How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour

The next Christmas, Santa brought Nicky, a miniature poodle with a wicked intelligence. Poor Nicky, my beloved friend, died horribly when his snout was crushed under the wheel of a horse-drawn carriage my father was driving, his teeth strewn across the asphalt road. Then came another mutt, Mach, who ran away, followed by our awesome golden retriever, Kubla (embarrassing name to me), who suffered from hip dysplasia, a developmental disease that some have linked to breeding dogs for conformation standards.

In 2006, my wife, Lisa, and I adopted Foxy from an organization in Larchmont that rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in the South and brings them north. Through a dog DNA test, a novelty at the time, when asked about Foxy’s heritage, I was able to tell that she was a hairless Bulldog-Pomeranian-Labrador-Mexican cross. A rare breed, indeed. She was the family dog ​​for sixteen years, until her liver failed and we euthanized her at home in Vermont in August 2022. A long period without a dog followed that terrible day. I missed having a boyfriend, but Lisa wasn’t ready.

Then one day, in the summer of 2024, while Lisa was browsing the classified ads Vermont Standardshe said, “There’s an ad here for Goldendoodle puppies.” I looked at her. Was the period of mourning finally over?

“I started quilting all the dirty laundry.”

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich

The ad gave the telephone number of the breeder, who was located in Bethel, twenty minutes away. “No harm in looking,” I said, dishonestly. “We could take the kids and make it a family outing.”

The puppies were first-generation crosses between the breeder’s dogs: a golden retriever named Amy and a standard poodle named Bumper. First-generation, or F1, doodles combine equal parts of their parents’ DNA in a random combination. Some receive the low shedding genes; others don’t. Second-generation doodles (F2), which are doodle-to-doodle crosses, are even more of a crapshoot: Some littermates may have poodle coats, others retriever coats. Many breeders cross their F1 doodles with an unrelated poodle, or a “multi-generation” doodle, to get puppies with the preferred doodle coat. Some now use DNA testing to select preferred coat traits. Eventually, through selective breeding, you get multi-gen-doodle-multi-gen-doodle crosses that result in relatively predictable-looking offspring.

Our decision, if there was one, was made the moment we saw the scope. The Goldendoodle puppy was designed for maximum cuteness. No standard English word comes close to summarizing the feeling of seeing one; Luckily, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “gigil” (pronounced “ghee-gill”) last year. In Filipino English, “gigil” means “a feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to clench our hands tightly, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze anyone or anything we find so adorable,” according to an OED bulletin.

I picked up a puppy with slightly redder fur than the others and tightened my grip a little. Lisa captured the moment on her phone; the photo is now his lock screen. She says it’s the happiest she’s ever seen me.

The “creature,” as we sometimes call him, joined our family in the fall of 2024, at nine weeks old. After much debate, we named him Herman (as in Munster, not Melville). He quickly grew much larger than his parents, reaching seventy-five pounds. It looks like a retriever and a poodle were carelessly taken apart and put back together. Her coat, made of soft, wavy curls, looks like a poodle cake with retriever frosting. He has retriever ears and a poodle’s pointed occiput, topped with a mushroom cap of blond curls with a reddish tint that wiggle stupidly when he moves. Its muscular poodle legs end in retriever feet, with webbed toes, and its beaked poodle muzzle is partly hidden by its splendid “furniture”: the eyebrow-mustache-beard combination that signals that a doodle carries at least one copy of the RSPO2 gene, leading to reduced shedding. Herman proved remarkably “obedient,” that is, willing to follow instructions and almost always eager to please, but with a mysterious distance and dignified reserve. From a very young age, he has developed extraordinary social skills with other dogs, and he is unfailingly gentle with people of all ages. I learned his vocabulary of whines, yawns, growls, barks. Because he comes from very active dogs on both sides, Herman (“Proud, Goofy, Too Smart by Half”) needs three hours of exercise a day or he gets bored, and you don’t want that. His strong food drive, combined with his size and intelligence, makes him a danger in the kitchen. If counter-surfing were a sport, he would be an Olympian. He once ate seven enchiladas left on the kitchen counter, without disturbing the Pyrex casserole dish they were in; we thought our son had gobbled them all up until we found a pinto bean on Herman’s elbow.