Fancy is as fancy does

Originally known as ‘pudels’ or ‘puddles’, curly-coated standard poodles were first bred in Germany to retrieve game from water and, as Matthew Dennison discovers, some still cut a typically stylish dash in the field

- Matthew Dennison

UNMISTAKABLE is the note of polite consternation that colours Aleks Wasowska’s response to my question about her dogs’ obedience. Those in question—3½-year-old silver bitch L’Eau and 2½-year-old white bitch Breagh—are standard poodles and, increasingly, familiar fixtures on shoots close to their owner’s home near Ely in Cambridgeshire. Both dogs happily pick up pheasant, partridge and duck, she tells me, in all weather and covering all terrain. Miss Wasowska describes L’Eau in pursuit of duck as ‘an absolute machine in water’, whereas Breagh, from an old Scottish working line of standard poodles, resembles ‘a bulldozer through covert, although she is less nimble in water’.

The standard poodle is no longer an everyday sight in the shooting field. Indeed, although the breed remains popular on the Continent and in the US, the standard poodle is no longer widely seen in Britain at all. In the past decade, the Kennel Club registered about 1,000 puppies a year on average—the French bulldog, by contrast, registered nearly 40,000 puppies in 2020.

Thinking aloud, I wonder how the shooting fraternity reacts to Miss Wasowska’s appearance in the field with these dogs, which many have forgotten were first bred as curly-coated water dogs, especially as Breagh’s snow-white coat is clipped into a show cut, the traditional ‘topiary’ of pom-poms derided by poodles’ detractors. As working-dog expert Col David Hancock wrote in 2013: ‘Stand by for ignorant comments from one generation sportsmen, unaware of [the standard poodle’s] heritage.’ ‘There are some raised eyebrows,’ Miss Wasowska admits with a smile, which give way to ‘considerable respect’ by the end of the first drive and the dogs’ display of prowess.