A website called First Dog Charlie went up on Saturday (April 6) purporting to show the new Presidential First Dog, a Portuguese Water Dog named “Charlie.” It sure looks like the same dog the Obamas were shown getting to know in a photo in the Washington Post on Easter Sunday. Apparently the Obamas wanted to delay the announcement until Tuesday, when the pup is supposed to move into the White House, but the event has generated so much attention worldwide that it was probably inevitable that the news would get ‘broken’ (or… housebroken?) before the due date.

The Post reports that the First Puppy is a gift from water dog-loving Senator Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts, and that the Obama daughters Sasha and Malia immediately re-named him “Bo.” Not “Beau,” which is a great name for a poodle and my family had just such a giant mutant mountain poodle too, once. Probably sounded too French. Seems that Michelle Obama’s father was known in-house by the fond knickname of “Diddly.” As in… Bo Diddly, get it?

Bo is primarily black, with a white chest, white paws and a white goatee. They call this “tuxedoed,” but basically he looks a lot like a parti poodle. In fact, poodles and Portuguese Water Dogs share an ancestry that dates well back into the time of the Teutonic tribes of northern Germany and rural Russia, when they were famed for their prowess at hunting, retrieving and… you guessed it… riding comfortably on boats of all description. In the provinces the dogs were bred and developed for hunting and in France, for warfare, while in Portugal they took to the sea along with their masters.

The tuxedoed look will no doubt come in handy for Bo in his job of being First Dog and in charge of meet-and-greets of various high level officials, ambassadors and leaders from all over the world.

Here’s to you, Bo! May your life with this lovely family be long and multi-storied.

Barack Obama has been elected to be the next President of the United States! And, as is a standard question for all newly elected Presidents with a lovely wife and children to share the White House with, Obama was asked what kind of puppy he was planning to get for the title of “First Dog.”

And yes, it’s going to have to be a dog, because 10-year old First Daughter Malia has allergies she can’t escape with a cat, but could easily avoid with just the right kind of dog. Plus, as Obama mentioned, the family is going to want a shelter puppy…

“But obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me,” said Obama, in an apparent self-depreciating reference to his mixed race heritage. “So whether we’re going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household.”

Yet a surprising number of shelter dogs are purebreds. We got our beloved giant mutant mountain poodle Beau (pictured at top) at our county’s animal shelter when he was 6 months old, and his pedigree was a whole lot more impressive than mine! A size-large standard poodle with your basic kennel cut would make a delightful First Dog!

And poodles are, among all dogs, among the few that are certifiably hypoallergenic. The list includes breeds like the Maltese, Bichon Frise, and Shih Tzus, but these are what my daughter calls “yapper punting dogs,” small enough to be utterly unimpressive in a mansion the size of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Even better, there are poodle rescue outfits out there right now with poodles to spare, and some of ‘em are already housebroken!

And if the Obamas are serious about a “mutt like me,” there are a wide variety of poodle crossbreeds invented mostly because a good percentage of them get the benefit of hypoallergenic hair so people with allergies can have a canine companion to love. There are the famous bred-to-be service dogs known as Labradoodles, and an amazing list of other crossbreeds your imagination can run with…

• Saint Berdoodle
• Scoodle (Scottish Terrier + Poodle)
• Eskapoo (for non-allergenic dog sled teams)
• Pugapoo
• Doodleman Pinscher (too scary for the White House!)
• English Boodle (this might be a winner, just for laughs…)

So my advice to the Obama family is to put your feelers out right now to the poodle rescue societies and be open to an interesting poodle ‘mutt’ that looks a whole lot like Winston Churchill!

In a previous post and subsequent short videos, we’ve looked at what service dogs can do for people, and a little bit about how they’re trained. Standard poodles are of course a favorite for the service sector due to their high intelligence and trainability, and also for their hypo-allergenic coats. The Australian Labradoodle was originally bred specifically for being service dogs, combining the best qualities of the best dogs.

