#I've found a few good poodle breeders that I like

[watching-constellations]

Huh. My medical team actually thinks that a service dog is a good idea for me, and they filled out the medical forms I need to be approved to train with an organization. They had all the forms filled out within two hours of me sending them. They didn't question my final decision to pursue training a service dog. Not even for one single second. Wild. I guess we're doing this.

[followthebluebell]

Can I ask you, as someone else who seems to be more of a cat guy, your experiences with Truffle? I’m considering a Spoo for my next dog and am trying to get a feel for whether or not one would work for me (and my cat guy spouse). I’m mostly wondering about energy levels because someone saying “moderate energy” or “high energy” doesn’t give me a whole of expectations as to how much and how intense exercise I’d be looking at to keep the dog satisfied which is important living in an apartment with a cat. I really like the trainability of the poodle and work in grooming so even if I didn’t want to do it myself, I have trusted people to do it for me so that’s no issue. I mainly want a companion I can take on hikes and to restaurants/brewpubs on the weekends who won’t eat my other pets. Just trying to gather as much perspective as possible before jumping in :)

Honestly I think spoos are the world's most perfect dog. I'm only a little biased in this absolute concrete fact. I'm not sure I could have any other breed of dog at this point.

I think Truffle is a medium energy dog. He's fairly active; we used to go on five mile hikes three days a week, but have since petered down to 1.5-2. On days we don't hike, we usually play fetch or flirt pole for like 30 minutes.

He also loves days where he does absolutely nothing, which really highlights my next point:

I don't think energy levels are as important in a dog as a good off switch is. Even if we've done absolutely nothing, Truffle won't tear up my house or try to eat my cats. I think a lot of this is just genetic, tbh. I looked specifically for breeders who titled their dogs for obedience and agility AND raised their dogs in their home because I wanted a dog that was smart, healthy, and had a good, solid basis for home living. A few dogs in Truffle's pedigree have hunting titles as well, but there's not really much of a delineation between hunting lines and show lines in poodles.

Mental exercise plays a much bigger role than physical exercise. We train daily for around 30-40 minutes--- I think that's a bigger requirement than just physical exercise. It's definitely something he's way more into and tends to tire him out more.

He's not a super cuddly dog. He likes to be BY me, but not ON me. This is great for me because I get touched-out easily, especially by a large dog. He's just unobtrusive, which was ideal for a service dog. He's not running around trying to be everyone's friend. He's just aloof towards strangers.

TBH the biggest issue I have with standard poodles is their tendency towards pickiness about food. Truffle's on a vet prescription diet due to stone formation and it can be a fucking pain to get him to eat sometimes. I've recently found a new hack (he really loves pumpkin) but I know in my heart that it's going to lose efficacy at some point and I'll have to try something new.

Like i said, I think he's the perfect dog for me. He's happy to go out on a hike and look for cool lizards, but he's equally happy to curl up on the couch and snooze as long as he also gets to do some trick training. He's very chill with the cats and treats strangers as a curiosity rather than a compulsion. He's a lovebug without being overly cuddly and needy.

[grison-in-space]

Man, sometimes I want to challenge dogblr to Find Three Programs You Like when (serious) arguments about what kinds of dogs are good and which kind are awful come up.

For example, I was totally out there kvetching that Clumbers are the worst several months ago--and then I think it was @fjordfolk ? someone posted a working Clumber screenshot from Crufts and I found out that there's this whole British organization breeding Clumbers that actually look like pretty decent dogs. Not my cup of tea, but I can totally get why they might be just exactly what someone else would LOVE. Here's three breeders whose programs I can seriously respect. Are there things I would like them to do differently or better? Sure. But I like all of them. As a bonus, because the British working people appear to rarely advertise their damn dogs online, all three are North American breeders--ie, exactly the people who DON'T have access to that neat organization. (One is essentially in my back yard, even.)

Okay, but Clumbers are kind of a punchline to dog nerds... but not to anyone else, because they're a very uncommon breed, not one that's aimed at a popular audience. What about doodles? If a friend of mine approached me and said, I want a Labradoodle, medium sized to large, to be my rowdy kid's pet and occasional hiking buddy, what would I say? Where would I point them?

