The tragedy of Grugliasco and the Czechoslovakian wolfdog, a breed that should not exist – Corriere.it

When news of the tragedy of Grugliasco, an old woman mutilated and killed by five Czechoslovakian wolfhounds, spread, I received a large number of phone calls and messages from friends who had known Shylock.the Czechoslovakian wolf who lived with us for a year and a half and that later I had to entrust the coach to a friend, with whom he still lives. How could this happen ?, my friends asked me. What could have triggered the pack? Are CLCs, as breed enthusiasts call them, really that dangerous? We still don’t know much about what happened: the lady had lived in that apartment with her daughter and the five dogs for a long time, she took them to the gardens, everything seemed normal. Five dogs is a lot, but the amount itself is not a problem.On the other hand, it is essential to have absolute control over the leader of the pack, because the behavior of other dogs also usually depends on him. Perhaps something, a sudden gesture, a stressful situation caused by who knows what, but also an excessive caress, triggered the reaction of one dog, which in turn triggered the reactions of others. It may be that the elderly woman underestimated a sign of aggression, or did not catch it, or that one of the dogs had some undetected behavioral pathology (the adult couple appears to have been adopted, so we do not know their previous life and any trauma suffered).

It may well be that we never know the causes of the tragedy. The fact that the Czechoslovakian wolfdog shouldn’t really exist. an invention of man, one of the worst in the field of dog breeds. In the fifties a Czechoslovakian colonel had the brilliant idea of ​​mating a Carpathian she-wolf with two German shepherds to create a more aggressive and fierce dog that will be deployed throughout the Iron Curtain. The experiment largely failed, as the new wolfdogs were found to obey only the trainer, and once transferred to the workplace, a border where those who tried to cross were normally killed without too many compliments, they proved unruly and uncontrollable. Unfortunately for the breed it continued to exist, and after the end of communism it also spread in the West: and as the CLC is a beautiful animal, its popularity grew.

But the Czechoslovakian wolf requires absolute daily commitment, extremely rigid training, few concessions to affectivity, laborious building of a solid hierarchical balance, and quasi-military containment measures (CLCs dig and jump, normal fences are worthless. ). There is more, much more: a Clc needs space, a large space available, because he is able to hear a sound or smell hundreds of meters and sometimes miles away, accustomed like his wild cousin to traveling tens of kilometers a day, he has an extremely developed predatory instinct and, in short, he needs a great freedom completely incompatible with the rules of human coexistence. Therefore, one of the two: either the dog becomes more and more stressed, aggressive and therefore dangerous, or it is reduced by training and containment measures to a life of a prisoner, like a lion in a circus. The only thing we can do, if we really love dogs (and wolves), would be sterilize all specimens in circulation and renounce once and for all the absurd claimpresumptuous and ultimately criminal to mix artificially what cannot and therefore should not be mixed.