THE TAMASKAN WOLFDOG - DANGEROUS OR FLUFFY?

hello and welcome to animal watch and this week we're meeting the tamaska today i will be meeting one of the world's newest wolf look-alike breeds one which has originated from the mixing of sled dogs with lower content wolf dogs one who originates from the freezing temperatures of finland and has a look which some say is one of the closest to a true european wharf will you agree with me that the temascan is not only stunningly beautiful but also has a temperament to match sweet kind and playful watch and find out if you will love the tamaskan just as much as i do the wolf wild and untamed many people dream of possessing this independent and mystical creature but keeping a wolf in our home is fraught with problems firstly it's illegal in many states and countries secondly a wolf does not want to be confined to your home and will wreck it thirdly any wolf that can be kept legally must be licensed and fenced outside in its own enclosure all pretty tricky if all you want is a beautiful wolf-like companion to sit at your feet and watch tv with so what's the solution a wolf lookalike a dog or wolf dog who has been bred to resemble the wolf but is tame legal and also happy to live alongside you meet the tamaskan the tamaskan is a new breed who was created by breeding the same dogs that make up the northern inuit with husky wolf dog mixes from finland the german shepherd the samoyed the alaskan malamute and the siberian husky are the breeds who were used to create the northern inuit the breed who starred as the baby direwolves in game of thrones and which have been used in tv and film all over the world back in the 90s a breeder called lynn sharkey traveled to finland and saw some beautiful aguti husky mixes from a famous kennel known for racing huskies mixed with czechoslovakian wolf dogs the appearance of these mixes were really beautiful the czechoslovakian wolf dog is around 25 wolf content and is a mix of carpathian wolf and german shepherd used as guard and army dogs these dogs are far heavier and not as fast as a husky however the look and beauty of a czechoslovakian wolf dog totally resembles a european wolf the aguti husky is a colour in the husky family where the dog takes on a very natural rabbit-like coloration and if the mask is a full mask that covers the face then the resemblance to a european wolf is uncanny the finnish kennel had mixed the two breeds resulting in a type of dog which looked more wolfy than a gooty husky but with less of an edge to its temperament than the czechoslovakian wolf dog huskies are more trusting of strangers and usually kinder but equally a husky will run away more than a czechoslovakian wolf dog the breeder brought back several of these wolf dog mixes to the uk and started a new breed which she decided to call the tamaskan she bred them with the existing northern inuits and a new breed was born with a far more wolfy coats color and appearance than before [Music] i was one of the first to take on a second generation puppy who i named kiyoshi from one of the first kennels called alba of scotland kiyoshi's granddad magnus was one of the original polar speed husky mixes from finland and stunningly beautiful when i first saw her my mouth fell open she was incredible she looked like a baby coyote or dingo and when she howled all the way home on the train i was repeatedly asked what on earth she was no one knew she was a doc kiyoshi has been with me 12 years now and i've never had such a sweet natured loving and matriarchal dog in my life she breaks up fights she is so affectionate every dog she meets likes her and she is incredibly beautiful the only downside is the husky in her has made her seek freedom at every opportunity so high fences had to be put up and a lock on my gate or she will walk for miles just like a husky now i am biased towards this breed so to make this episode i decided to go meet two other tamaskans in the uk one called frecky and one called atlas two incredible looking males who both have a huge instagram following i wanted to find out if all tamaskans were as lovely as my kiyoshi fracky is 13.9 wolf content an atlas has 15.3 wolf content so a lot higher than kiyoshi who came out at zero wolf content kiyoshi didn't inherit the wolf jean despite her brothers inheriting it so i wanted to see if these two tamaskans were different in any way to her due to this higher wolf content both frecky and atlas didn't have any samoyed in them unlike kyoshi who has 5.1 samoyed hey hi dan how are you hi annika i'm great great thanks uh i've got uh jerry here to meet you and also fracky over here welcome today i'm so excited because of course i've got my own tabasco at home so hello babies what a good boy jerry what a good girl so we got jerry and frecky just like odin's wolves [Music] hey look at you've got such a big head look at you pricky here is so beautiful he looks just like a european wolf and of course jerry as well she's like more of a typical looking tamaskin absolutely gorgeous temperament's beautiful what is a typical day in the life of living with your tamaskaans a typical day in the life of living with tamaskaans is always interesting they do like a lot of attention they like a lot of hugs the two that we've got i'd say they are wonderful with people very very friendly they do need quite a bit of exercise they've got a lot of energy and they know how to use it if you don't give them a lot of walking and a lot of mental stimulation as well because that's really important then you will see more of the naughty behavior more of the more of the chewing won't be bud we are on our