BURST
Bryton Bongard of Wahnapitae clearly loves his dogs, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
At the moment, they are nuzzling his hands, pant legs, pretty much anything they can get their snouts on. Admittedly, he’s come into their enclosure bearing treats — doling these out first to five pups, at no objection from the older dogs — but their interest can also extend to items that aren’t so edible, or shouldn’t be.
At one point, as he sprawls out on the grass with them, a dog sneaks in from behind to snatch his ball cap; later, I see two of them playing tug-of-war with it at the opposite end of the pen.
That might be salvageable, but other, pricier items have not been. “They ate two phones on me in the past month,” he casually relates, while navigating the furry swarm.
In the first instance, a female named Charlie “pick-pocketed” him, he says, and “proceeded to crunch the phone right in front of me.” The next time he threw a phone outside the fence while cleaning up bones inside the pen, “and one of the puppies stuck its head through, grabbed it, and started to chomp down on it.”
The phones were wrecked, but he doesn’t really care about that. He’s just glad he got them out of their jaws before a tooth punctured a battery, as that could have caused acid poisoning.
Trying to eat a phone may sound like a stupid thing to do, but Bongard’s canines are actually extremely intelligent, with perceptive abilities that can seem almost clairvoyant to those of us who lack them.
The day before my visit, Bongard and his wife welcomed their first child, a baby girl, into their lives. This was not lost on the dogs, whom they claim knew both when the baby was conceived and when she was ready to emerge.
“We figured out my wife was pregnant because one of the dogs, her favourite, was just rolling all over her one day, drooling, rubbing on her,” he says. “She was like, there’s no way he’s trying to scent-mark me without something going on, I’m going to run into town and get a test.”
It was positive.
A few days before her due date, the dogs seemed to know again that something was up. “They were all over her, giving her a bath, and the one dog licked her right in the belly button,” he says. “She’s like, ‘Can we go to the hospital? I think the baby’s coming out.’”
Their child was born later that night.
“I love it when dogs figure stuff out before we do,” he says.
Dogs range from 25 to 50 per cent wolf
All canines have better noses and ears than humans, plus an apparent sixth sense that allows them to pick up on hormones. Bongard’s dogs, however, are different from your average labradoodle or lapdog, or even a malamute or Malinois.
They don’t live indoors, and they don’t go to dog parks. They number 16, and they function as a pack. These are wolves — or part-wolves, at least — and that is the problem.
In Ontario, it is illegal to keep a wolf as a pet, even if it is a hybrid. Bongard says nearly all his mixes have been DNA tested by this point, and they range from 25 per cent wolf to 50 per cent wolf. None is a full-blooded wolf.
Still, he has been found in contravention of the law by the Ministry of Natural Resources and is now looking at a fine — which could be as high as $20,000, he says — along with the removal of all 16 of his wolf-dogs.
That’s on top of five pups, aged six weeks, that were already seized by the MNR earlier this year, even though they were still nursing.
“They said they were going to take them to a sanctuary,” he says. “I said, Why don’t you take the she-wolf at the same time? They said they didn’t have room for her and they would just bottle-feed them.”
Bongard says he has asked where the pups ended up, because he would like to know they are in good hands, but the ministry won’t tell him.
The MNR was not willing to divulge this information to The Star, either. Nor would the ministry speak to other questions we posed concerning the fate of the remaining hybrids in Bongard’s care.
“As this is an active case, MNR is unable to comment,” said spokesperson Sarah Fig in an email. “In general, it’s against the law to keep wild animals from Ontario as pets or to hold them in captivity. There are a few exceptions, which are carefully regulated under the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act.”
The most obvious exception is a wildlife rehab facility, but Bongard, who has some experience in this area, points out that sport hunters can also apply to have pens for coyotes and foxes in order to train dogs to pursue them.
Coyote Watch Canada, a non-profit advocating “positive human-wildlife coexistence,” says on its website that pressure from a dog-hunt lobby in 2023 prompted the Doug Ford government to open up more licensing opportunities for this kind of “bloodsport” activity.
