Posts tagged "Schnoodle"

Is your mixed-breed a mistake of monumental proportions, or the crowning achievement of thousands of years of thoughtful selective breeding?

Despite millions of labradoodle owners across the planet who are convinced their pups are the greatest thing since sliced bread, the man credited with pioneering the breed has massive regrets about his involvement in the "oodle" craze.

"I don't regret the dog, not for the purpose I bred it for," Wally Conron tells Paw Nation, "I regret all the people who got on the bandwagon willy-nilly. People who are breeding poodle crosses for the money, who have no concern for parentage."

How was Conron to know that by crossing one of his kennel's best Labs with a standard poodle, he would unwittingly spark an international trend that would spawn the schnoodle, the groodle, the roodle and countless other similar designer breeds?

In 1988, service-dog trainer Conron received a letter from a woman in Hawaii who needed a seeing-eye dog that wouldn't shed, because her husband was highly allergic. At that time, no one had ever bred a Labrador retriever with an allergy-friendly standard poodle, at least not on purpose.

Now, only 22 years later, labradoodles have their own Facebook pages. Labradoodle enthusiasts, along with other groups of "oodle" owners, are even vying to have the breed recognized as an official breed by the Kennel Council.

When Seattle-area resident Kim Pouncy's dog, Mack, kept waking her up in the middle of the night, she thought the 3-year-old Labrador was having behavioral problems. But when the midnight nudges became simultaneous with Pouncy herself feeling dizzy and weak, she realized there was more to it. Mack was alerting her owner to a drop in blood sugar.

"I'm a Type II Diabetic," Pouncy told Paw Nation, "and I'm dependent on insulin. It's hard to say how long it took for me to catch on that Mack was alerting me. I didn't realize when she was doing it during the day, but when she did it at night three or four times, I finally got it because she would wake me out of a sound sleep."

Diabetes alert dogs are appearing more and more all over the country. Dogs4Diabetics, Inc. (D4D) began almost seven years ago, when its founder began researching the possibility of training dogs to detect type-1-diabetes-related hypoglycemia, and to physically alert diabetics to a hypoglycemic situation.

According to former D4D board member Martha Hoffman, the organization has seen great success in matching people with their talented and trained alert dogs. "The program is effective and genuine," Hoffman tells Paw Nation, "and all the dogs are tracked by their accuracy as measured by their partner's blood-sugar readings."

Hoffman confirmed that along with D4D's training to alert to lows, the dogs began independently alerting to lows before they happen. The dogs seem to recognize when blood sugar is starting to drop, way before a meter reading shows a low. This helps people avoid the low, and better prepare before onset.

While scientists have not yet defined all of the elements that compose the warning process, diabetics agree that alert dogs are in tune to the physical, emotional and physiological changes that occur during the complex prelude to diabetic symptoms.