Well, sort of. In southern Oregon, there is a breeder who has spent 30 years creating a new sort of dog she calls the American Alsatian. The puppies are astonishingly cute, and they grow up to be tall, broad, golden-eyed and quite wolfy-looking. And, Lois Schwarz hopes, they are on their way to looking just like the actual dire wolves that roamed the Americas during the last Ice Age, hunting bison and other megafauna, before going extinct.
Schwarz is the founder of the Dire Wolf Project, an endeavor that predated both the “Game of Thrones” books and series — a show she calls “very, very smart,” although she dislikes the sex and darkness. Inspiration struck her decades before, in the late 1980s — an era when wolf-dog hybrids were hot and Schwarz wanted large dog with the character of a lap dog. She had bred and trained dogs for some time, and she said she knew that even if people thought they wanted a wolf, they really didn’t. (Wolves and hybrids make infamously terrible pets.)