“Once in captivity, with no way to escape, hundreds of hunting hounds and dogs are brought by their handlers inside the pens to ‘track’ down the captive wild animals,” the organization says. “Coyotes, foxes and rabbits are chased for hours, harassed, and often maimed or killed by the dogs.”
Bongard has seen this first-hand, having grown up in the countryside near Peterborough, among a family who kept hunting dogs and belonged to the Ontario Hound Association.
“We used to train dogs in pens and use them to run down coyotes, and anything that entered the pen would be eliminated as a threat and dumped in the swamp,” he says. “My family was nothing compared to others in the organization. There have been situations where hunters have dumped wolves into pens as a ‘training opportunity’ and then just shot them.”
The two-acre pen he has now at his rural property in Wahnapitae is really the antithesis of that. His wolf-dogs aren’t hunted or harassed, or expected to pull a sled or perform any other task. They aren’t a tourist attraction forced to endure endless oohs, aahs and Instagrams. They basically just hang out.
They are well-fed — mostly with meat scraps, although on this day they got four dozen eggs as a treat — and they have a shed in which to escape the elements, although in winter Bongard says they are just as happy to ball up in the snow.
“I got out of the (coyote-hunting) sport around 2017,” he says. “I was just done with it — I got tired of killing things. After I came here and heard about these dogs that were a species I knew, that might have something I understood in them, I thought I could use the skills I had learned to do something good rather than evil.”
Authorities got involved after 2024 barn fire
Bongard moved to the Sudbury area in 2020, settling at his rural property on Red Deer Lake Road North, not far from the city animal shelter. About a year later, a coworker told him about a friend of hers in the Worthington area who had a wolf.
“I kind of didn’t believe it, because who would have a wolf?” he recalls. “But I was like, okay, I’ll bite. She said this guy could use a hand building an enclosure and, in exchange, he would give me some wolf-dogs. I’m like, sounds good to me.”
Bongard had built lots of pens during his days running hounds and containing wildlife like foxes and coyotes, so it was old hat for him to pitch in on the fencing project. For his expert assistance, he came away with five puppies.
The mother, he says, was a bona-fide wolf that the Worthington man had acquired from a zookeeper in the Sault area. The fathers — the pups came from two different litters — had been falsely advertised online as wolves. To his eyes, they looked like Pyrenees-malamute combos.
Not long after Bongard got his wolf-something pups, someone complained to the MNR about the Worthington man’s wolf. Officials eventually swept in to seize her and eight offspring, for transport to a sanctuary in Alberta, he says.
Meanwhile, his own pack had expanded. “I bred them with other dogs, which drops the percentage of wolf in them,” he says.
The idea, he maintains, was never to make money, even though there is significant demand for dogs of wolf extraction, or ones you could pass off as full-blooded wolves, in part because shows like Game of Thrones and Yellowstone have driven up interest in the species.
“There’s been no puppy mill here or anything like that,” he says. “I separated them every year in breeding season, even ones that were fixed, because the females get into loud squabbles and the neighbours would think they were trying to kill each other.”
The wolf-dogs aren’t invited inside his house, but they do have a couple of outbuildings they can utilize. The bigger one is heated in winter, and Bongard runs fans in summer to keep them cool; the other is more of a lean-to where they can get some shade and respite from snow or rain.
“The enclosure cost me about $30,000 — the fences are eight-feet-high, and go three feet into the ground so they can’t dig out,” he says. “But I don’t make any profit from them.”
He’s never sold a puppy, he says, nor does he charge hundreds of dollars for a wolf experience — as do some other places, including a resort/wildlife centre in the Timmins area.
“It’s just appealing to me to have these dogs that I can look at and be with,” he says. “No matter how bad your day has been, when you come home, they’re just happy to be there and see you.”
Bongard also had a barn that he previously used to separate his canines — when the females went into heat, for instance — but it burnt down in January of last year.
Some of his wolf-dogs were in this structure when the blaze occurred, but he was able to rush out and rescue them. He and his wife sadly lost two pigs and nine goats, along with two husky-mix dogs, which was devastating. But he was relieved that he at least got the wolf-dogs out.
