Are Doodles a Real Breed? What the Critics Get Wrong (And What They Get Right)

If you've ever been judged in a comment section, at the dog park, or by a trainer for choosing a Doodle, this episode is for you. 

I dig into the most common criticisms of Doodles and do something most people in those conversations don't do: I actually engage with them. I explain what the critics get right, where their arguments fall apart, and why the science behind your Doodle's intelligence, sensitivity, and drive is exactly the reason Doodle-specific training matters. 

You'll also hear about my beloved Standard Poodle Hershey, why a Poodle and a Doodle are genuinely different dogs, and what organizations like GANA and WALA are doing to raise breeding standards. 

This one is for every Doodle parent who has ever wondered if they made the wrong choice. Spoiler: you didn't. 🐾 

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Corinne Gearhart is the founder of The Doodle Pro®, a science-based training platform helping Doodle parents raise calmer, well-mannered dogs using positive reinforcement. She is the host of The Doodle Pro® Podcast and author of Your Doodle’s Daily Schedule Blueprint™.

📘 Get the Doodle Schedule Blueprint:
https://thedoodlepro.com/doodle-schedule-bonus/

🎧 More episodes:
https://thedoodlepro.com/podcast

Corinne Gearhart is the founder of The Doodle Pro®, a science-based training platform helping Doodle parents raise calmer, well-mannered dogs using positive reinforcement. She is the host of The Doodle Pro® Podcast and author of Your Doodle’s Daily Schedule Blueprint™.

📘 Get the Doodle Schedule Blueprint:
https://thedoodlepro.com/doodle-schedule-bonus/

