Standard Poodle

We never had a clue that Curls was a natural retriever until he showed up on the porch one day with a bird in his mouth. We have since discovered that the Poodle breed are great water dogs and retrievers and we were just ignorant. We rescued him from a local shelter, and didn't know a thing about the breed's traits.

Unfortunately for the retriever in him, we don't hunt. But we knew we could work with and accentuate his inborn love for water. We have a good-sized natural pond on our property, so we decided to build a small dock so we could walk out into the center and see if we could teach him to jump in and retrieve.

It didn't take any time at all and almost no 'teaching' to get Curls into his new game. Once we saw how much he loved it, we made several fowl-like decoys and rigged up a fowl 'thrower' to shoot these decoys over the water. He is absolutely crazy about this game and will literally 'beg' us to play. If we are busy with something, he'll find one of his decoys and bring it to us, swat us with it if necessary to get our attention, just to drop the hint. He'd play that game all day if we'd let him.

We've even had a few friends bring their dogs over and have enticed them into a friendly game of competitive distance jumping and timed retrieving. It's one of the fun things of summer that we really look forward to. Curls is the reigning champion and star of these summer games and has quite a reputation locally, even getting a small article in our local paper.