Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

My family decided it wanted a dog.

The dog of our dreams was neither flatulent nor obese, rabid nor narcoleptic. A dog neither too intense nor too slack, too homely nor too beautiful. Not so human that it was hopelessly neurotic nor so canine that it was unsuited to human company. Not so oversexed that it whimpered at the sight of your cuff swishing past, nor so neutered it just wanted to sit under the almond tree, like Ferdinand the bull, and smell the flowers.

Our primary consideration was my wife Rachel's and my son Jonathan's allergies. (My daughter Daniele and I aren’t allergic.) So we narrowed our choice to the class of non-shedding dogs. There are only a handful, and they are mostly breeds known for dignity, industry, and valor.

We knew that you can’t really buy a dog based on the dog itself. Particularly if the dog is young. All puppies are adorable, and you will want to take them home, even if it’s guaranteed they will grow up to be bullmastiffs or chows.

No, breed is important. The breeders and groomers and owners we talked to all agreed that the key to understanding an individual animal is knowing about the breed. Why does Buster, or Patches, or Cassandra do such and such? Buster is a boxer. Patches is a Bedlington. Cassandra is a Lhasa Apso.

Our strong preference was to establish the breed we wanted, then wait until a dog of that breed appeared in the pens of the Humane Society. After all, we had seen over a hundred breeds come through there – how hard could that be?

But there were problems. First, non-shedding dogs weren’t showing up in large numbers at the local Humane Society. The few that were, were of the miniature varieties, which we didn’t want, and which were quickly adopted by someone else.

Second, you could not test a non-shedding dog at the Humane Society for sneezing, because the place was so saturated with the air and hair of the twenty thousand dogs that had preceded the test dog. Rachel and Jonathan could not even enter the doors of the place. We took a schnauzer for a walk outside to get a clearer sense of it. It had Rachel and Jonathan sneezing their brains out in a minute. We couldn’t take it home for a test drive, bathe it, and stand around smelling it, either – rules being rules.

So adopting one of the doomed dogs Daniele and I had walked wasn’t going to work out. The search would therefore be more difficult. And more expensive.

But I was sanguine about this. All I asked was a breed whose dignity and bearing mirrored the seriousness of my own station in life.

So we got a poodle.

The American Lionhound

The standard poodle is a misunderstood breed. In Minnesota, where we live, there are only about eleven of them, and they don’t know one another. People evidently feel it’s best to keep them spaced apart.

Most people, hearing the word poodle, think of the smaller miniature poodle and even smaller toy poodle. The standard poodle is a much bigger dog, weighing from 50-90 pounds. There is also a so-called giant poodle, even bigger, but this is not a separate breed, just a subset of freakishly big (and unhealthy) standards.

Poodles are one of the most identifiable breeds, having numerous features everyone knows on sight: the curly coat, longer than normal legs, floppy ears, long face, black eyes, tremendous white teeth, and excellent nose. But most especially, there is the haircut.

Tradition says the poodle was bred in Denmark or Germany over a thousand years ago -- making it a very ancient breed -- to be a retriever. Its ancestors may have included the French barbet and the Portuguese water dog. Its Latin name is familiaris aquatius.

But the coat, the coat! So luxuriant, so extravagant was its coat that the French seized on it as a subject of topiary, creating elaborate haircuts that made the breed the king of show dogs, a natural aristocrat -- and the most despised by people with democratic sentiments.

The coat deceives and beguiles. As a hunting dog, it provided wolves and bears with something false to attack, like a matador's cape. Since it never stops growing, the dogs can fool people, and even themselves, into thinking they are bigger than they really are. A rottweiler and a poodle are the same approximate height, but the rottweiler can weigh three times as much as the poodle. Many a standard poodle has lost in battle because it failed to factor its own fur into the power equation.

And the deception deepens. Have you ever seen a parked car with a white standard poodle sitting at the wheel, and done a double take? With its long legs, round head, and elegant, vertical posture, the poodle sits in an extreme isosceles triangle, like the temple cats of Egypt. Richard Dreyfus, whose life changed when he saw Suzanne Summers whip by him in the white Thunderbird in American Graffiti, could have been fooled by a poodle. Its bouffant hair makes it strikingly similar to a platinum-blonde movie star, a la Carole Lombard or Jean Harlow. The white standard can be shimmeringly beautiful, which causes more than a double take – it makes you reappraise your basic orientation.

But just as they are attractive, so are they hated, and for much the same reason. While poodles (mostly the little ones) were the most popular breed in the 1950s, people have turned against them in the current era. Like the cars of the 50s, the dog of the 50s, all done up in bows and fancy styling, reeks of cutesy schlocky falsity. A properly appointed show poodle is both wonderful and a monstrosity -- remarkable that people can make a dog whose ancestors roamed the forests in packs look like that, but horrible in the extremes they push it to.

The standard is an extremely handsome dog under the right circumstances, with its jaunty spirit, jutting chin and silky ears. But people are turned off when it is clipped and poofed and brushed and shaved so that half of it looks psychotically overdressed and the other half looks shaved sadistically raw.

When we decided that the poodle was the breed for us, Rachel and I had had little actual experience with one. I think we encountered exactly one in our travels through our neighborhood. It was a shaggy, chocolate-brown male, who bounded toward us with the most striking attitude. He seemed gloriously happy, and gloriously pleased with himself. I patted him, and he thanked me with a look in his eye, and he moved on.

At no time did he not seem doggy. In fact, if I could put my finger on what made him special, it was that he seemed to be aware that he was a dog, and he seemed to find lots of advantages to being one. He was smart enough to be let off a leash, inquisitive enough to entertain himself, and savvy enough and social enough to accost complete strangers and make friends with them.

Now, that was a dog. We imagined all poodles were of that same type -- regal, whimsical, and benign.

The dog we wound up getting would be all these things except benign.

We liked that chocolate dog but we still had reservations. My great fear was that I would be out some night with my dog, and I would meet a gang of street toughs, and they would take one look at my poodle and bust out laughing.

We told friends we were getting a poodle and while a few responded favorably, several were against it. The poodle wasn’t a legitimate choice in their eyes. They envisioned a small dog with a sharp nose and drippy eyes, sitting in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s lap.

So we decided to keep a low profile on the breed. Our plan was to tell acquaintances that he was a very unusual graft from the herding dogs of, oh, the Transvaal. We decided to call his breed the American Standardbred Lionhound.

So long as we never clipped him into the usual poodle topiary, no one would be the wiser.