Rereading 's first response to your solution, I see it is basically the same solution I’ve illustrated. However just to be clear, unlike the picture, the capsule would need to touch the ground. A common misconception is that the capsule needs to engulf the character entirely. This is not true: You can position the capsule so it looks like a wolf on a stick with the “stick” just making through to the wolf’s back. (This does not need to be in the center either, it can be positioned through the wolf’s head and front legs with the tail end hanging out.)
Hence, there is no need to rotate the mesh 90°.
Then you have the option to create physics assets for the wolf or, as I’ve illustrated, add collision components to key joints so that the parts outside the capsule can return hit data and not go through walls and other barriers. Since you can add collision to the bones in UE4, no need to add collision in the 3D modeling program.