First wolf-dog hybrid confirmed in Greece

A salient Greek wildlife radical connected Friday said it had confirmed the archetypal lawsuit of a wolf-dog hybrid successful the northbound of the country.

The Callisto radical – which is presently progressive successful efforts to trap a rogue wolf successful Halkidiki, bluish Greece – said the hybrid was recovered adjacent the bluish metropolis of Thessaloniki.

“This is the archetypal familial (case) to beryllium confirmed successful Greece,” Callisto biologist Aimilia Ioakimeidou told a league successful Athens.

The carnal is 45 per cent wolf and 55 per cent canine according to DNA testing, she said.

It was discovered during tests connected 50 wolf samples from the Greek mainland, Ioakimeidou said.

While wolf-dog hybrids had antecedently been reported successful Europe, Central Asia and the United States, that categorisation mostly stemmed from conscionable the quality of the animals.

Later familial testing has shown such hybrids are rarer than archetypal thought.

The wolf colonisation successful Greece has been increasing steadily successful past years arsenic a effect of a 1983 hunting prohibition under the Berne Convention.

According to a caller six-year study precocious concluded by Callisto, it stands astatine 2,075 individuals, including astatine slightest three packs of a minimum of 31 wolves successful the Mount Parnitha scope adjacent Athens.

The Thessaloniki-based organisation aims to study, support and negociate the populations and habitats of ample carnivores such arsenic bears and wolves and different endangered species.

It is presently mounting an cognition to find a young wolf that injured a five-year-old miss from Serbia successful the coastal edifice of Neos Marmaras connected September 12.

While domesticated dogs came from a adjacent comparative to the grey wolf some 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, the story of their root has shifted successful caller times.

A longstanding fashionable theory had held that wolves became tame by hanging astir quality settlements for nutrient scraps.

But that has been challenged, and different theory holds that possibly quality hunter-gatherers took wolf pups to rear and they developed into the dogs we person today.

Source: AFP