Why we’re producing this litter:

We get it… this litter is different. VERY different. It has ruffled quite a few feathers both within and without the general wolfdog community for us to be planning this litter. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first litter on a global scale where a purebred Borzoi has been crossed with a high content wolfdog, so there’s not even a precedent that we can point back to when people question why we’ve chosen to use a Borzoi as part of our wolfdog breeding program. We’ve based the decision on multiple factors that we feel are important and relevant to wolfdogs as a whole, which we’ve tried to outline below:

Traditionally, wolfdogs have been produced using four main dog breeds: German Shepherd Dogs, Alaskan Malamutes, Siberian Huskies, and (slightly less commonly) Samoyeds. There have occasionally been other breeds mixed in, such as Great Pyrenees and Belgian Shepherds, Tamaskan Dogs, Northern Inuits, and even Czechoslovakian Vlcak and Saarloos Wolfdogs, who are being crossed into “American Wolfdogs,” but those mixes are much less common compared to the “Big Four” breeds. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the dogs that have been used to make and propagate wolfdog lines have been very low-quality dogs (think mystery “Craigslist Specials”) with significantly undesirable temperament, health, and structure. Over time, this majority usage of backyard bred quality dogs has snowballed into today’s issue of most low and mid content wolfdogs expressing those undesirable traits of their BYB dog ancestors.

From a temperament standpoint, there are quite a few traits that are highly common in backyard bred quality dogs of those four most popular breeds which have been passed down for generations in their wolfdog descendants. Extreme anxiety, very high energy, nerviness and aggression, neurotic behaviors, extreme shyness or even aggression, pica (compulsive eating of non-food objects), being destructive of their home environment, escape-artist tendencies, and other behavioral issues are sadly common in many low and mid content wolfdogs. It goes without saying that these behaviors are less than ideal and significantly contribute to the amount of difficulty that many owners experience when trying to care for their wolfdogs. There’s not really any consistent line of low and mid content wolfdogs that can produce an “easy mode” temperament for owners. Our goal is to attempt to breed away from these difficult and extreme behaviors and work towards that “easy mode” temperament, so that owners are better able to enjoy and more easily care for their wolfdogs. Since many of those behavioral issues tend to be found more in certain breeds and less in others, a significant step towards this goal in temperament is our choice to select breeds and purpose-bred mixes for our breeding program who are less prone to exhibiting the behavioral issues common in wolfdogs. Obviously, no breed is completely lacking behaviors that might challenge the average owner, but we further narrow our search for breeding candidates by selecting individuals who display the mildest form of what are normally considered difficult behavior traits specific to their breed or mix. Dogs who have low or no same-sex aggression, resource guarding, prey drive, etc. for their breed or mix. While we acknowledge that “watered down” instincts and behaviors are not always ideal or in accordance with a specific breed’s Breed Standard, ultimately, we must make the argument that we are not breeding XYZ Breed… we are breeding wolfdogs, so we’re searching for individuals who stand the best chance of helping us to improve the temperament of our next generations of wolfdogs. Those next generations will never be bred back to any pure parent breed anyways, and will therefore have zero impact on the parent breed’s population.

