Chien gris de St. Louis. A type of large French griffon hound from the sixteenth century.
I came across this interesting account of a French noble using wolf blood to improve the hunting instinct of his wolf hounds. The following text comes from Wolf-hunting and wild sport in lower Brittany (1875) by Edward William Lewis Davies :
I was fortunate enough that night to sit next to the Count de Kergoorlas at dinner; and hearing he was a master of wolfhounds in Upper Brittany, I gleaned from him some interesting information with respect to the style of hound he considered best adapted for his particular sport.
“A big, bold, broken-haired hound is what I keep for the work; and occasionally I invigorate the race,” said he, “with a strain of wolf-blood.”
“And how, pray,” I inquired, “do you manage that?”
“Nothing is more simple. The dog and the wolf being congeners they breed readily together; nor does the law affecting mules affect the hybrid race, as the offspring of the first cross reproduce their litters with the same facility. I keep a dog-wolf brought up by hand; and he, suckled in infancy by a hound dam, lives in perfect concord with any hounds I think fit to enclose with him in his kennel; while a day or two reconciles a strange hound to his company.”
“And do you find the first cross,” I asked, “as manageable in chase as your ordinary hounds?”
“Far from it,” he replied; “insomuch that I only keep that produce to breed from. They usually run mute or all but mute, and are so self-willed in chase and so fierce in kennel, that I merely use them as stud hounds, and enter the second cross. These, the grand-offspring of the wolf, become rare wolf-hounds, fierce, fine-nosed, desperate in chase, and never tiring during the longest day. But, to be candid, they have one great fault: they are too shy of their tongue; nor can this defect be bred out for several generations, although tonguey hounds are especially chosen for the purpose of every cross. The old nature of the wolf appears and reappears, and no device of human ingenuity can pitchfork it away.”
I have since learned in my own country, from that keen and experienced sportsman, Mr. Waldron Hill, who brought over several couples of these hybrid hounds from the Department of Eure, and whose object it was to enter them as otter-hounds, that they had at least one other fault, which he found utterly ineradicable, in fact, the old wolf coming out again in them. They would kill sheep; and, as he justly remarked, that to hunt the sheep was a far more expensive amusement than hunting the otter, he hanged the whole of them. In the Count’s country, however, this vice would not be observable, as there flocks of sheep are not found depastured abroad and roaming at will on a thousand hills, as in this more favoured land (pg. 25-26).
This is not the first time I’ve encountered stories of people crossing wolves and dogs to produce a superior hunting animal. Henry Wharton Shoemaker described the exact same thing happening in Pennsylvania, and it has always been claimed that the various types of cur, particularly the Catahoula and Lacy dog, have a bit of wolf ancestry. Several reindeer-herding and hunting spitz breeds from Finland and Scandinavia have also been found to have some wolf blood.
The hound described in the text is some sort of griffon, which is why someone tried to pass some of them off as otterhounds. Otterhounds do have some blood from the French griffon hounds, especially the Griffon Nivernais.
It’s not entirely clear if any modern hounds that derive from these French hybrid wolf hound packs.
It’s certainly possible, but one should not necessarily assume that all of these are wolf dogs in the same way as the Saarlooswolfhond.
However, this account is yet another example of humans using wolf blood to improve working dog stock.
And it’s also one of the reasons why I don’t use Canis familiaris as the scientific name for domestic dogs. That name assumes that it is a true species.
But the truth is it is nothing more than a very successful subspecies of Canis lupus.
And there have always been relatively significant amounts of gene flow between both wild and domestic Canis lupus populations.
Whether we want to admit it or not.
What does ‘shy of their tongue’ mean? Won’t bay with the pack?
It means it won’t bay when on the hunt.
Interesting that vocalization behavior is should appear immutable. I guess vocalization patterns do generally follow breed groups. . . . maybe they are genetically hard wired. Has anyone studied the genetics of vocalization?
Misc. observations
From memory (that is memory of living in an area there were lots of greyhound breeders and running a boarding kennel), most scent hounds bay. Sight hounds, or at least greyhounds, are big on chorus vocalizations (meaning a several of them living on the same property will howl together for a few minutes, to be answered by another group a half mile away . . . always at night) but I don’t think I’ve never a greyhound, or other sight hound bay. Rotties will join the chorus. Gun dogs neither bay nor chorus. Some staffies scream/squeal . . . horrid sound. And then there are the little yappers.
“Gun dogs neither bay nor chorus”? While they were silent when hunting or tracking, I wish I had recorded the beautiful “songs” of my six Golden Retrievers howling together — often initiated by the noon siren in our little village years ago!
