hybrids - Page 1

it seems that most people don't agree with hybrids. i  have a doberman/shepherd mix and it is a wonderful dog. my wife met someone who is selling white shepherd/wolf  hybrid pups and i was curious if anyone has owned one. i do have a pretty good size yard and no children. we do want to get another dog sometime i'm just looking for info. thanks

For what it is worth, hybrid, mutts, can certainly be nice pets. But to purposely breed them when shelters are full of them,,,,,,not my idea of what is a reasonable idea.

Further, in many states, wolf hybrids are illegal. They can be unpredictable, even more so that any dog.

I think the science is pretty solid: hybrid vigor is real (a good thing).  That is, for reducing the risks of genetic abnormalities, especially genetically coded diseases in which the recessive carrier is healthy but the homozygous dog is a victim.

But hybridizing across breeds comes at a cost -- not loss of predictability (that's a wive's tale, as F1 crosses are rather predictable and standardized!) but at a loss of type.  Not only show type, but working "type".  The subtle ways that dogs act and react and learn -- the subtle ways that different breeds act, react and learn -- helps skilled trainers work with their dogs.

If you mix a mal and gsd, therefore, you may well get a great dog -- but a good trainer has to take a few steps backward and figure out the best mode of training.  So for an inexperienced person, this may be a better mix than for a trainer experienced with either the gsd or the mal. 

Go one step farther: consider hybridizing a dog and a wolf.  As exotic and dramatic as this sounds, you are going well outside the bounds of knowledge of most people in terms of raising and handling.  Virtually no one can really take a wolfdog very far in sport.  Some will tell you that they can be almost civilized enough to live in a house/secure kennel set-up, but that's about it.  That might be fine for some, but you are asking people on this pdb who raise the equivalent of thoroughbreds if they like the idea of a horse mule cross.   People here are trying to create and find dogs who can do a whole lot more than live in a kennel, look nice, and not hurt themselves or others.  The wolf-dog hybrid may be a good thing for someone who is experimenting with this sort of thing, but not appealing to people who are doing so much with their dogs.

I was not speaking of genetic hybrid vigor and I doubt the OP was either. I was speaking in terms of unpredictability in terms of how the animal reacts. As a paramedic I have seen a few maulings done by wolf hybrids. Of course, I have seen maulings from other dogs too.

I have never personally owned a hybrid, but I have been around both hybrids and 100% wolves in years past and had intimate contact with them. While beautiful animals, they are not an animal that should be in society for the most part, in my opinion.

Wolf hybrids can be very unpredictable. There are some very good sites with good information on how to care for them.....one of the sites recommends at least 5 acres of ground, & that must have a 6 foot fence, with at least 2 additional feet buried, as the wolf hybrids seem to be quite the Houdinis as far as escaping enclosures. There was a lot of information that would discourage most people, you really have to have a special kind of commitment to successfully care for them.
Mules, on the other hand, are true hybrids, & cannot reproduce. They are the result of a horse & donkey cross. There are different names for the result of a male horse to female donkey, & for the result of a female horse & a male donkey.....I guess there are subtle differences; but I can assure you, you can not breed mules!  jackie harris

I have no problem with mixed breed dogs, just the people who breed them deliberately and even worse, people who pay big bucks for them, the "designer" ones especially. Hell, if you want a mixed breed dog, there are thousands rotting in shelters.

The few wold hybrids I have met have not been stable animals suitable for companionship.

Shepadoodles! . .. .

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LMFAO!

 Question re. hybrid vigor:

I've read that it only is beneficial to the first generation.  (Warning: what follows is just my layperson understanding of what I've read.  I am not a geneticist but I did sleep in a Holiday Inn...  :)  )

Correct me if I'm wrong.  From what I read, I understood it to say that cross breeding one purebred dog to another purebred (different breed) dog, as I understand it, produces fewer "matches" between recessive genes.  So fewer genetic flaws show up in that first mixed generation.

However, breeding the first generation to another (unrelated but the same cross) first generation, will result in matches between recessive genes - and there will be more recessive genes to choose from.  So *more* genetic flaws may show up.

Does that make sense?  (I may have asked this before, but I don't recall getting a definitive answer.)

sounds about right to me....  but recessive does not necessarily mean negative, either.    I think that's an inference that too many take for granted.  Recessive genes can be negative, neutral or positive - depending on the environment that the organism finds itself. 

That's pretty much right.  The optimal benifits of hybrid vigor (heterosis) are experienced in the first generation, thereafter steadily declining, gradually leading to loss of fitness or "outbreeding depression" (i.e., the majority of the gsd breed) and definite loss of "type", whereas any deleterious recessives are spread rapidly throughout populations.  The largely uncondoned practice of inbreeding, which can lead to "inbreeding depression", is conveniently forgotten of the fact that "fitness" can actually improve overall and quickly recover in successive generations, even with continued inbreeding.  Some endangered species have even actually thrived because of their inbreeding practice, and recovered to sustainable populations.  The argument of health or fitness should not really be the central theme of importance for either inbreeding or outcrossing, as it's often so simplisticly put.