Not every dog – poodle, labrador, shepherd – is cut out to be trained as a service dog, and most service dog training organizations have strict criteria by which puppies are judged, and programs for finding good homes for all the dogs that don’t quite make the grade for one reason or another. So I thought in this post we should look at the specific criteria used to choose the perfect dogs for training.

Assistance Dogs International, Inc. has a 12-point list of qualities that guides their training standards and ethics. These criteria are:

1. An Assistance Dog must be temperament-ally screened for emotional soundness and working ability.

2. An Assistance Dog must be physically screened for the highest degree of good health and physical soundness.

3. An Assistance Dog must be technically and analytically trained for maximum control and for the specialized tasks he/she is asked to perform.

4. An Assistance Dog must be trained using humane training methods providing for the physical and emotional safety of the dog.

5. An Assistance Dog must be permitted to learn at his/her own individual pace and not be placed in service before reaching adequate physical and emotional maturity.

6. An Assistance Dog must be matched to best suit the client’s needs, abilities and lifestyle.

7. An Assistance Dog must be placed with a client able to interact with him/her.

Items 8 through 12 are about the client and the organization’s responsibilities. American Poodles At Work [APAW] just offers its philosophy for training poodles as service dogs…

“We believe that assistance dogs should want to work, want to please. As such, we use praised-based methods of training, encouraging our dogs to learn more. We teach each dog to think and process the information, executing commands efficiently and without frustration no matter how daunting the task. By providing feedback (much like the child’s game of ‘Hot & Cold’), our dogs can quickly narrow down possibilities to make an appropriate decision.

Our puppy training starts the day pups are born, stimulating the neurons to enhance brain capacity. Once puppies are old enough to make conscious decisions (around 3 weeks of age), we start gently teaching behaviors that we want ingrained for life. By around 16 weeks our puppies have learned the basics of close to 60 commands, some of which are as reliable as an adult dog’s response.

Our dogs are raised together, but once they are older (6-12 months) certain pups may be placed with Puppy Parents who continue socializing them until the puppy is approximately 18-20 months old. At that point we bring the young adult back to brush-up on the skills they learned as a puppy, learn a few more advanced tasks, and be matched with a client for their ultimate career. However, the majority of our dogs stay at our facility with various overnight and weekend excursions with volunteer trainers through-out their adolescence.”

Puppies and dogs who don’t quite make the grade for one reason or another are still well trained, well maintained dogs that are likely to make wonderful pets. Most of the service dog organizations have ways to apply for a “released” dog, and there’s no real shortage of people interested. If you’re interested, check out the criteria at Assistance Dog Institute or contact any reputable service dog training organization. APAW offers a links page with a nice list.

Back when we’d first adopted our beloved Beau the black standard from the local animal shelter [A Poodle and His Clown] we were working as directors of a state funded after school program for at-risk and adjudicated young teenagers (12-14) at a local Jr. High school.

Beau was just 6 months old when we got him. He was about 9 months old when a volunteer from the local police force (good outreach) volunteered his time to help us with the kids. He turned out to be a great asset, kept most of the adjudicated kids out of trouble from then on by being their friend and mentor. One afternoon he brought a couple of beautiful German Shepherds – the ‘real’ shepherds that surprise people. Smaller than expected, low-slung in the rear. Seems he’d been promoted to K9 training and these were his babies. He’d trained dogs when in the military, our town was just starting a K9 program. His dogs were the same age as Beau, who as it happened had been to the vet that day so ended up at the school with us for the program that day.

We’d told our young policeman about Beau, of course, and he’d mouthed some platitude he’d learned in the Army about big poodles being excellent service/K9 dogs, but he’d never actually seen or met one. The moment he saw Beau – who was quite hairy at the time and already bigger than either of those shepherds – it was love at first sight. All that he’d heard about giant poodles suddenly clicked in his mind, and within 15 minutes he had Beau joining his pups in the “Obedience Show-Off Game.” He offered to include Beau in his training course for free, just wanted to work with him.

