I think that domesticated wolves we see in pictures with people are not pure wolves , they are hybrid from dogs and wolves , but real pure wolves never been domesticated , what do you think ? Is that true ?
If you took a wolf puppy out of the wild you would not be able to domesticate it, but you would be able to tame it. Which basically means you could teach it to live with you, but he would never be a pet. However, If you bred that wolf to another wolf and then selected the most dog-like puppies for future breeding, and so on and so on, then you would be able to domesticate wolves. That is, in a very simplified manner, how we have dogs today.
Wolves are actually one of the easier big carnivores to tame, probably beacause they are pack animals and rather small (in comparison to lions for instance). When it comes to taking an adult wolf out of the wild, maybe you would be able to tame it, but it would probably take a lot of time and effort. I am not sure I have ever heard of that actually happening.
Personally I like the word “socialized” better than “tamed”, because wolves will always have the nature of a wild animal. You can’t train that away, and that is the difference between the domesticated dog and the socilaized wolf. “Tamed” is more adequate when it comes to feral dogs or mustangs.
There definitely is a lot of pictures going around of alleged wolves that are actually wolfdogs, but it certainly is a lot of pictures of real wolves together with humans as well! I can recommend watching the documentary Living With Wolves, which is about Jim and Jamie Dutcher (picture 2 and 3) who lives among socialized wolves in a huge enclosure to study their pack lives (the pack was however artificially composed and therefore a bad obejct for a study on pack life, but it’s a very interesting documentary when it comes to see how wolves and humans can live side by side.)
And last, but not least: here are some pictures of socialized pure wolves. Non of these are considered pets.
