History

I got my first dwarf poodle in 1999, and I had my first litter in 2001. Since then, my life has been surrounded by poodles. My daughter shares my hobby. We have litters occasionally and, when we do, the puppies grow in our living room together with the family.

We have toy, dwarf and standard poodles. Each poodle is a member of our family. Our hobbies include agility, obedience, rally obedience, tracking and freestyle. We compete in competitions, but we also perform in charity-related shows if requested.

We have been training obedience and agility classes in weekly basis with my daughter and I am qualified freestyle judge since 2006.

I started poodle rescue in Finland in 2002, and realized that there were surprisingly many poodles whose owners had very little support or knowledge in grooming their own dogs. As a result, we started offering grooming services to the poodle owners who needed help.

Once upon a time there was…

...Noora the dwarf poodle. Time almost flew when Noora was a puppy. Kids were on their hot and sunny summer holiday. We had bought some garden net under the backyard hence in order to prevent Noora from leaving the yard, but she just went and walked through it. How tiny she was under her fluffy coat! We had to buy some new, thicker net, so that Noora could safely enjoy her outdoor life. The backdoor was open almost all summer, which – of course - made Noora’s housetraining quite easy.

I started teaching Noora the rules of the house. After couple of days I could tell my husband, that Noora would sit when asked. To be honest, he didn’t have any faith on my tiny doggy, but I felt joy as I got to prove my word. I started obedience next fall and realized, that my dog was like a real dream come true. We started training carefully by playing. After all, Noora was just a kid. We had several pauses during the training and quitted exercising whenever Noora looked tired.

We started in the beginners group in a autumn, but before the snow has fallen, we had moved up to the competing group. Because of what I had been through with my boxer Bruno before, I had prepared to work very hard with my dog. Command, request, force the dog to obey… Repeating, repeating and then a little bit of … repeating. Whenever Bruno saw something interesting (for example playing dogs), he took and left to investigate, merrily and full of excitement. But always without a moment of thinking. And then we would start everything all over again – with a long rope. (Honestly, the long rope was not always needed every training – unlike repeating and more repeating).

Noora was not alike. Usually after one drill she knew what I was after. Her eyes were on me. When I asked her to come to me, with a blast of black lightning, she was already there. Once I let her go she went and asked other dogs to play with her, but then I called her back and - slash - she was there. “Staying” was easy to Noora. When we worked together, she was fully concentrated and didn’t even once look away from me.