We politely declined, not really all that interested in having a K9 trained drug or attack dog around the house. But we were flattered, and our policeman friend went on to become a trainer for a service dog outfit (for disabled folks and search and rescue dogs in the civilian sector, said he wasn’t cut out to be a policeman anyway), finally did get to work with poodles, goldens, border collies and labs as well as shepherds. His dream job!

The thing that impressed us that day watching Beau play with those two extremely well-trained pups was how he took his cues from them on what the commands were and what they meant, and figured out for himself how to rig the system – with that impish poodle talent for doing something funny just for laughs, while at the same time beating those shepherds at their own game. Did I mention that poodles have big egos?

See, we aren’t good trainers. In fact, we generally don’t spend any time training our dogs. They’re expected to figure out what’s what using their own brains, and so far they always have. The poodles of course figure it out quickly (took Big Ras Bob exactly 2 hours to figure out exactly what we needed in a dog after walking into our home). They are that smart, and they do genuinely want to please. Plus, living with clowns is great fun for them – we always laugh at their jokes.

So yesterday I was surfing around for details and pretty pictures of standard poodles in training as service dogs. I happened upon a very cool blog from Dogviews, Roxi: Service Dog in Training. One recent post on that blog talks about the dog training methods of Cesar Milan – that guy with the popular “Dog Whisperer” television show on the National Geographic channel. Milan boasts that he “rehabilitates dogs, trains people.” Yet as Hansen points out in her blog post, he’s come in for a lot of criticism from professional dog trainers as well as some humane society spokespersons.

I’ve watched Milan’s show, and his methods are not materially different from those our policeman trainer used with his pups. He emphasizes body language and mind-dominance, which (along with generally reasoning with a dog smart enough to want to understand) is pretty much the ‘natural’ way of things for all the dogs we’ve ever owned and NOT formally trained. Dogs are smart, they want to love and be loved, and they want to have a real place in their family’s life.

Of course I’m quite sure there are dogs that don’t fit this profile, but I just don’t know them personally. To be our dog, you’ve gotta find a way to fit in, and our dogs have all managed that. The poodles have taken more interest in doing an actual job than the mutts have, but the mutts have their jobs as well – like letting us know when someone’s on the property and keeping deer out of the yard. They bark at bears too, but are smart enough not to try and chase ‘em away. At any rate, all dogs and dog breeds have their particular talents for which they were bred (or in the case of mutts, can pick and choose to display). And all individual dogs have their personalities and issues, just as people do.

It seems to me that to be a good trainer, you’ve also got to be a good “Dog Person” – able to connect and communicate with a dog on a real level the dog understands and respects. But then, it seems to me that Dog People need that skill all around, whether or not they actually do any serious dog training. A truly smart dog is going to do what his or her family requires and expects, will readily respond to body language, voiced disapproval and praise, and will organize for themselves how that translates by way of behaviors in home and out in public.

Do check out some of the links below to information about service dog training programs, and what they require of their dogs. One company – apparently quite successful – even teaches the dogs to read! And yes, they prize those standard poodles on that particular skill! I’ll be writing more about this training later, so stay tuned!

Links:

Assistance Dogs International

Assistance Dog Institute

American Poodles at Work

Canine Partners forLife

CPL TeamTraining: Marie and Showbo

Snowflake Foundation

National Service Dogs (Canada)

It was about six months after our beloved Uncle Bob had to be put down, all the way to summertime and our busy party and picnic schedule as clowns. We hadn’t intended to get another dog, as we had rescued a little-girl mutt puppy who had been unceremoniously dropped off on the road near our driveway. We actually live at the proverbial “end of the road,” bordering the National Forest where irresponsible people come to dump off their unwanted dogs, cats, puppies and kittens. I call it “Evil Stepfather Syndrome.”

They usually die of getting hit by a car, or of starvation, or end up getting shot when they raid a neighbor’s chicken coop or trash looking for something – anything – to eat. We’d kept this puppy because she was so small, and we were dog-less. Not like someone’s big old hound or Doberman that we’d rescue if we could and turn in to the shelter. You never know why people dump their dogs. And hounds will just follow their noses out of your life in no time anyway.