An interesting account of hound breeding. Since 1974 I have used “wolf genes” to strengthen the dog lines I raise (originally shepherd-malamute crosses descended from a remarkable dog I got in 1965), but a little over a year ago I crossed a 3/8 wolf, 5/8 Alaskan malamute with Boudicca, my female Irish wolfhound and produced some amazing puppies. After observing several of these pups owned by friends over the past year plus, I have concluded that this fourth generation from a pure wolf exhibits little of the trainabilty problems encountered with most wolf-dogs. Hopefully this cross will result in these animals, which look much like pure Irish wolfhounds, being much healthier and longer-lived than AKC Irish wolfhounds.
On the subject of sight hounds giving tongue, my male Irish wolfhound, Branigan barks “tree” when he’s treed a squirrel, a behavior I didn’t expect to see in a coursing breed.
I think you are right about the trainability issues decreasing with subsequent generations of wolf hybrid bred back to dog. A litter of F2 hybrids that I raised were basically untrainable, at least in the sense that we usually mean when training dogs. They were very adept at educating themselves, and learning from each other, but all but one of them became wilder and more predatory as they matured. But a friend who raised and trained German Shepherd Dogs, mainly for security and Schutzhund, had some dogs that were 5th or 6th generation removed from a direct wolf/GSD cross, and they were fabulous dogs, some of the best I’ve ever seen.
Mr. Cunningham, I would be interested in discussing you Irish Wolfhound x Wolf Hybrid crosses, as I have been able to find little to no information about anyone having or raising this type of animal. Hopefully you will read this and reply.
Saints vary a good bit in re vocalization–some are very vocal others not. Sammie rarely barks, but he has a repertoire of grunts and groans that he uses to make his wishes known. He also has a happy howl that he uses when he’s excited at the prospect of a walk or other activity.
Anyone wishing to discuss my breeding program(s) can reach me at wolfrunkennel@gmail.com.
With regards otter-hounds, I am frankly not very surprised that wolf-dog hybrids were poor at the job; most dogs are reputedly not much good at otter-hunting as they don’t see otters as prey. There is the story of an English country parson who decided for some reason to try to start up an otterhound pack at one point.
His proto-otterhounds consisted of pretty much everything he could find locally with four legs and an ability to bark, with liking water being the second qualifying characteristic. With this motley pack he proceeded to scour the local streams, rivers and waterways in search of otters, which were then not uncommon. Nowhere he searched did the hounds find a single otter.
Then in desperation he drafted in a retired otterhound from an established pack, which actually knew what an otter was and would speak on the line. This one hound then taught the rest of them to hunt otters, though the entire enterprise was much more of a hearty walk that an actual hunt. It is therefore quite probable that wolf-dog are a lot more instinct-driven and much less learning-driven than are pure Canis familiaris, hence they’d naturally go for sheep over a nasty, musky-fishy smelling predator.
Charles St. John, the Scottish sportsman, describes his retriever that hated otters and regularly pursued them after having been bitten by them.
It was never unusual in the past to breed a dog to wolf to increase hunting ability. The Russians, for example, still breed wolves to their hunting laikas (and you can find videos of the hybrids hunting on Youtube), and many Scandinavian hunting spitzes derive from relative recent wolf hybridization. The Norwegian elkhound is one breed that has a mitochondrial DNA sequence that is derived from the Scandinavian wolf.
It’s when you want to have a dog that does something else besides hunt that crossing it will a wolf becomes problematic.
Hunting minks and otters with Finnish Spitz is very popular in Scandinavian countries. Hunters and trappers east of the Urals depend on hunting martens and sables for a living.
Training a dog to hunt any kind of mustalid is difficult due to the secretive nature. I wouldn’t say dogs are not good at hunting them because they don’t see otters as prey; but rather dogs seldom see otters. If a dog has never seen something before, it won’t hunt it.
I have never understood the concept of “teaching a dog to hunt”. I have found that a dog either has the desire to hunt or it doesn’t. A dog that has this instinct and desire will hunt anything. These dogs like to kill, and are driven to hunt with that end result in mind: that is their reward. The secret then is to teach (train) them to hunt only what you want them to hunt, which basically means you must train them not to hunt certain animals. A coon hound that runs fox (to “run” means to chase) is no good, nor is a fox hound that runs coon. Here in Vermont we do not hunt deer with hounds, and a lot of hounds have died because they could not be broken off (trained to not run) deer, but down south where they hunt deer with hounds the same dog would be considered valuable. Any prey a hound chases that it is not supposed to chase is called “trash”. If your coon hound runs cats, rabbits or deer, it runs trash.
