Whenever someone talks about seeing a coyote in a densely populated area, they are met with the inevitable question, “Are you sure it wasn’t a dog?” The answer is usually short on details, but long on emphasis: “It didn’t look like a dog.” But of course a coyote looks like a dog. Just not exactly.
One commonly cited difference is that a coyote has longer legs than a dog. I’ve used that description myself, but always felt a bit insecure. “Longer legs” is not entirely accurate. A coyote is somewhat longer than it is tall, just like a typical dog.
No, a coyote doesn’t actually have legs any longer than a dog’s. But there is an unmistakable impression of “legginity” in a coyote.
After thinking about it for a while, I realized what it was. A coyote’s “elbow” is below his breastbone line, and a dog’s “elbow” is higher than his breastbone. (There are rare exceptions, but I’ll come back to that.)
A German Shepherd is a fairly typical domestic dog, and one that looks superficially similar to a coyote, but look closely. Like most domestic dogs, the shepherd’s “elbow” joints are much higher than the bottom line of his chest. Even a decidedly uncoyote-like dog, like a Boston terrier, has “elbows” higher than the sternum. The same goes for just about every dog I’ve ever tested (with a few exceptions, which I’ll come back to). A picture of a coyote clearly shows the “elbow” well below the lower chest line.
Now why is this? Is the coyote’s humerus proportionally longer than the dog’s? It may be so. But for field identification purposes, it is not really necessary to take precise measurements.
Look very closely at pictures of coyotes and dogs, and you’ll see that the real difference is that the dog’s chest is proportionately deeper than the coyote’s.
The same goes for other wild canids. Domestic dogs have deeper chests than foxes, wolves, or jackals.
The gray wolf is the most equivocal of the wild canids in this regard. A gray wolf’s chest is slightly deeper than a coyote’s, and its elbow joint is almost level with the bottom line of its chest. This can be quite difficult to distinguish when the wolf has long fur, as it often does.
But here’s a pretty good rule of thumb: A domestic dog’s elbow is higher than his chest, and a wild dog’s elbow is at or below his chest line.
What about those exceptions I mentioned earlier? There are two, sighthounds and “primitive” domestic dogs.
In most sighthounds, the elbow joint is actually lower than the lower line of the chest. Obviously, this is not a question of having a shallow chest. Sighthounds have proportionally longer humerus bones than other dogs. Still, no one is going to mistake a greyhound for a coyote.
“Primitive” dogs also often have the elbow joint lower than the chest. They retain the same proportions of chest depth and leg bone length as their gray wolf ancestors.
Fortunately, most early dogs are strikingly different from coyotes in other ways. Most “pariah” dogs are yellow, and many also have floppy ears and/or curly tails, something coyotes and other wild canids never have. And these primitive dogs are very rare in North America, where coyotes live, and you’ll never see one roaming free.
The next time you think you see a coyote, try to get a good view of the front legs and see where the “elbow” joint is. A coyote has a very “leggy” look that comes from a shallow chest.