second sofa since getting frankie oh my goodness the first sofa didn't last very long fortunately the second one is doing okay isn't it mate yeah yeah digging in the garden very difficult to stop them from doing that you do have to be prepared to give a lot of time to them they're not the dog that you can just leave in the house and go out to work all day they're not a dog that you can just sort of expect to sit on the sofa and not do anything are they escape artists because i know my one if somebody accidentally leaves the gate open she'll just go like a husky so she'll be gone she won't come home it'll be somebody phoning me up and saying we found your dog three miles away and that's the husky in my one do you find your ones want to get out we haven't really experienced it too much ourselves jerry is more if she's in the garden and the door's shut for any reason she's more trying to get back in so we've actually found that she's jumped over the front gate and then i found her knocking on the front door trying to get back really really really good i find that my tamaska and kyoto if she sees a pheasant or a rabbit or something she's gone and she's chasing it highly predatory these are exactly the same so whilst they don't tend to try and escape from the house we did used to try and let them off the lead try and start that training but um yeah as you say they see something and they're gone and they're gone so really it's safer isn't it just to keep them on a on a lead or a long leash you can walk them on the long leash you're in a fenced area he's got a beautiful wolfy coat here i mean he's actually a very very exceptional looking tamaskan if you were walking down the road you would definitely think that he was looking like a european wolf wouldn't you yeah we do get an awful lot of that people either asking if they're a wolf or telling me that he's a wolf because i'm walking dude people are scared of him some people are even though he is lovely and to me he's just a smiley little boy some people see that sort of wolfy look and it it puts him on edge sometimes with big dogs they might be really nice to children but sometimes they can be jumpy and scratchy what if somebody had like a one or two year old kid would you think they might be a little bit scratchy i don't think so he's very good at adapting to the size of the person or the dog that he's playing with so if he's playing with a big dog he'll play quite rough because he knows he can but when he's playing with a little dog he'll play gentle and he's the same with people he's generally very very friendly with all dogs he meets occasionally there'll be one that's just spooked him for some reason and he'll get a bit grumbly but no he just really wants to play they just seem so healthy and fit and full of life even when they're old jerry she's eight years old people think she's three or four i still take her running along with him as well she's actually a better runner than he is because she knows to pace herself whereas he pulls like a madman at the start don't you frecky and then he runs out of energy jerry will bark at people at the door quite loudly she'll bark when she wants things frecky doesn't bark very much at all he does occasionally it's more sort of little woofs if he's gonna bark but he does howl there is one particular ice cream van that plays a tune that he likes he will start howling and then jerry will try and join in but jerry can't howl particularly like a wolf so she sort of warbles what would you say is the best thing about having a tamaskan um i think the best thing about having a tabascon is just how loving they are the connection that we've got is fantastic my wife suffers from epilepsy he's worked out all by himself to tell her about 30 seconds before she's gonna have a seizure so he'll just uh walk up to her and he'll very very gently just take her hand in his mouth not biting just resting his mouth on her hand and then she knows to sit down to make herself safe so she doesn't fall down yeah after meeting the incredible looking frecky i was off to meet atlas on his walk in clumber park hi hello how are you doing i'm megan this is atlas my tamaski look at him he's so big hello oh what a lovely coat atlas you're massive [Music] well i'm here with megan and atlas and boy he is huge which goes to show that tamaskan's being quite a new breed they still quite vary don't they yeah he is on the bigger end i think um the breed standard is like 25 to 28 inches for males and he's around 29 to 30 and yeah so i was thinking you know that could be amended and also he's really really well behaved a lot of tamaskans i mean aren't and they're more like huskies and they run away did you find him really easy to train he's really smart he picks things up really quickly like new tricks and stuff he'll pick up in like a day he does get a bit bored you've got to really motivate him use like high value treats in busy situations and things like that otherwise he's more interested in something else for somebody that's like the first time owner having a tamaska and what would you say they they need to expect they need to expect that their dog's going to be smarter than them they'll outsmart them and they'll challenge them in keeping their interests but atlas himself is really good in the house he's never been destructive or anything like that i know that some of them can be there's other people that i know where they've had their sofas eaten and their floors torn up so it does really go to show doesn't it that being a very very new breed it's the character almost hasn't been quite settled yet has it so you're not