wondering 'what if'. As a kid, did you used to think you could tame a lion and badly want one for a pet? I always did, and we probably could have, using the patience of Job and more determination than a terrier but taming has already been done and domestication has long-been tried.

But taming is all it is, as apparently from all I've read, wolves lack the gene or the location on the gene or something like that which activates the brain to adapt true, lasting domesticity tendencies as foxes and canines have, though many geneticists, animal behaviorists and many research facilities have tried, going back tens of decades or more. I've read two or three books on the subject that explain the wolf brain simply doesn't react to tameness attempts the same as foxes and canines, using the very same environmental domestication efforts over generations of wolf lines. There are a lot of differing opinions on wolves but, basically, as I understand it, there has never been a genetically-pure wolf, permanently temperamentally-altered, fully, reliably tame/domesticated wolf ever achieved by environmental methods.

Wolves can be long-term tamed as long as they remain in a confined, domestic situation, usually requiring an alpha-type leader, as they can react very differently in domestic confinement than in nature. Isn't it the Russians, Scandinavians, Hungarians - forget exactly who all - who have done so many studies on developing domesticated wolves in confinement and eventually working to explain why wolves have never been fully domesticated or permanently tamed as a species, even when raised by a human family with the parents in a domestic home setting from breeding through pup- to adulthood. Their pups always are always born wild as I understand. It's true, any wild animal can have the odd pup that produces far less adrenaline or fear-reaction to human nearness and more readily adapts to taming but wolf basic-species genetics haven't changed from its wild nature.

I've read wolves are like lions, tigers and bears and certainly some can be tamed but forever remain genetically wild unless one tosses aside environment and tries cross-breeding them with dogs or other species and then they are essentially no longer wolves but genetically-altered wolf hybrids. Apparently shortly after wolves are separated from their human pack, they readily revert back to the wild. While dogs may become feral and wild-like due to loss of their domestic home situation, they can readily, easily be returned to their domesticated nature and always whelp domesticated, tame puppies.

I've always read tamed wolves can be mercurial and even when tamed are always to be considered temperamentally unreliable, like the tamed lion, tiger and bear. As yet, as far as I know, no researchers have yet ever truly tamed or genetically domesticated the wolf environmentally so that they consistently retain wholly domestic tendencies or reliably birth tame, domesticated young.

But now that I've grown to appreciate more of Nature for what it is, I see that wolves are so very lovely and unique in their natural, wild, free complexity of character, I would never try to change even one of them.

I didn't want to get into a loooong debate about taming & breeding (selectively),
but I believe it can be done with all canids. Of course wolves in the wild are way different than dogs. And why is that?


But so are other canids.


Having read about the Russian fox farm experiment, I can see how selective breeding & domestication can other ride the wild. Basically, environment wins other heredity.


No one has ever attempted such an experiment with wolves, only foxes. But the basis for a sound theory is there.


You take the most docile ones & keep breeding them to make fox or wolves that are more dog like - in only a few generations.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia...icated_Red_Fox


https://vimeo.com/22734940


Animal Domestication: Taming the Wild - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine


https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...domestication/

I don't think crossing different species is a good thing nor do I think keeping an animal in captivity that lives in the wild is a good thing. I do not think it would be fair to the wolves at all. Sure maybe it can be done but that doesn't mean it is fair for the animal.

It actually doesn't require or have anything to do with cross breeding.
One just takes the docile animals & sees that they become more dog like.

You were taking about wolf and dog mixes. Wolves have their purpose so breeding them to be different could cause issues. Docile or not taking an animal out of the wild like that and breed to change it really serves no purpose.

Gotta disagree with you about only foxes being researched. It's such an interesting pursuit, maybe you could do some more research if you are certain that over the centuries no wolf domestication efforts have been made by many, many others and failed. Read a few books about the dog and wolf genetics and what differences seem to stymie wolf domestication. Wolf domestication research, if for no other reason than the high cost of wolf depredation on the dairy, farm and ranching industries, has and continues to be researched. Geneticists, animal behaviorists and animal husbandry researchers didn't simply decide to only domesticate the smaller, far less lethal fox and completely forego the larger, more deadly wolves, so dangerous to society they kill everything from domesticated pets to poultry, lambs, horses, cows and steers, etc., costing pet owners in heartbreak but many food/dairy and textile industries dearly, not just in food products but hides, fur, goose down, etc.

Wolves killed off so many wildlife in Yellowstone National Park and poultry and hoofed herds of every kind from the farms and ranches nearby, they were completely eradicated from Yellowstone for years. Wolves are so expensively predatory, killing of so many ranch and farm stock, those industry leaders tried and paid for research into everything they could to be better able to control wolves as a species, certainly including species domestication.