🎧 More episodes:
https://thedoodlepro.com/podcast

Transcript

0:00

you've ever Googled doodle trainer or doodle groomer and ended up in a comment section that made you feel embarrassed for having your dog, this episode's for you. If you've ever been in a Facebook group, maybe one of the ones with names like, why are Doodle people like this and walked away Feeling Judged for a choice you made with real love and real reasons? This episode is for you. If a trainer or vet tech or stranger at the dog park has ever said something that made you wonder if you made the wrong call, this episode is for you. Because today I want to actually talk about the criticism. Not to get defensive, not to argue, but because there is something really important buried inside of it. Something that explains exactly why your doodle is the way that they are. And why so many doodle parents feel like they're failing when they're absolutely not. I am Corinne Gearhart, certified dog trainer, doodle specialist, and author of your Doodles Daily Schedule blueprint. Welcome to the Doodle Pro Podcast. By the end of this episode, you're going to understand your dog in a way the critics. Simply don't, and I say that not because I'm dismissing the critics, but because I have spent years on both sides of this conversation and I have something, most of the people in those comment threads don't have receipts. I want to tell you a little bit about how I got here because it matters for this conversation. I worked in pet care for years, dog walking, pet sitting, and I started hearing something over and over from my clients with doodles, not. Frustration with their dogs, frustration with how the industry was treating them. Trainers who rolled their eyes, pet professionals who made offhand comments. A sense that choosing a doodle was somehow naive or trendy or less than. And the families who I worked with. They were not naive. They were people with real allergies or kids or living situations where a lower shedding dog was genuinely the right answer. They had done their research, they loved their dogs deeply, and they were being made to feel like they didn't deserve to be taken seriously. I have allergies myself. That was part of my own story too. The idea that you need to choose between a dog you can live with physically and a dog who gets real serious science-based training support that gap makes no sense to me and nobody was bridging it. So that became the work bridging the doodle divide, building the thing that I kept wishing existed for the families I was working with. And I wanna tell you about my last dog before Nestle, because she's the reason I can stand in the middle of this conversation and say what I'm about to say with complete confidence. Her name was Hershey. She was a standard poodle. And she was magnificent. I went full fru, fru bracelets on her legs, pompom tail. She would walk into a room of fluffy doodles and she was absolutely the most extra dog there. I loved her for it. I am a boy mom, and I leaned into all of the pretty things. Bows, yes, even nail polish on my Hershey. She wasn't a doodle and I didn't want her to look like one. So when someone says you could just breed poodles, or why didn't you get a poodle? I hear that I have loved a poodle. I know what that dog is. I know that intelligence, that sensitivity, that extraordinary need to be in partnership with a human. I know that athleticism, I know it from years of living with it, and my current dog is an F1 B Cava P. That means he's three quarters poodle. He is not a poodle. He is something different, not a lesser version of Hershey, not a greater version, just something else entirely. And I love him for exactly that difference. It goes far beyond the haircut. Now I promised you I was going to actually engage with the criticism, so let's do that. Some of it is legitimate and I think it matters to say that out loud. There are breeders producing doodles carelessly. Breeding for profit only or for a certain look without health testing, without understanding the temperament profiles, they're combining without any real thought for the families who are going to live with these dogs, that's real. And doodle parents deserve to know about it so they can make better choices. The Coke claims have some truth too. When you cross a curly coated poodle with a straight coated retriever, you get variation. Some doodle shed, some coats are harder to maintain than families expected. The idea that no one can be allergic to a doodle isn't accurate. Any honest breeder would tell you that. And I say all of this because I want you to be the most informed doodle parent in the room. And that means the whole picture, not just the flattering parts, but here's where the criticisms. Stops being right, and here's where it actually gets interesting. Okay. What is a breed? Actually? A breed is a group of dogs selectively bred over time for specific traits, physical characteristics, temperament, working ability. The critics are right that doodles don't have an a KC registry number. That's true, but intentional crosses between breeds have existed for centuries. The Labradoodle was developed in Australia in the 1980s, specifically as a guide dog for people with allergies. That was not an accident, that was a breeder. Looking at two different breed profiles and asking what could these two dogs produce together that neither produces alone. And in the last decade, organizations like Ghana, the Golden Doodle Association of North America, and Walla, the Worldwide Australian Labradoodle Association have built health testing protocols that are genuinely rigorous, hips, elbows, eyes, cardiac screening, DNA panels. I shared some of those results on my social media recently. I met with the board of Ghana and the president and Vice president of Walla a few weeks ago. We discussed the breed standards they had worked so hard to establish for their respective doodles. These leaders were remarkable. These are not people breeding carelessly. What they're doing is hard work and expensive. Being newer does not mean less intentional and using the word mutt with disdain because this dog doesn't have a century old registry number is not a scientific argument. It's a gatekeeping argument. Now, here's the part I find genuinely fascinating, and this is the part that critics have not thought all the way through. One of the most common things I see is this a gamble with personality since you're crossing two different breeds. And my answer is, you're right, there is variation, but here's what that actually means when you cross a poodle with a golden retriever. Or an Australian shepherd or Bernese mountain dog, you're combining two very specific cognitive and emotional profiles. Poodles are ranked amongst the most intelligent dog breeds in the world. They were bred to work, to problem solve, to be in constant communication with a human partner. That is not a personality quirk. That's centuries of selection for exactly those traits. Golden Retrievers were bred for high engagement, high responsiveness, deep desire to connect Australian shepherds for focus and handler sensitivity. Most of the breeds and doodle crosses share one thing. They were bred for partnership. I dive deeper into what I call this poodle operating system, combined with the different crosses in more depth in my book, your doodles daily schedule blueprint. So what do you get when you combine high intelligence with high engagement and high sensitivity? You get a dog who is exquisitely tuned into their environment, a dog who notices everything, a dog who processes information and emotion constantly. A dog who needs emotional and physical engagement in a way that a lower drive breed simply does not. You get a dog who, without the right structure and training can look chaotic, reactive, impossible to settle. Not because they're broken, but because they're operating exactly as designed and nobody has given them the tools they need to regulate that beautiful brain. And here's the thing about my cava Poo, three quarters poodle. He has so much of that poodle intelligence, athleticism, that sensitivity, that need to be engaged. And he also has something Hershey in the other poodles I've worked with didn't have in the same way a kind of warmth, social magnetism, a way of connecting with every person in the room. Not better, different, a different expression of some of the same extraordinary traits. His Cavalier side was built to be on Royalty's lap and he sees me as his royalty and feels that's exactly where he belongs, which is so beautiful. And prone to separation anxiety, but I cover that in my Cava Poo episode. The critics say that the variation in doodles makes them unpredictable, but what they're actually describing is a dog who needs specific knowledge to live with well, and that specific knowledge is exactly what's been missing for so many families, especially when they're seeking training help and they get shut down or shamed for having chosen a doodle. When a doodle parent comes to me feeling like a failure, it's almost never because they did something wrong. It's because they were handed generic advice for a dog who needed something specific. The industry hasn't caught up. The resources haven't been there, and the comment sections sure aren't helping. When critics say doodles are a gamble, I hear them saying that more doodle families need exactly what we do here at the doodle prep. They're accidentally making the case for doodle specific training. So what does that specific knowledge look like? It starts with understanding that your doodles drive sensitivity and intelligence. Are not problems to be managed. They're traits to be channeled. Science-based positive reinforcement is not the soft option. It's the most effective option for dogs who are this tuned in to human feedback and emotion. Aversive tools and punishment based methods don't just fail with dogs like this. They actively damage the relationship that makes your doodle trainable in the first place. The relationship is the training. It means structure, a predictable daily rhythm where your doodle knows what to expect and what's expected of them, not rigidity structure, because a dog who's constantly monitoring their environment for what comes next cannot relax. And a dog who can't relax. Can't learn, and it means emotional regulation, not just commands the ability to move through a trigger, the doorbell, the squirrel, the leash coming off without losing their mind and to come back down. When they do, that's what's possible. I have seen it happen with hundreds of families, not because their dog was easy. Because they finally had the right information for the specific dog they have. If this episode resonated with you, if you've ever felt dismissed for having a doodle or wondered if the training approach everyone else uses isn't quite fitting your dog, I want to invite you into something. I'm running a free five day Doodle parent challenge starting April 20th. Five days completely free, and by the end, you'll have the foundation your doodle has been waiting for. The link to join is in the show notes or@thedoodlepro.com slash challenge. I would love to see you there. Thank you so much for being here today. If this episode helped you feel a little more confident about your dog, or more confident in your choice of a doodle. Or a little more ready for that next comment section. I would love if you shared it with another doodle parent who needs to hear it. And if you've been meaning to leave a review on your podcast player, it takes about 30 seconds and it helps so many more families find this show. Doodles are different, wonderfully, so, and I look forward to seeing you next week.