This image comes from a BBC piece on Italian wolves.
Italian wolves often live in areas where natural prey is hard to come by, so they scavenge at garbage dumps.
What else scavenges at garbage dumps?
Dogs.
Some dogs have dewclaws on their hind legs.
Dogs and wolves are the same species, so it’s actually possible for there to be a gene flow between wild and domestic populations.
Exchanging genes in this fashion has gone on for thousands of years.
But because conservation is still largely typological in thinking, any wolf that shows dog characteristics must be removed from the population.
This is not wise.
Wolves can benefit from the input of new genes, even if they come from a domestic dog source.
These wolves fulfill the same ecological niche as the wolves that have no obvious dog characteristics.
The only reason why I might consider removing possible hybrids from the population is that the anti-wolf paranoids tend to hyperfocus on the ancestry of wolves– whether it’s the correct subspecies or not or whether they are part dog or coyote or Martian.
But I don’t think Italy has many of these people.
My dog, which is an australian cattle dog mix has double dew claws on his hind legs. I always thought he was some sort of mutant, but some breeds actually have them in their breed description, which is pretty odd.
From automatic translator
I live in Italy and, over the years, I have 4 copies of the Italian wolf dog, a breed created by crossing the German shepherd dog and true Italian wild wolves. No one had spurs. However it can happen. Now and then the Italian wolves mate with dogs, but the contribution of the dog will quickly change. In a litter of true (apparently) wolves captured in Abruzzo, on a 4 only seemed partly a dog. Without that particular puppy biologists, at first glance, would not understand that the wolf was mated with a dog.
caused by environmentally induced polydactyly
Rear Dewclaws: Causes & Implications
By Jessie Zgurski & Jody Haynes
RDC in Captive-bred Wolves:
When Wolf Park was contacted,
they insisted that the pup was pure and
that they had verified its lineage. They
also suggested that, because the parents
of the pup were brother and sister, the
RDC were strictly a result of inbreeding.
Later, another Wolf Park representative
contradicted the earlier suggestion
of inbreeding and stated that the RDC
were not genetic and that they were
caused, instead, by environmentally induced
polydactyly.
http://www.floridalupine.org/newsletters/NewsletterSpring2005.pdf
Besides Reudi having the rear dewclaws, so did his half brother Wotan from the next year. Same mother, different father. The rdc’s were sugically removed soon after births.
That’s interesting, but these rear dewclaws in Italian wolves were caused by the same mutation that causes them in domestic dogs. And the one in this photo has other dog-like traits.
“They
also suggested that, because the parents
of the pup were brother and sister, the
RDC were strictly a result of inbreeding.
Later, another Wolf Park representative
contradicted the earlier suggestion
of inbreeding and stated that the RDC
were not genetic and that they were
caused, instead, by environmentally induced
polydactyly.”
Both of these hypothesis are crap. Inbreeding will cause many, many other issues long before it causes extra toes. And typically, when you see deformities due to inbreeding, it’s in the spine.
Dewclaws are not caused by polydactyly. Polydactyly is the replication of toes; I actually own a dog with environmentally induced polydactyly (we believe due to nitrates in the water) and it is outside middle toe (and some of the bones in the leg and stifle joint.) A dewclaw is not an ‘extra’ or ‘duplicate’ toe, it is a separate digit in it’s own right.
I have seen a coyote cross which had a ‘frame shift’ where the dewclaw became the first toe, and the outside toe became a dewclaw on the outside of the leg. Both front legs.