Though undoubtedly controversial and anathema to many animal lovers, many no doubt think it would be more palatable to domesticate those certain wolf packs with territory near all types of foul/animal-raising farms and ranches rather than killing them, just wiping them out. So the efforts to see if domestication were possible, be it controversial or even unethical for the wolf species itself, have long been tried, as yet, unsuccessfully.

For the last century and one-half at least every type of behaviorist/genetics researcher, animal husbandrymen, anthropologists and plain old citizens of the world have long tried every every method of domestication and yet wolves still remain wild as a species. The dairy and meat industries would doubtless pay millions for fully domesticated male wolves that could introduced into the wolf packs with territory near food-producing farms and ranches the world over. But wolf domestication has long been tried and studied not just for food supply and economics but just because many people felt challenged to domesticate the wolf if for no other reason than the canine mostly evolved from wolves. Nobody has truly domesticated one yet and apparently cannot until and if the wolf is genetically altered as canines did as they evolved.

Read How The Wolfe Became The Dog by John Zeaman and Jon Franklin's The Wolf In The Parlor. There are two more I just can't recall the name of I've read that cover attempts at wolf domestication. Just about any book that talks about canine evolution, dog genetics mentions wolf domestication failures and why they worked with the dog but not the wolf. If you or anyone out there could find a way to fully domesticate a wolf, where so many have failed, I'm certain the world will beat a path to your door.

Here's just a quick, single 15 minutes Google search reference of only a tiny fraction of references to research done on wolf brains, genetics and why domestication fails:

Wolf Depredation | International Wolf Center

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolves...orking_animals

Wolves versus dogs: Why a wolf will never be man's best friend. Scientists find out why dogs become domesticated | Daily Mail Online

https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/art...s-can-be-tamed

https://www.researchgate.net/profile...d/publications

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kathryn_Lord

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialization_of_animals

deadspin-quote-carrot-aligned-w-bgr-2

https://scholar.google.com/citations...AewAAAAJ&hl=en

Here's another article I'd read and forgot about until just now. With so little predisposition to react to human interaction or communication efforts, studies still go on in attempts to research wolves' reaction to human communication efforts and until it changes, no true domestication seems that likely.

Explaining Dog Wolf Differences in Utilizing Human Pointing Gestures: Selection for Synergistic Shifts in the Development of Some Social Skills

[QUOTE=yorkietalkjilly;4728634]Gotta disagree with you about only foxes being researched. It's such an interesting pursuit, maybe you could do some more research if you are certain that over the centuries no wolf domestication efforts have been made by many, many others and failed.... .........


For the last century and one-half at least every type of behaviorist/genetics researcher, animal husbandrymen, anthropologists and plain old citizens of the world have long tried every every method of domestication and yet wolves still remain wild as a species. The dairy and meat industries would doubtless pay millions for fully domesticated male wolves that could introduced into the wolf packs with territory near food-producing farms and ranches the world over. But wolf domestication has long been tried and studied not just for food supply and economics but just because many people felt challenged to domesticate the wolf if for no other reason than the canine mostly evolved from wolves. Nobody has truly domesticated one yet and apparently cannot until and if the wolf is genetically altered as canines did as they evolved.......

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Went to bed, slept, woke hungry, had a snack and thought about how in the world a farmer or rancher could successfully introduce tamed wolf genes into nearby wolf packs without getting the tamed wolf or his pups killed. Apparently, it's practically undoable, if that's even a word. A wolf pack would likely readily kill any 'tame' wolf trying to enter the pack, let alone attempting to breed with any of its females, so breeding would have to be done using human management or artificial insemination and still the alpha wolf would likely kill those pups, as they aren't his own offspring. Normally, only the alpha male and female pair in wolf packs breed and no tame wolf is ever going to ascend to the role of alpha, so it would take a great deal of human intervention to try to 'tame' a wolf pack using tame wolves.

And a tamed wolf pack probably won't retain hunting, killing skills so the breeding stock would have to be fed, socialized, etc. by humans. I imagine only generations of selective breeding for tameness, confinement/shelter and providing food for the breeding stock, human socialization from birth and not simply environment changes alone would be required until a prototype, genetic tameness mutation occurred but if that's possible, why hasn't that already happened when socialized wolves are line bred in confinement for a few generations as with the Russian foxes?

In arctic climates where dogsledding is essential to survival, wolves have been kept and bred in confinement in hopes of domesticating them for sledpulling(wolves run for many miles daily in nature), naturally any sane wolf-keeper/breeder would selectively breed for tameness, if nothing else for his and the safety of other confined wolves, his family, workhands, dogs and stock. But obviously none of them the world over ever succeeded in creating a domesticated wolf. Each wolf still had to be socialized and tamed early in life to keep it from fearing its handler and before sled-training work without apparent widespread success.

https://www.animationsource.org/boar...ka-t36348.html

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/i...1194337AAMHoQa

https://www.google.com/search?q=alph...ed+sled+wolves

At the very least it shows dogs are not canis lupus.


