Poodle Resources

Standard Poodles generally do well with other animals. They are sociable by nature, they were bred to work cooperatively alongside people and other dogs, and they carry very little of the terrier-style drive to chase and kill small things. “Generally” is doing some work in that sentence, though. Most of what determines whether your poodle … Read more

Color is usually the first thing people ask us about and, we would gently suggest, the last thing that should decide which puppy you take home. But it is a fair question, the information out there is patchy, and some of it is actively misleading. Here is the honest version. The solid colors Black The … Read more

We are in Morganton, in the Burke County foothills of North Carolina. A good number of our families are not. Over the years puppies have gone to homes across the Southeast and well beyond, and the question of how a puppy physically gets from our house to yours comes up in nearly every first conversation … Read more

This is the article we most hope you never need, and the one we most want you to read anyway. Bloat kills healthy dogs. Not old dogs, not sick dogs – a dog that was fine at dinner can be in serious trouble by bedtime and dead by morning. It is one of the few … Read more

Standard Poodles are usually ranked among the two or three most trainable breeds in the world, and the ranking is deserved. They learn fast, they want to work with you, and they will pick up a new cue in a handful of repetitions. What nobody mentions is that this cuts both ways. A dog that … Read more

Feeding a Standard Poodle puppy is not complicated, but there are two or three ways to get it meaningfully wrong, and they are the ways that cause lasting damage rather than a bad week. Here is what we feed, what we send home, and what we tell every family at pickup. Start By Not Changing … Read more

Most Standard Poodles live somewhere between 12 and 15 years. Plenty reach 16. A few make it past that. For a dog this size, that is genuinely good. Large breeds tend to be short-lived, and the general rule is that the bigger the dog, the fewer the years – a Great Dane is doing well … Read more

Standard Poodles shed very little. That part of the reputation is earned, and it is genuinely one of the best reasons to choose the breed. But “barely sheds” gets heard as “low maintenance,” and those two things are close to opposites in a poodle. The hair that a Labrador leaves on your sofa is hair … Read more

Waitlists are one of the most common sources of confusion between breeders and families, and occasionally of real frustration. Different breeders run them very differently, and the word itself tells you almost nothing about how any particular one works. So here is ours, start to finish, with the actual numbers. Step 1: You Send an … Read more

Almost every family we send a puppy home with asks about crate training, and a fair number arrive slightly apprehensive about it. The word “crate” sounds like a cage, and putting an eight-week-old puppy in a cage feels wrong. We understand the instinct. It is also worth getting past, because a crate-trained dog has somewhere … Read more