Hello fellow wolf owners. So i got my baby husky last week, but while i love him and already would protect it with my life, i'm not sure if he is pure or not. I met his mom and dad, and while the dad is for sure 100% husky, his mom could be mixed, since her snout is longer and she looks shorter compared with the average husky. Also, my husky has a smaller distance between his eyes if you compare to other puppies and while he is almost 10 weeks old, the ears are still floppy. The first image is my puppy named Arthas, the second is his dad and the third is his mom. What you guys think?

Honestly, at 10 weeks you could stick most any ball of fur up there and ask if it's <pick your breed> and someone's gonna say "Yep, sure is!"   Over the course of the next few months you're going to see so many changes you'll sometimes wonder if "this" is the same dog you got as a puppy.  They'll change size, of course, and color and markings ...

While all three of the dogs in your picture look to me as if they're longer furred, they don't look like woolly's.

So, does he look like a Husky ... as much as any other 10 week old husky will.

ETA: The question was "Is he pure?" The only way you're going to know for sure is to run a DNA test on him. Even if he has paperwork that shows him to be pure back to umpteen generations, the paperwork is only as good as the breeder who bred them.

aljones wrote:

Honestly, at 10 weeks you could stick most any ball of fur up there and ask if it's <pick your breed> and someone's gonna say "Yep, sure is!"   Over the course of the next few months you're going to see so many changes you'll sometimes wonder if "this" is the same dog you got as a puppy.  They'll change size, of course, and color and markings ...

While all three of the dogs in your picture look to me as if they're longer furred, they don't look like woolly's.

So, does he look like a Husky ... as much as any other 10 week old husky will.

ETA:  The question was "Is he pure?"  The only way you're going to know for sure is to run a DNA test on him.  Even if he has paperwork that shows him to be pure back to umpteen generations, the paperwork is only as good as the breeder who bred them.

Gotcha. And what about the ears? His ears are pretty big, so is normal that they're still floppy? Or i could be worried?

As a puppy, his ears are going to go up and down ... maybe one'll be up then the other then both, then neither ... the only certainty (sorta) is that they'll drop when he's teething then when they come back up after that they'll generally stay up.

At 10 weeks old i could convince you spider was a purebred husky. And my neighbor adopted a shep husky mix only to dna test it and.... purebred agouti siberian husky and no gsd. But i second the dna test if your concerned.

A comment that I'll be glad to let others disagree with ... dad looks like a fluffy husky, mom on the other hand looks more like a malamute (note the ears on both)

The ears and bar mask suggest there could definitely be Malamute in the mom to me, but when you are dealing with out-of-standard huskies, anything could pop up. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "she looks shorter". If that is in further reference to her snout that makes sense, but if she looks shorter in reference to her actual size (height) then it's possible it's not Mal and instead might have Samoyed diluting her height. As Al has already mentioned, papers don't equal pure necessarily. When purchasing from a quality breeder you should be in the safe zone but AKC does not actually check to make sure that the papers of parents registered are actually genetically the parents of the pups being sold, so if a breeder has a couple papered dogs they could always say they are the parents, even if they had another breed on premises that could have been the actual father.

As for the eye distance, malamutes have pretty broad heads structurally so it can make their eyes look somewhat close together but there isn't really a lot of difference in the distance ratio between malamutes and huskies. Some huskies have wide set eyes due to breeding or an illusion caused by the mask type they display but good quality dogs of both breeds tend to have a narrower eye set.

If you paid big money for the dog and it was sold to you as a pure then it would be worth a DNA test, but outside of that or general curiosity there's not really any differences between the two possible breeds health wise (a little bit temperament wise, but minimal) that you would benefit from knowing if he is mixed. Size wise, he will probably fall somewhere between the two parents in size. Both breeds are slow to mature, so he'll be somewhere between 3-5 years old before he starts to mellow, but every dog is different.

It's hard to say. I would agree with Al's comment that one is very malamute looking (to me). You can order an embark test, as embark is the most reliable for breed identification. However embark does have a threshold that I believe was recently updated to 15% now, so if your dog is at least 85% of one breed and 15 or under of one other breed, it'll just show purebred.