The Personality of Poodles

“They say poodles aren’t ‘real’ dogs. At least, that’s what I tell motel desk people when we’re on the road with our Imperials and they say dogs aren’t allowed. It almost always works. In truth, their intelligence is amazingly human-like. They learn quickly, are highly creative, and love to be stars.”

That’s from the ‘About’ page of this blog. It describes something every ‘Poodle Person’ knows, and it’s honestly isn’t that difficult to convince other people – like your average motel desk clerk – that it’s true.

For a young guy being set up with a blind date, ‘personality’ isn’t necessarily a strong recommendation. Parents attempting to deal with a high-energy, short attention span child who might be better off on Ritalin, ‘personality’ can be a descriptive defense mechanism. The word itself contains the noun ‘person’, which does seem fairly exclusive to human beings. Yet poodles are famous for having personality to spare.

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Working Poodles: What They’re Best At

I’ve spoken a bit about how our family troupe of circus-style performers happened to be gifted with a standard poodle and fall so in love with him that we’ve had standard poodles as members of the family – and the troupe – ever since. I’ve even posted about one of our most successful poodle acts, Championship Poodle Wrestling.

But poodles weren’t actually bred to be delightful performers of tricks on command under the big top (or on the Riverwalk). Poodles originally appeared in Germany rather than France, working in the swamps as water dogs trained to retrieve fallen birds for hunters. They may have developed from rugged Asian herding dogs, and still make excellent herders today. Captured by the Berbers of North Africa, they also held a reputation as lion hunters with excellent tracking skills.

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Poodles and Cancer: Is this breed-specific?

Three years after what was left of my family moved to our mountain in North Carolina following the tragic death of our son and business partner SkyPup, we lost Uncle Bob the Poodle to systemic cancer. He’d been with us for 9 years as a certified member of our family as well as our family entertainment troupe.

It broke our hearts, even though we still had Kenya, our female black with the improbable registered name of “Kenya Queen Reba Amelia E.” – our Flying Poodle. She was 5 years younger than Bob, purchased from a breeder in Savannah as a mate for Bob (in hopes we could pay for haircuts with occasional puppy litters). We’d wanted to make especially sure their bloodlines were not closely related, having researched the issue of interbreeding and prevalent cancer and not wanting to make that mistake.

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Championship Poodle Wrestling

Our poodles have all been big dogs. In the Imperial range, they weighed in at between 60 and 80+ pounds of well-shaped critter. Despite their reputation for intellectual prowess and high-dollar doggie superiority, poodles are like any other dog when it comes to having fun… they love to play.

And anyone who has ever owned and loved a big dog will tell you, wrestling with their masters – in the grass or just on the living room floor – is one of the most favored forms of play. Because we were already show-folk when we were gifted with our first standard poodle, the next step was entirely predictable.

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