Legendary breeder, handler, and judge Anne Rogers Clark captured the Poodle’s personality beautifully:

“Poodles are Labrador Retrievers with a college education. My Poodle will do anything your Lab will do. After a day of retrieving in the field, your Lab wants to curl up and snore in front of the fire. My Poodle wants to be a fourth at bridge and tell naughty stories!”

Karen Healy might have agreed. In a November 14, 2002, interview in the San Diego Reader, the then-owner of the Exotic Pooch grooming shop in Pacific Beach recalled a bumper sticker that read, “Poodles aren’t dogs, they’re poodles.” She added: “They really are different than other dogs. They think more like humans. They’re very, very smart.”

That is an owner’s affectionate assessment, of course, but anyone who has shared a home with a Poodle may recognize the sentiment.

We already know that Poodles are capable hunting dogs, and that Standard Poodles have competed in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Their résumé also includes wartime work: Poodles from Pillicoc Kennels helped launch the Dogs for Defense effort during World War II, and the breed served in domestic sentry roles. Not quite the career one might expect from a dog so often dismissed as decorative.nationalpurebreddogday+3

But “confidence artist”?

An old anecdote places an enterprising shoeshiner near the Pont Neuf in Paris, where he supposedly discovered that a clever Poodle could be very good for business. According to the story, he taught his dog to roll in the mud and then plant its dirty feet on the shoes of passersby.

“Oh no!”

How fortunate, then, that a young man with a brush and a shoe-polishing kit was standing nearby.

The customer acquired clean shoes, the shoeshiner acquired another paying customer, and the Poodle stood to one side, presumably looking like a dog who could not imagine how such a thing had happened.

When the customer left, business development resumed.

It is a wonderful story, though we might file it under historical anecdote rather than verified incident. The appeal lies in the partnership: a person devises the scheme, and a dog learns its part. Some might say the Poodle is not the criminal mastermind here. It is simply the employee with excellent training and questionable management. We’re not so sure.

For a more respectable addition to the breed’s working résumé, Versatility in Poodles, Inc., reports that Poodles have participated in police K9, drug-detection, and forensic-dog work. Its overview doesn’t name the individual dogs or document their assignments, so we want to investigate further before we attach specific accomplishments to them. But nothing would surprise us about this multi-dimensional breed. The documented record already gives us plenty to admire: retrieving, sled racing, and wartime sentry work, all beneath a coat that too often distracts people from the dog wearing it.

Perhaps that is the Poodle’s most successful confidence trick: persuading the uninitiated that it is merely ornamental.

Meanwhile, there is a bridge game to organize.

Image: Poodles at dog show collecting gossip about another dog.  Just saying. Photo by © Natallia Yaumenenka/Dreamstime