But my husband had picked up a newspaper for the County Seat where he was to be clowning at a big company picnic at a recreational park near the lake the following Saturday. He just wanted to see the advertised announcement, as the picnic was for the largest employer in the county.

Did I say this was a rural (total population: 38,000), Appalachian North Carolina county? One does not often see high-dollar dogs that aren’t some kind of coon or deer hound, fighting Pit Bull, junkyard mean Dobie or Shepherd, or the occasional old lady yapper dog (Pekingese, Chihuahua and such). My daughter has always jokingly referred to them as “punting dogs.” As opposed to hunting dogs, that is…

While leafing through the paper trying to find the ad, a picture popped right out at us. There in the weekly “Adopt-a-Pet” county animal shelter sidebar was a young, black, sad-looking hairy dog that looked suspiciously like a standard poodle. What the heck? We didn’t even know anyone in the county HAD such a swanky dog, much less that there was a homeless one pining away in a cage down at the shelter!

We tried for about five minutes to rationalize ourselves out of it. It’s a mini, the picture just looks standard. It’s a bad dog or it wouldn’t be in the pound. Maybe a biter. Or a cat-killer… it didn’t work, of course. If that was really a standard poodle we were duty-bound to get him out of that cage!

My hubby called the shelter and got some worker on the phone Friday night, asked if that was really a standard poodle. The worker said he thought so. Of course the next question was, “what the heck is he doing at the shelter?” The worker said he didn’t know. So hubby said he’d come to the shelter right after his clown gig the next day to check it out, and the worker said someone would stay until 2 p.m. to accommodate his schedule.

The person who stayed was the director of the shelter. My hubby walked in with full dress tramp clown costume, face, giant shoes and bowler hat, and asked to meet the poodle. Sure enough, there was this spectacular standard about 6 months of age, in a cage. Of all things (poods hate cages, we’ve had ‘em destroy entire clip shops that try it!).

He approached the dog gingerly, as we knew nothing about why he was in such dire straits. The director said the dog was vicious, would bite. He put his face close to the chain link so the dog could see and smell his makeup, then put his hand right up to it while looking that dog in the eyes. Beau’s eyes grew soft and he gingerly licked the hand and lowered his eyes, immediately having recognized a friend. So we took him home.

Turned out the lady who’d bought him (a $700 dollar, AKC registered poodle in a region where poodles don’t count) was paying the shelter extra every week to not kill him, telling them they had to find just “the right people” to give him to. She lived alone and had undergone serious back surgery, simply couldn’t keep up with him – he was a puller.

The shelter director said he knew as soon as my husband walked in with clown-face that we were “the right people” for this dog. Made it easy for us to take him right home that day. And we were never sorry. Beau raised another stray mutt and a couple of kittens too – he was a wonderful ‘Mom’, took the job seriously.

Beau is no longer with us, but we had him for 9 years. We’re now on the list for further rescues. Thought about volunteering to foster (keep homeless poodles until someone wanted them), but once they’re in our hearts how could we let go? I’ll keep you all up to date on how that’s going, and once again refer readers to the poodle rescue links below.

In view of this story, I’d also suggest contacting your area animal shelters in case they happen to get a poodle (and don’t know about poodle fostering). And don’t neglect to share your own rescue stories!

Poodle Rescue @ Standard Poodles USA

Florida Poodle Rescue

Poodle Rescue of New England

Coastal Rescue

Carolina Poodle Rescue

Norcal Rescue [Northern California]

Nebraska Rescue

We purchased only one poodle puppy in our long career of being “Poodle People.” That was Kenya, our female black. The rest were rescues, and we’re currently on the list for more. How we managed to end up with these beautiful, dearly beloved dogs makes for some fantastic stories.

It was 1986 when Uncle Bob came into our life. A good friend was driving her contractor husband’s pickup truck toward town from Jacksonville Beach in a driving rainstorm one non-descript north Florida afternoon. In those days Beach Boulevard had entire stretches of undeveloped woodland in between intensive gated community housing and apartment complexes, strip malls and such. Just across the bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway the vehicles ahead were slamming on their brakes and sliding in the water, so she slowed way down while trying to catch a glimpse of what was causing the panic.