When I kept Bluetick coonhounds I kept them chained to dog houses that were the enclosed bottoms of rabbit hutches so they were engulfed in rabbit scent all the time, and ignored rabbit scent when hunting. To make them deer proof I had a very belligerent goat that had long, sharp horns that she was more than willing to use on any puppies that got close to her. I would purchase bottled deer scent at the sporting goods store and dab it between her horns and on all four of her feet. By the time any pup that had been raised around this goat was taken out hunting it would give any deer it came across a wide berth; associating deer scent with that feared goat.
Lobo, the ¾ German shepherd, ¼ Siberian husky I got for my 15th birthday was a natural killer and would hunt anything I set him on. I used to hunt coons with him by walking along the banks of the Otter Creek and sending him out to look for coon. Since he ran silently, and would not bark “tree” (letting me know he had a coon up a tree), I had him trained to take off at my command to “Hunt” and run down the river bank for about a quarter mile. If he caught a coon on the ground he would kill it (he often caught them by surprise since they wouldn’t hear him coming like they would a baying hound, and wouldn’t know he was there until he was right on them), and then come back to me and lead me to the dead coon. If he treed a coon he would stay silently at the tree, usually circling and circling and jumping up on the trunk, and making enough noise by crashing around and digging at the trunk for me to find him if he was away from the river a short distance. If he should have a coon treed farther away and I couldn’t find him, I would simply call him back to me, and then send him back to the tree and follow in the direction he went. If he found no coon he would simply come back to me and we’d walk farther down the river together until I sent him back out again.
The river bank in a section of farm land I hunted was cut back sharply by high water in the spring, so that by the time I was coon hunting in the fall there would be a steep, five foot drop to the river, and usually a lip of sand three feet or more wide running out from the bank to the water. One night as we were walking along the top of the bank, Lobo suddenly leaped off it and landed in the water and engaged something in a furious fight. In the beam of my flashlight I couldn’t see what he was fighting, but they were really going at it. Then suddenly it was over. All was still and Lobo was standing in water half-way to his back with his neck arched high, looking down into the now settling water all around him. Whatever he had been fighting was gone.
I believe he had attacked an otter. As far as I know he had never seen an otter before, but he was a hunter, and anything he had not been trained to not hunt and kill was fair game.
We would hunt the hedgerows between farm fields and pastures in the same way we hunted the river banks. One night Lobo and I approached an old apple tree that marked the beginning of a hedgerow that usually produced a coon or two. Suddenly Lobo froze and began growling viciously, threatening something I couldn’t see with dire retribution (I knew all of Lobo’s uncommonly deep and savage sounding growls, and he was challenging something to a fight). I swung the beam of the flashlight in the direction Lobo was looking and the light illuminated broken and stripped branches on the old apple tree, and trampled grass at its base. Amongst the fallen apples in the grass were several piles of fresh bear droppings. Lobo was tense and ready; awaiting my command to attack whatever was hidden in the hedgerow, but since I was armed only with my old, single shot .22 rifle, I ordered Lobo to follow and got to hell out of there; the last thing I needed was him fighting a bear in the dark.
At day light I went back to that hedgerow and found fresh bear tracks in a ditch near it. Lobo had never encountered a bear before, but he was a natural “hunter” (i.e. killer) and would have as willingly tackled a bear as a coon.
So when I hear people talking of training a dog to hunt I have to shift my train of thought to what they actually mean. What they usually mean is to train a dog to hunt only what you want it to hunt. If a dog doesn’t naturally hunt it may be difficult to train it to (though they can pick it up if hunted with an experienced dog), and they’ll probably never be the hunter a dog that seemed to be born to it would.
As far as crossing wolf into a dog line to improve the hunting abilities of that line goes, I can see no need to do it. Though the wolves and wolf-dogs I’ve owned over the years have all been willing killers of whatever small stock (up to and including sheep) they could get their jaws on, they were no more interested in hunting than any good dog I’ve owned, and certainly not interested in hunting in a manner a human demands of them. They are more powerful, with larger teeth and more powerful jaws than any dog, which makes them better killers. But the problem lies in training them not to kill (or simply chase) unwanted prey. Foxhounds will run through a flock of sheep on the trail of a fox and ignore the sheep. But if you cross those foxhounds with a wolf the resulting pups will be impossible to train not to kill the sheep. I don’t believe you could ever train a wolf-dog to hunt just specific animals and to ignore others.
The only advantage you get by crossing a wolf and a dog is the physical superiority and genetic health the wolf brings to the mix. But after years of crossing wolves and dogs back and forth I have decided the loss of trainability just isn’t worth whatever physical improvement you make in the wolf-dog cross.
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