I've never bothered looking for a doodle breeder before, so it took me a minute to find the ALAA (that's the Australian Labradoodle Association of America), which has some pretty great metrics for its breeders and an open studbook allowing purebred Poodle, Cocker, and Labrador outcrosses to boot. They require hip and elbow testing at bare minimum and offer special labels for breeders that also do a wide range of other health testing. Here are a few I liked. And honestly I could have looked for a lot longer; I stopped mostly because this is already getting long, but I found a lot of people doing pretty well.

Doing stuff like this lets me get a quick and dirty sense for what kinds of things are actually happening in breed communities I'm not part of. Turns out it's really easy to find a doodle breeder that health tests out the nose, but harder to find one that does formal temperament evaluations; I picked the ones I did because they emphasize CGCs or therapy dog statuses. That strikes me as pretty common for lapdog and companion oriented breeds, though, and it's not like conformation showing is an option in that community. By contrast, the thing I struggled with on Clumbers was not titling--as far as I can tell pretty much everyone breeding Clumber Spaniels is involved with showing and often, at least in the upper Midwest, also hunting--but emphasis on healthy conformation. I saw a few breeders loudly proclaiming that Clumbers are just built loosely so a certain amount of fair hip sockets are okay (??) and more than a few producing dogs with much looser, droopier eyelids than I like to see.

I think as dog nerds, it's very easy to both be negative about dogs we don't like and also to be wary about praising breeders that seem okay, lest someone come in and tell us that our ethics are loose and our morals impaired. Especially for those of us who work in pet care, also, it's easy to see the most problematic dogs and generalize them to entire groups because a) they're the ones causing issues and are therefore memorable, and b) they're probably being owned by people whose animal care is otherwise problematic, and it's easy to imagine that those people would somehow handle things better if they had a different sort of dog. Unfortunately that is not how humans actually work.

But like I said earlier this week, I like cattle dogs. I can tell you immediately where the problems are in my breed, and what I was looking for two years ago when I started seriously looking at breeders. It's scary for a new person to navigate, especially since people are often really wary of publicly praising breeders because the criticisms come flowing thick and fast. But this is a bad way to treat dog fancy and ethical dog production. For one thing, it plays right into the hands of animal rights activists who think that there's no responsible way to breed dogs, and that way lieth there being no dogs at all for anyone. For another, it makes finding breeders inaccessible to the very same new people you want to find better dogs in the first place! So let's try something different. Let's try practicing finding three good programs before we levy criticisms: if nothing else, the exercise of finding those good problems will tell us a lot more about what is really out there than our assumptions, and it will also tell us what voices need to be boosted to help make those spaces better too.

[doberbutts]

re; doodles, they are likely never going to be the dog for me, but they're fine imo.

I see 3 or 4 types of doodles

cash grab breeders. These obviously exist in all areas of dog breeding, but they must be acknowledged all the same.

Hypo breeders. Breeders who think they are improving the animals by introducing hair coats to the equation. These are perhaps on the first steps towards actual good ethics, but imo often miss the mark.

Sturdy Dog breeders. people who breed burnadoodles and other cart/working dog crosses. Usually with some sort of hypo service dog in mind. Perhaps not doing everything I want in a breeder, but still better than 1 or 2.

cobberdogs et al breeders. The first doodles were an attempt to create a working guide dog with a hair coat because it was found that -most- poodles don't mind running their handler into things like labs and goldens but there are blind people with dog allergies. This has resulted thus far in a few 'new breeds' or breeds in development such as the Cobberdog. These dogs are bred with service in mind, but those who don't make it as service dogs are often career changed to family pets or sports dogs. These people care a lot about the health and characteristics of the dogs they are breeding.

There is, of course, nuances to be made all the way along and I also don't get why someone would want a /doberdoodle/ that just sounds like an oxymoron to me. But I can see my way around a few of the mixes.

But in the end, not my pony not my race.

As said I just don't get it. People can do what they want, I just don't understand because even #4 is easily solveable with "just breed poodles that do not do this" because dog genetics and genetic temperaments are so moldable that if you want to breed a poodle for a specific temperament trait you can easily just. Do that. There are a number of guide orgs that exclusively use poodles and do exactly that. Why not support those, with the guarantee of a coat that's more friendly to allergy sufferers, instead of a diceroll mixed bag of traits that you won't even know if you succeeded on the allergy thing until the dog is old enough to start shedding?

It's not a moral issue for me. I genuinely don't care. I just don't understand why this is such a popular thing when genuinely most people I've spoken to just want a poodle.