There was an article in Wapo recently about the coywolf moving into Rock Creek Park in Washington DC. The general gist of the article is that there are now larger carnivores in the middle of DC. The amount of wolf/dog/coyote genes is actually not set in stone, it varies from individual to individual. When they came to New England we called them coy dogs.
Where the article gets it wrong is that coywolves of course can and do feed on deer and bigger. Warning if you don't want to see coyotes eating a deer alive don't watch the vid.
Those dogs look a lot bigger than the ones we have in the west, like twice as big.
The photos have been manipulated such that red is added to where the deer is bleeding. The predation is fairly typical of canines in that they first bite the perineum to cause massive bleeding and eat the guts. The canines are neither cruel nor kind, just dogs, but for the deer it must be horrific.
There are also reintroduced red wolves in North Carolina. http://www.wolf.org/... where they interbreed with coyotes. I once asked some hunters from that area how come so many people shoot so many reintroduced wolves and was told that it's just about impossible to tell a red wolf/coydog mix from a coydog which is a mix anyway. Also that there are already enough coydogs, no need for more. I have my doubts about the red wolf program. Might just end up with a few more genes in coyotes.
Recent studies have shown that it certainly is possible to interbreed gray wolves with coyotes. All these different names and arguments over separate species or hybrid or whatever fascinate scientists, me not so much. Recently the effort to delist the gray wolf was criticized by an independent review over just this issue, whether the eastern timber wolf really was a separate species or not. It was widely reported here and elsewhere that the argument was over the delisting itself. Eyeroll. Canines don't carry doggy backpacks but they do bring lots of baggage.
A domestic dog/wolf litter in Washington state was put down this spring. In Europe testing shows lots of interbreeding with sheepdogs. Canines can interbreed, especially wolves and dogs, but also coyotes.
It looks like DC now has canines, but if any predator can live alongside humans with little conflict it's the coyote and it's hybridized relative the coywolf. Rock Creek Park is managed by the Park Service and of late they've been culling deer via paid shooters, coywolves will probably make that unnecessary. On the downside is that some off leash dog walkers will eventually lose a dog or two.
Below are a couple of links, one of which is a really fun PBS documentary that I wish I knew how to embed. Part of the documentary is about the folk singer Taylor Mitchell who was preyed on and killed by coy wolves in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...
http://www.pbs.org/...
http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/...