Dogs' Tales: Doodles and Poodle

You can never replace a dog, and we'll continue to miss Pumpkin, Hugo, and Caesar, the three dogs--a bulldog and two Shar-peis--my husband, Tom, and I have had consecutively since we bought Pumpkin in 1979. But you can acquire and love another dog or in our case three, courtesy of petfinders.com, which focuses on finding forever homes for abandoned pets and strays by providing Internet-accessible listings for a huge number of animal shelters around the country. My focus was on acquiring one or more labradoodles—a cross between a standard poodle and a Labrador retriever—because we heard good things about them from Alex, our son-in-law, and they were a breed that allowed Tom and me to compromise—I really wanted a standard poodle, and he wanted nothing to do with poodles. I spotted two ‘doodles that were listed as available at a shelter near Richmond, Virginia. After many e-mail exchanges with the shelter’s founder, we drove from our home in Annapolis, Maryland, to Richmond, Virginia, one Saturday, and after surviving an incredible amount of south-bound traffic on I-95, we adopted year-old sisters Flopsy and Mopsy.

What awesome dogs—calm, intelligent, well mannered, graceful, and gentle! Still, I was not surprised one day when Tom said, “These dogs are great, but I want a puppy.” Apparently we both subconsciously missed the joys of cleaning up and frequently stepping in the messes puppies make and of enduring the certain destruction of possessions that happen to be in reach of the sharp teeth of a teething mouth. In other words, I don’t know what the heck we were thinking, but I dutifully got back on to petfinders and spotted a standard poodle puppy. Flopsy and Mopsy must have loosened up Tom’s heart to poodles, because after an exchange of e-mails with yet another dog shelterer, we took off for a weekend in West Virginia.

My initial thought about going to West Virginia to get a dog was that it wouldn’t be that much farther than Richmond, and it is true that some places in West Virginia are not much farther from Annapolis than Richmond is. This particular place in West Virginia would have been about the same distance…if we had lived in Kentucky. In other words, our destination in West Virginia was about as far away in that state as you can get from where we live. Which was ok—we hadn’t had a road trip in a while, and when would we have a better reason to drive all the way across West Virginia?

We met the foster parent at dusk in the parking lot of a gas station in the outer reaches of Appalachia. We learned at that point that our puppy, Tanner, was not technically homeless—his owner also owned Tanner’s poodle mother and had her bred with a male poodle. Papa had papers proving his pedigree, but Mama did not. So we were buying a puppy, not adopting, and the owner acknowledged that although she did in fact take in and care for stray dogs in the area, Petfinders would frown on her using its website for the for-profit sale of puppies that had been deliberately brought into the world for that purpose. But there was no doubt this was Appalachia—as impoverished a place as we had ever seen in this country outside of a major city—so we did not hold it against the seller. In typical West Virginia fashion, Tanner was one of eight puppies, and he has the sass and self-confidence of someone who is used to living off the land yet still lives well.

The ‘doodles, who road with us to pick up their new brother, were unimpressed with Tanner’s West Virginia swagger. They were Virginia girls, and Virginians view West Virginians as uncivilized at best. When we put little Tanner in the back of the jeep with the girls, they moved as far away from him as they could, and as they huddled together, their facial expressions suggested that they believed they were sharing their space with a rat.

But now the three get along quite well; Tanner’s vulnerability when he plays with Flopsy and Mopsy is that he is considerably smaller, but that weakness gets smaller every day. The five of us are a pack, just like the Dog Whisperer says we should be. We’re still working on who is pack leader.