Due to the rising popularity of wolf dogs, as well as the chihuahua being one of the more popular dog breeds in North America, its not surprising that we have seen people curious about a chihuahua wolf mix breed with a steadily increasing number of people reaching out each month about breeding a chihuahua with a wolf.
With so many people reaching out about various questions about a chihuahua wolf dog, we have decided to publish this article going over the subject in detail.
Our hope is that we are going to be able to help as many of our readers as possible who are interested in chihuahua wolf dogs and answer the more common questions that we see people asking.
Now, keep in mind that the vast majority of current wolf dog variants are part wolf and part dog with wolf like features like a husky to try and keep the look of the wolf in the dog.
A chihuahua wolf dog will share features from both parents so may end up looking more like an actual chihuahua than a wolf.
As we see such a range of questions about a chihuahua wolf hybrid, we have decided to add our table of contents below.
It should make it easy to skim the article as quickly as possible to get to specific sections with ease to find the information that you are looking for.
You are able to click any of the sub-headers in the table of contents to be taken directly to its section of the article.
Can A Chihuahua Breed With A Wolf?
Both the wolf (Canis lupus) and the chihuahua (Canis familiaris) are a part of the Canis genus so they do have the correct number of chromosomes to breed with each other and produce puppies.
Although it is very unlikely to happen naturally in the wild, most wolf dogs are created via dedicated breeding programs in captivity so a chihuahua wolf hybrid is possible.
The size difference between the wolf and the chihuahua could make pairing the two difficult as well as pose a risk to the mother during the birthing process.
As we mentioned earlier in the article, the vast majority of current wolf dogs are part wolf and part large dog breed with wolf-like features so this produces less of a risk.
Although the DNA of a puppy does tend to take the size of the mother into account, even a regular chihuahua puppy has a chance of causing problems during the birthing process so a chihuahua wolf mix could present an even larger risk.
You could try to get around this by using a male chihuahua and a female wolf though but an inexperienced wolf dog breeder should never try random pairings.
What Will A Chihuahua Wolf Mix Look Like?
A chihuahua wolf mix can pull features from both parents meaning that there is no set appearance to the hybrid and each pup from the exact same litter could technically all look very different from each other.
It could be a range of looking like a small wolf all the way through to looking like a large chihuahua with everything in between being included as well as mixed features from the two parents.
This is why we always try to discourage any type of mix as there really is no way of knowing exactly what the dog will look like due to a lack of breeding standards.
Even something like a Labradoodle can look dramatically more like one parent than the other sometimes even being passable as a purebred labrador or poodle and a chihuahua wolf mix will b no different.
On top of this, there are various laws in place on wolf dogs with most areas either banning the keeping of wolf dogs as pets outright or only allowing a wolf dog that is less than a specific percentage of wolf be kept as a pet.
Most areas where wolf dogs are currently legal require the dog to be less than 25% wolf to be kept as a pet so three of your chihuahua wolf hybrids grand-parents will have to be chihuahuas where as one can be a wolf meaning the dog will probably look more like a chihuahua than a wolf anyway.
Did Chihuahuas Evolve From Wolves Or Foxes?
Although it is not known what specific type of wolf the chihuahua is descended from due to there being multiple domestication periods for wolves, all modern dogs are descended from wolves.
Both dogs and wolves are from the Canis genus where as foxes are from the Vulpes genus meaning that your chihuahua is descended from a wolf, not a fox.
We have seen a large number of people claiming that the chihuahua is actually a descendent of the Fennec Fox but this is not correct.
It is usually just speculation on social media due to the Fennec Fox and chihuahua having a small number of similar features and people spreading the modern day version of chain mail on social media without knowing that it is not correct.
As we touched on earlier, the Fennec Fox comes from the Vulpes genus and all foxes separated from the Canis genus of wolves and modern-day dogs well before humans started to domesticate dogs.
This gives us evidence that all modern dogs do come from animals within the Canis genus ruling out the possibility that your chihuahua could have ever evolved from a fox.
How Did Wolves Turn Into Chihuahuas?
Although the exact process of the chihuahua evolving from wolves has been lost to history, it is known that some time in the last 30,000 years, the chihuahua developed the IGF1 mutation that restricts its size and prevents it from growing to the size of a wolf.
As with all other domesticated dog breeds, the chihuahua has had a number of natural mutations over the last 30,000 years since it became domesticated.
Over the last few hundred years, various kennel clubs around the world have set out breeding standards for what a chihuahua should look like and promoted this look via selective breeding.
This is why you are able to get a chihuahua that will reliably look like a chihuahua with each litter of puppies but a littler of chihuahua wolf hybrids could look like a random mixture of each parent.
We also see people asking about the possibility of turning domesticated dogs such as the chihuahua back into wolves over time but this is not possible due to the various mutations in DNA that domesticated dogs have evolved to have since domestication.
These mutations prevent the dogs from returning to their original wolf-like state and is the main reason that people started to breed wolf dog hybrids.
How Much DNA Do Chihuahuas Share With Wolves?
Chihuahuas share around 99.9% of their DNA with wolves with both species being from the Canis genus.
This is why Chihuahuas and loves can technically breed with each other and produce healthy puppies where as something like the fox that is a part of the Vulpes genus has a different number of chromosomes as well as less DNA in common with Chihuahuas preventing them from breeding together successfully.
Although the DNA shared between wolves and Chihuahuas is 99.9%, you also have to remember that humans share 98% of our DNA with pigs too.
This is why DNA similarities can seem very high when you look at it as a percentage but the actual species can be totally different to each other.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over the chihuahua wolf mix to an end. We hope that you have found our article helpful and that we have been able to help you get a better understanding of a chihuahua wolf dog. Although it can be fun to theorise what a chihuahua wolf hybrid would look like and how it would behave, wolf dogs really are high energy animals and require a considerable amount of exercise making them unsuitable for the vast majority of our readers.
