“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’.”
This story is from the March 30, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the March 30, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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