"We'd like to shoot them' Growing number of wolfdogs raises hackles across Europe

From the moment the rangers first saw him on their trail cameras, the problem was apparent. The wolf, spotted deep in the woods of Italy’s Gran Bosco di Salbertrand park, was not grey like his companion, but an unusual blond. His colouring indicated this was not a wolf at all, but a hybrid wolfdog – the first to be seen so far into Piedmont’s alpine region. And where one hybrid is found, more are sure to follow.

- John Last

“We thought he would go away,” says Elisa Ramassa, a park ranger in Gran Bosco who has tracked the local wolves for 25 years. “Unfortunately, he found a female who loves blonds.”

The blond specimen spotted in Piedmont illustrates the latest development in a worrying new trend. Over the past two decades, Europe’s decimated wolf population has slowly been resurrected through years of painstaking conservation work. Now hybrid numbers are rapidly growing – and if their spread continues, scientists fear they may put the European wolf – as a wild, genetically distinct animal – at risk of extinction.

In Piedmont, the blond hybrid produced at least two sets of pups before disappearing. “From one event, we now have several packs with hybrids,” says Luca Anselmo, a wolf tracker and researcher with Life WolfAlps EU, a multi-year, multimillion dollar initiative to support the return of wolves to Europe and reduce their conflicts with humans.

Hybrid wolfdogs are not a new phenomenon. While present-day wolves and dogs are distinct sub-species, they belong to the same canine family, and have retained genetic overlap since humans began domesticating ancient wolf ancestors thousands of years ago. Modern wolfdog hybrids had not been well studied until recently, however, when advances in genetics made it possible to prove their existence. When Luigi Boitani, Italy’s leading wolf expert, captured a hybrid in 1975, he says he “was met with everything from gentle opposition to [people who] said, ‘this is bullshit’.”