To me, a dog is a wolf that tends to live around people. A wolf is a dog that tends not to. It's a behavioural description. The wolves in the game park at Longleat are functionally dogs from that POV.
I'm afraid I have to disagree to some extent. There are some obvious physical differences between wolves and even the most similar dogs, such as Siberian Huskies and Alaskan Malamutes. Wolves are "keel-chested," narrowly built with thin legs ending in large paws; when walking, they place their paws one in front of the other, leaving one line of tracks. Dogs, by contrast, are more barrel-chested, with stockier legs, and leave parallel tracks. We have couple of wolf/dog hybrids at
the sanctuary where I volunteer, and the difference with "pure" wolves is visible, albeit not always obvious. The eyes usally reveal the answer: wolves' eyes are yellow to amber, hybrids' often are not, even if they physically resemble wolves in every other particular. Moreover, wolves' brains are about half again as large of those of an equivalent-sized dog. WildCat's observation that "a dog is a wolf that has had all the brains bred out of it" is not far off the mark (though it's more like one-third, rather than "all").
And while there are varying degrees of socialization to humans, it's simply impossible to fully domesticate an individual wolf, even one hand-raised from birth. First, they are, for all practical purposes, impossible to house-train. Second, they retain their hunting instinct, and
will chase anything small that runs, like the neighbors' cat or, indeed, the neighbors' kids. Third, when they reach sexual maturity (around age three), they will start entertaining thoughts about challenging for leadership of the "pack," i.e. your household. An oft-heard story from idiots who got a wolf (which is legal in many of the United States) because they thought it would be cooler than a Rottweiler, or because they're into some Newage garbage about it being their "totem animal," and didn't bother reading up on them properly beforehand goes along the lines of "and then, one day, (s)he just turned on me!" Further questioning will almost invariably reveal that this occurs around the time the wolf is three years old. As a result, most pet wolves over the age of three end up in sanctuaries like ours; in the case of wolf/dog hybrids,
80% are euthanized before or at age three. Metullus' experience is, with all due respect,
extremely rare. Allow me to refer to
some of our propaganda on wolf and hybrid ownership and why it's generally a
really bad idea (and remember, propaganda is "information disseminated for the purpose of influencing opinion"; it is not necessarily untrue); incidentally, it also addresses some of those claims about "percentages" in hybrids' bloodlines (spoiler: they're mostly spurious).
Wolves (plural) can, of course, be domesticated, as the existence of dogs shows, but you're looking at many generations of selective breeding. All the wolves at our sanctuary are captive-born, and many of them are comfortable with humans, provided we remain outside their enclosure, i.e. outside their territory. If we have to go into an enclosure (which we try to avoid if at all possible, but in summer, you gotta clean up the scat at least once a week), the wolves will generally stay as far away from us as possible, even though they know who we are, and recognize us as the people who bring them food.
. ......Or as anything else goes.