You never know. It could have been deer in the road, maybe injured, already dead, or too frightened to get out of the way. Might have been a big ‘gator trying to get from one apartment complex’s bermed pond to one across the highway. There were 4 lanes of wet pavement with a grassy median between them. That’s where she focused, hoping whatever critters were stranded had at least made it safely there.

Then she saw them. Immediately put on her flashers and pulled off the road to the median shoulder. Two of the biggest, most beautiful black dogs she’d ever laid eyes on, romping and wrestling in the middle of the median as if they didn’t care one bit about the storm, the traffic, or the dangerous panic they were causing among drivers on both sides. Traffic was heavy and getting heavier on this 55 mph highway, they had little chance of getting wherever they belonged in one piece.

Heart pounding, hoping to get safely back in traffic before someone rear-ended the truck (two of her kids were in there), she jumped out, opened the tailgate and sternly ordered those dogs into the truck bed. They dutifully obeyed, smiling broadly and happy to go for a ride. She made a U-turn at the next intersection light and drove straight to our house, which was then suddenly very full of very large, very wet, very black, very male standard poodles.

We’d met some toy and miniature poodles in our lives, but never met anything like these guys. Our friend joked that these were what poodles look like before they get put in the dryer to shrink. We were plainly amazed. Our Jack Russell, Gnarly Ted, had died just the week before. We had a dog-shaped hole in our lives for sure, but these were obviously someone’s high-dollar purebreds. We agreed to keep one of them while our friend took the other, until we could track the owner down from the vaccination tags. We figured the vet clinic that had given the shots would know very well whose dogs these were.

We had Bob for a week before the owner came forward to claim them. He was about 6 or 7 months old, full of fun and energy, smarter than any animal we’d ever spent time with. He was well trained to the leash, but loved to romp on the sand and in the surf at the beach. Where our teenage son took him twice a day morning and evening. At first we thought maybe he volunteered so readily because the beautiful dog was a positive babe-magnet, but it quickly became clear he and Bob had fallen hopelessly in love with each other.

When we took him home to his ‘mother’ our son cried. He’d tried every argument he could think of for us NOT giving Bob back to that ‘other’ family. They didn’t look after him well. They didn’t care if he got run over. They didn’t deserve him… but of course, we had to take him back.

His ‘mother’ was a rich single mother who lived in a big house with her 10-year old daughter in one of the gated housing communities along Beach Boulevard, near where our friend had found the dogs. Bob was “the pup” she’d been given by her brother who owned the older poodle. He’d been set to stud, she got pick of the litter. She was trying to keep both dogs while her brother was overseas, but complained that they were completely unmanageable escape artists. While we were there we observed the young daughter’s treatment of Bob, which was disturbingly abusive. No wonder they kept running away, we thought. But we did our duty, and drove home without him.

A week later the lady called us. Said she would trade Bob (who she’d decided she just couldn’t keep) for a birthday party clown show for her daughter. Our son SkyPup immediately volunteered, even cancelled taping of his weekly children’s show on a local television station so he could do the gig. He’d made up his mind that it was his job to save Bob from an uncaring and abusive owner because he and Bob belonged together forever…

And so they did.

That’s how we got our first poodle, and there have been more. I’ve written about the rescue of Beau in another post. And I hope I’ll have another poodle rescue or two to report by the time I’m done reporting the ones that came before. Below are links to Poodle Rescue groups, and to Sandra’s rescue page over at Standard Poodles USA. Do check out some of the great poodle rescue stories linked there, and consider fostering or adopting a poodle or two yourself. They truly are the most amazing, most devoted, most intelligent dogs in existence!

Links:

Poodle Rescue @ Standard Poodles USA

Florida Poodle Rescue

Poodle Rescue of New England

Coastal Rescue

Carolina Poodle Rescue

Norcal Rescue [Northern California]

Nebraska Rescue