Regarding health, it’s an unfortunate fact that health testing has been almost completely nonexistent in wolfdogs until the past ~10 years, despite many diagnostic health testing tools and resources being available for over 30 years at this point. This means that the backyard bred dogs who were (and still are) being used to create and propagate wolfdog bloodlines were almost never health tested, and didn’t come from purebred lines with generations of health testing behind them, either. There are MANY genetically inherited health disorders that have unwittingly been introduced and passed down in wolfdog lines, such as epilepsy, megaesophagus, Addison’s disease, Lupus and other autoimmune disorders, protein allergies, ocular and cardiac disorders, joint dysplasia, Degenerative Myelopathy, skeletal chondrodystrophy, etc. The list is almost endless, to be honest. Most of these genetic disorders are specific to the original domestic dog breeds used to create and propagate wolfdogs - in other words, most of those disorders are simply not found in the genome of pure wolves. Managing the risk of genetic health for wolfdogs and stacking the odds in a litter’s favor by selecting breeding dogs with generational health testing, as well as performing breed-specific health testing on all breeding dogs and wolfdogs, is critical to ensuring that we better the next generations of wolfdogs. The lack of high-quality foundation dogs in the past (and current) wolfdog gene pool, as well as the lack of long-term, in-depth health screening and documentation, has driven us as a breeder to strive to raise the bar for future generations. This is why all of our breeding dogs are health tested for all relevant breed-specific health issues, and why we are so diligent in selecting well-bred dogs to participate in our breeding program. Furthermore, we are careful to track and disclose any and all health anomalies and issues within our dogs and the puppies they produce, so that we can make informed breeding decisions in the future.

In terms of structure, there is a pretty significant difference in conformation between wolves and most domestic dog breeds. There will be major differences in skeletal size and proportion regardless of what domestic dog breed you choose to compare with a wolf, but there are certain breeds that do tend to come much closer to the mark than others. (For clarification, we are referencing the North American subspecies of wolves, not Eurasian or other extra-continental subspecies.) Referring again to the primary four dog breeds used to create wolfdogs, the differences in overall size, proportion, angulation, skull shape, and gait are so significant that we have found those breeds to heavily detract in many ways from the conformation and “breed type” of the wolf in wolfdogs. Over time, low and mid content wolfdogs have been bred to increasingly higher Filial Generations, meaning they are becoming further and further removed from their closest pure wolf ancestors, and the amount of pure wolf ancestors appearing in pedigrees within 5-8 generations has also sharply dropped since the 1990’s. As a result, most low and mid content wolfdogs are multi-generational mixes of anywhere from 3-10 generations of wolfdog x wolfdog breedings. Even an animal who is F3 might only have ONE pure wolf great-grandparent, instead of the old days where an F3 might have 4-6 pure wolf great-grandparents. The extended mixing and remixing of low and mid content wolfdogs with breeds who are strongly dissimilar to wolves in structure has resulted in wolfdogs who significantly lack in breed type today. In our opinion, breeding wolfdogs means producing dogs who look very wolf-like…what’s the point in producing a wolfdog that doesn’t even look similar to a wolf? Selectively breeding wolfdog type can and should be done to a standard - that of the wolf’s conformation. North American subspecies of wolves have, in general, similar enough conformation that it’s entirely possible to adhere to a consistent standard that breeders should be holding their litters to, even when breeding low contents. Lack of selective breeding for wolf-like conformation and the usage of BYB quality dogs has ended up producing wolfdogs who have truly trainwreck structure. There’s no end to the number of wolfdogs with table-straight legs who are butt-high, roach-backed, with short legs, deep chests, short muzzles, short back skulls, coarse skulls, and deep stops. Not our preference at all, to be polite. Choosing a sighthound like Fay will enable us to maintain structure that is much closer to a wolf’s in many ways. Yes, Borzoi do have some significant conformational differences, such as much deeper chests, longer tails, finer bone, more rise over the loin, and more open angulation in the front assembly, but again, no dog breed is going to be a perfect match for wolves. In our personal opinion, we feel that the differences present in the Borzoi’s structure are significantly offset by the similarities, and those differences in structure that get passed down in this first-generation litter are traits that we will further refine in future generations.

To sum up, we really want to stop repeating the same choices that countless wolfdog breeders before us have made, especially when those choices have resulted in wolfdogs who are largely not to our liking in many ways. We want to use higher quality dogs who come from a breed or mix that more closely match our goals in temperament and structure, compared to the four traditionally popular breeds. We are willing, and have an amazing opportunity, to try something new and different. Our very long-term goal is to establish our own unique line, and we have quite an extended and detailed plan for the next 15+ years of our kennel that we are looking forward to working on. This litter between Genn and Fay is a big step towards our end goals.