I'm not going to echo whats already been shared (bad idea...really...really bad idea) but can you do some digging and find out the story here? There has to be an interesting (illegal and just plain stupid) story there if this thing is in fact a wolf.

On a positive note I guess it's a good thing that your buddy did not have an acquaintance who just happened to have some wolverine pups up for adoption..

Reminds me of my all time favorite Far Side:



Edited to add: Sorry if this post came off dickish..if it helps most of my friends are way sharper than me so I'm probably the wolf pup adopter in my little circle :)

Bred to kill wolves.

Bigger than most people

Overly protective of family especially children

The descendants of the Roman War dogs.

Come now.

What breed is that?

Irish Wolfhound

Wolvs and wolf mixes are not pets. It may be sweet and cute now, but it is not a dog. Even wolf mixes are not pets and you have 50% of a wild unpredictable animal. Wolf's natural place is in the woods, second best is in a zoo, not in a house

I watched a good documentary a few years ago on the differences between dogs and wolves behaviour in their interaction with humans. The bond between wolves and humans is not near as strong as with dogs and humans. The doc showed different staged experiments where pet wolves and dogs interacted with humans. It was obvious that one animal has had 10,000 yrs of human companionship while the other hasn't. The conclusion was a pet wolf is doable with the right circumstances, but the best advice was to get a dog instead.

Most wolf hybrids are only 25% wolf and are still almost unmanageable.

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Long Chile was a silly place.

For what it's worth I've known one wolf hybrid (50%) fairly well, and he was an awesome dog. His owner, who was the breeder, explained to me that socialization was critical with wolf hybrids, that they had a very narrow window as young puppies when they needed to be exposed to humans and handled by them. The other critical factor was said to be that the mother had to be completely socialized to humans in order not to pass fear or distrust of humans along to her pups.

I would be very wary of a pup from a shelter unless your friend can speak with the breeder and establish some degree of comfort with regards to the parentage and socialization of the pup. My friend who bred hybrids had a lot of false starts and dogs that had to be put down when they displayed aggression as adolescents or adults. Personally I would never take the risk.

That said, the dog mentioned above was memorable. Denali weighed about 115 lbs, and after he got to know me a bit, he would stand up, gently put his paws on my shoulders, and let me give him a hug, his face right next to mine. He was very devoted to his owner, and quite mellow and well behaved around humans. He pretty much ignored other dogs, and they all clearly knew better than to fuck with him.

But he was still wolf, and he showed it when he died. He became old and somewhat decrepit, and one day, this dog who had always stuck around the house without needing to be leashed, quietly disappeared and wandered off into the woods. They never found him.

Ok, there has to be more to this story....they just don’t give wolves away at the shelter.

If it was mentioned that it was a “wolf hybrid” I would advise your friend to get a DNA test. I’ve known a few of people who supposedly owned or purchased wolf hybrids....turned out to be just large/dumb/friendly crosses.

Maurice

Everyone is replying about the pup and not the owner.

It's a big ask trying to compensate for millions of years of evolutionary instinct and thousands of years of domestication in one generation. Unless your friend is an exceptional animal trainer, (which I'm guessing you would have mentioned it if he was), this has an enormous potential to go very badly.

I've seen a pack of captive wolves given access to their night dens, the pack having escalated to full hunting mode in the last hour, knowing there were a couple of dozen live bantams inside.

After all the frenetic anticipatory pack bonding and howling, and knowing what I was about to witness, it shocked me. It was ferocious, astonishingly swift and totally silent. Not a noise from the chickens, they were all dead before being aware of any danger.

If ever anything went wrong for your friend, be it someone's pet, a child or an adult, he would have no chance to stop it happening. It would only take one instant of instinct overriding all the training he had invested.

How good a trainer is he?

 It’’s a “private” shelter. One of those shelters that takes in virtually any orphaned animal and believes it can be a pet.

She’s owned maybe three or four dogs in her life. By all accounts this seems like it’s going to be a disaster.

On the plus side she'll probably be in the news in a few months

American wolves don't kill humans. At least not in the wild... they occasionally do as pets.

Mountain lions are a small danger, but in western MT I think I'd be most concerned about grizzlies and moose.

It's not easy but it has been done. : ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlSiXhPxwLc

Does she currently have any dogs? That would be critical for this pup to learn socialisation 24 hours a day, not just when she's spending time with it.

What are her other dogs like? How well trained are they? How do they behave off-leash?

How much time does she have? How much does she work? Does she have children? Other pets? Where does she live (city, country, semi-rural)?

There's a massive difference between owning a dog and training a dog. And doing it very well. Yet she's taking on board training an undomesticated wild animal.

I was at a colleague's place for a party one December. He told his dog to "get Rudolf". The dog went upstairs and came down with a pair of foam-rubber reindeer antlers, pushed its head through the hole and used its paws to push the antlers to the top of its head. It was hilarious. He is an awesome animal trainer.

I would advise them to check their homeowners insurance. Taking a huge risk if the animal bites someone and I would guess your insurance company would drop you and deny coverage in a heartbeat. Wolves are majestic animals, but they are not pets.

"Behaving mostly like a dog" sounds dangerously like too low a bar.

The more I think about this the more questions I have.

How does she envisage keeping the wolf long term? Having it as a house pet similar to you would any other dog? Or having it penned in an enclosure with 10 foot fence with an electric wire and having the wolf satisfactorily tamed for her to enter with relative safety? If the latter, has she considered the social requirements of a pack animal being kept alone for it's entire life?