“That was the silver lining,” he says. “At least they were safe. And then everything went sideways.”
A few days after the fire, he got a visit from an animal control officer. Firefighters had noticed the unusual canine collection behind his house, he says, so may have passed this on to bylaw officials. It’s also possible a concerned citizen reported him, although he says he has not heard any complaints from neighbours, and has never tried to keep what he’s doing particularly secret.
“The enclosure is in the middle of a field — it’s not subtle,” he says. “It’s not like I’m trying to hide it from anybody.”
The bylaw officer didn’t find much wanting from an animal welfare perspective — “they basically said everything is good,” he says — but a couple of weeks later, MNR officers arrived.
‘The dogs don’t need to die – it’s not their fault’
That was over a year ago now, and Bongard has been in court a few times since, while also working with the ministry on a plan for the future of his semi-wild animals.
All are now spayed and neutered, and he has accepted that he won’t be able to keep them much longer, heartbreaking as that feels. At this point, he just wants to make sure they go to a good place where they can remain as a unit and be treated humanely.
“Punish me, don’t punish the animals,” he says. “It’s not their fault what they are.”
His hope has been that they could be transported to the same sanctuary in Alberta that took in the Worthington man’s canines. But he worries now that his dogs could be euthanized, based on more recent communication with both the MNR and the refuge facility.
The latter told him they don’t have the space currently to house his dogs; they are busily fundraising to expand their enclosures, he says, but are still shy about $300,000.
The ministry, meanwhile, has begun to use more ominous and vague language, telling him that “some” of his dogs will be taken to a sanctuary, without telling him where, let alone which of the dogs will be making this trip.
“About a month ago, they said we have to wait and see how we are going to properly dispose of your dogs,” he says. “I was like, what does that mean, guys? Because in no way does ‘properly dispose’ sound to me like they are going anywhere near a sanctuary.”
Bongard didn’t raise any public fuss for a long time, hoping quiet co-operation with the MNR would ensure the best future for his animals.
Once the fear set in that they could be put down, however, he put up a sign on his gate stating: “Please help save our dogs.” That led to concerns being shared on social media and a flood of supportive texts and phone calls coming his way.
“I’ve had more people coming to visit the dogs now than I ever have in my life,” he says.
One of them is Kassandra Belanger, who reached out to The Star to suggest we look into the issue.
“I live in Wahnapitae as well, and my interest is protecting these wolves,” she says. “I feel the MNR is abusing their power, as they are supposed to protect animals and not put down animals who have done absolutely nothing.”
Belanger says she has gotten to know Bongard and believes he has done a good job of caring for the canines, which, in her view, don’t pose a huge threat to the public. “I’ve met these wolves and they’re very well-behaved,” she says. “They’re like dogs.”
Prior to meeting the pack, she had driven by numerous times and “assumed they were just sled dogs,” she says. From her understanding, no one in the area had any issue with them, but “someone must have made a malicious complaint.”
Bongard and his wife are “super popular in Wahnapitae,” she adds. “Like, everyone knows these people. They’re far out into the bush, so it’s not like they’re in town, and they’ve had these wolves for years.”
She says the couple has done “everything the MNR has asked them to do” since conservation officers got involved, including parting with five pups and ensuring all the remaining wolf-dogs are fixed. She feels it would be a betrayal at this point if any of them got euthanized, particularly after they were given the impression that another home would be found for them.
“I reached out to (Sudbury) MP Viviane Lapointe and she directed me to the provincial person, so I’ve also emailed them,” she says. “I’ve posted everywhere, so now this is becoming viral. We need the public to start taking notice of this.”
Bongard says ideally the animals could simply stay on his property — he has offered to expand the pen and make other enhancements to meet whatever rules are required for sanctuary status, or even to just extend his time with them until another arrangement is made — but at this point the fight isn’t really about that.
“It’s not even about keeping them now,” he says. “I know I broke the rules, and the ministry is just doing their jobs, I get that. But the dogs don’t need to die for punishment — it’s not their fault. I’ll be the villain; I’ll pay the fine. Just tell me where my dogs are going and that they’re in a safe place. That’s all that matters.”