Thanks for the info.

Oh, wait, you're talking about scientists who are constantly researching and publishing their theories - just look at the links below. In the 15 or so minutes I Google-searched, so I think I found just as many or maybe many more scientists who say they are canis lupus! Just like anything to do with evolution of so many subspecies, there are camps on both sides plus a few other sides, as research is ongoing and even what can seem the same findings seem to elicit disagreement on conclusions!

I know one thing, the breeders of the first litters of the early Yorkshire Terriers has my eternal gratitude! My sister always says 'God was smiling the day he created the Yorkie'! Now I adore big, powerful dogs, love working with them and can't help but be impressed at how intelligent and eager to work they are, but somehow the little Yorkie, so tiny and so terrier, so anxious to please as he runs my life, just takes the cake, whatever path he took to be here! I guess cute wins out every time with me!

https://www.google.com/search?q=dogs...hrome&ie=UTF-8


http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...Domestic-Dogs/

"Oh, wait, you're talking about scientists who are constantly researching and publishing their theories - just look at the links below."


I was talking about some scientists & researchers who try to insist
that dogs are wolves (canis lupus), and it is clearly not true.
Dogs are different (canis familiaris).


Whether they say dogs are tame wolves, or wolves are wild dogs, it just is inaccurate. There's more to it then just a name.



"I know one thing, the breeders of the first litters of the early Yorkshire Terriers has my eternal gratitude!"


LOL! Me too!



"Now I adore big, powerful dogs, love working with them and can't help but be impressed at how intelligent and eager to work they are, but somehow the little Yorkie, so tiny and so terrier, so anxious to please as he runs my life, just takes the cake, whatever path he took to be here!"


Well yorkies are a super smart breed. Actually all my dogs were smart & clever in their own ways, be that they opened gates or knew when to run through them.


I love most dogs. (Rarely is there a bad one anyway.)
My somehow I just have an affinity for yorkies & pitbulls.




"I guess cute wins out every time with me!"


Well cute is different for everyone. I find APBTs cute,
but some disagree. Some don't like yorkies (I turn my nose up to those people).

Oh, I see what you mean, the dog is now called the canis familiaris. Got it, I thought you were referring to what so many seem to this is a one of the basic dog ancestors, the canis lupus while others think other species were involved or there was another ancestor or forty!

I totally fell in love with my next door neighbor's pittie, CeCe - never knew how she spelled it. But her favorite thing in greeting me was to stand up full length against the Cox fence between our yards, inviting me, an inveterate doglover, to put my face over toward her (for a lick I first thought) and she would ever so gently open half of her head up and place her giant open jaws across my face and hold. Her tail was down, ears were folded back, little eyes squeezed up and her whole body wriggling with joy. She had no hands to grip me with, no way to hug me back, knew nothing about how to show love except that way and licking, living out there mostly alone in the back yard with little human interaction except with the 3 children would pile out and roughly fall all over her - rarely, and then she was on her on again. So her mouth was the only way she could show me how deeply she loved having me there for her. And her 'love bite' of sorts was one of the gentlest, tenderest, sweetest moments I've ever had with a dog. Her giant white teeth would ever so gently shudder or shiver against my skin as I would put my arms over the fence and around her upper shoulders and squeeze and we would stay that way until my back hurt! Oh what a sweetheart a pitbull can be and how I loved her. My Jilly had been dead 2 or 3 years by that time and I still couldn't bear to even try to look for another Yorkie yet. So sweet CeCe and I had a real love-fest and she made me want to find another baby again.

Yeah, they used to think dogs decended from wolves, but now it's believed they had a common ancestor.


(Dogs and wolves are genetically 99.9% identical.)

Yep, seems like the latest thinking, though of course controversial(what else is new).

There was a show on animal planet showing how wolves and dogs think differently it was kinda interesting. To me they are so very different.

Our vet said recently that he preferred mixed dogs because their gene pool is wider or something and less likely to be ill if done properly, and carefully.

I am not sure where I stand, but I don't think I care so much with the dog I have, she is who she is.

She will always be my special little girl. What she is now, isn't because of what her mix is-- she is who she is because of what she has been through (or so I realized).

Still, on that note, I wouldn't personally want anything with pit bull in it. Just because of a fear of them. I don't hate them or resent them in anyway, just grown rather fearful and weary of them.

On the other hand, the other week at the vet we saw the neopolitan mastiff and was awed by it.