quite sure what you're getting the general history is first of all the original one sort of came from the line that the euthan argans and the northern inuits came from and then they went off to finland to source some arctic breeds bluestack went to finland and used some like finnish racing huskies some mixes between those and czechoslovakian black and then she used a wolf dog called boogie which is atlas's great granddad i think yes there's other dogs which you find quite common in the tamaskan breeder things like samoyed alaskan malamutes what other ones do we get sometimes they've recently added grown and dale and white swiss shepherd and some german shepherd i think other than that it's usually northern breeds i know some of them have come back with greenland dog in embark what exactly has he got in his dna then that makes up his particular type of tamaskin i think mostly husky some malamute um czech black and a little bit of american wolf a little bit of american wolf dog and there are tamaskans out there that don't have any wolf content in at all where do you think the future of the breed is going would you actually call the tamaska in a wolf dog or not no they're not a wolf dog there have been specific outcrosses that have been added that do have wolf content but they're usually in europe they're only sent to legal countries yes the aim is generally by breeders to bring the wolf dog content down to zero so really what they're doing at the moment is opening up the genetic diversity in order to make it a healthy braid yeah how will they go in the future as far as recognizing them in america they've worked to have them recognized by arbor which is the american rare breed association people have done like different shows and things like that where they are recognized as an official rare breed but in terms of kennel club recognition i don't think that that's like anywhere near in the future no because we don't want to have to close our stud box yeah one other thing with the kennel club is that they do make you close your stud box and we want to continue with the genetic diversity and bringing in new lines and stuff so that they're as healthy as possible and it keeps the coefficient of inbreeding down well i think what's really interesting is if you want to find out what exactly is in your tamascan then you can sign up for embark dna testing and the reason i like embark is because it has european wolf dna and a lot of the dna companies don't actually have european wolf dna which means that when you test your dog if it's got wolf content it will just come back as unknown today had been a heavenly day for me meeting a breed which has got to be one of my all-time favorites and i was not disappointed the tamaskan is not only incredibly beautiful but very trainable and responsive the german shepherd dna has really helped here as they are a very new breed and are currently being outcrossed with wolf dogs to improve the gene pool you won't really know what yours has in it until you get a dna test so some are carrying higher levels of wolf blood and some are actually carrying zero wolf content due to the wolf blood gradually being bred out being someone who has worked heavily alongside wolves and wolf dogs the tamaskan's wolf content doesn't show drastically any more in its character and it really acts like a dog now more than a wolf dog i would recommend this breed as a beautiful family companion but you must be up for a few walks a day and be able to train and stimulate them imagine you are taking on a large arctic breed or husky and you can imagine the work and coat shedding involved if you don't mind that and can guarantee a home for life then it's one of the sweetest breeds around if people want to find out more about the tamaskan what would be a really really good web page to go to the tamascan dog register website is a really good tool for information we've got the history of the breed health information information about different breeders and the general like personality of the dog and also there's another website i've heard where you can actually go on and you can register your own tamascan what would that be it's a pedigree database where you can have your dog's like information and pedigree being put on there it's called wolflookalike.com and you can find out about your siblings and closely related to masculines and everyone put their embark results on there so you can sort of see what goes into the tabascon breed and every now and then you'll get a notification won't you and it'll say there'll be like a closely related yeah sibling or something that's popped up and then you can stay in touch with temastans all over the world i think it's a fantastic idea and if you enjoyed this episode of animal watch on the fantastic beautiful tamascan then please give us a big thumbs up and subscribe to the channel by clicking the button in the bottom hand corner and be sure to tune in every single week where i'll be bringing you more fantastic episodes on dogs wolves wildlife and conservation we're enjoying this yes or no i know he says i love animal watch because i love it i love for it [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Animal Watch

Views: 2,416,131

Keywords: Tamaskan, The Tamaskan, tamaskan, Tamaskan Dog, tamaskan dog, tamaskan wolfdog, wolfdog, wolf dog, dog, dogs, wolf cross, wolf mix, wolf hybrid, wolf lookalike, wolf, wolves, Polar Speed Huskies, Siberian Husky, American Wolfdog, Bluestag, Animal Watch, Alaskan Malamute, Samoyed, Northern Inuit, Utonagan, husky, huskies, Finland

Id: WfhJX9Hzgak

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020