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.