Why Do Service Dog Schools Always Use Retrievers?

Lack of food motivation. The average poodle thinks it is gauche to eat before noon, will only eat just enough food to keep them alive, and it has to be cooked by a Michelin star chef during a full moon.

While many will work happily for praise, many more want toys/play, and it’s hard to reward a service dog with a game of fetch when you’re in Walmart. 

Extremely Sensitive. In the best poodles, that sensitive ego is valuable because most poodles have good self-restraint and think before they act. However, many poodles sense the importance of service dog work and buckle under the pressure. Performance anxiety is real as many human students can attest. Dogs who freeze up when they are needed most do not make great service dogs.

Most schools would rather train oblivious impulsive clowns who will, at least, act when there is a crisis. Retrievers fit that bill much better than most poodles do.

Plus, if you are a big service dog school mass producing dogs, you need a kennel. And the average poodle is too sensitive to live in a kennel environment.

Hair Care. Poodle hair doesn’t shed, and it doesn’t stop growing. Notice that I called it hair. It is not fur. It is hair, and it needs to be treated with all of the same care that a human with 4c level curly hair must give their own hair, but with the addition of a downy undercoat to tangle it. (And yes, a poodle’s hair can be trained into dreadlocks just like human hair can.)

What this mostly means in practice is that their fur mats up and has to be shaved. Ever wonder about those silly fancy poodle cuts? They’re practical.  The areas that are doomed to mat and/or get filthy, like the beard, toes, and… er… toileting region, are kept shaved and trim, while nice puffs can be sported on the easer to care-for spots.

Unless you’re a master groomer, this gets expensive. Your dog needs topiary performed on them every 2-3 months. Until you can develop the chops and have the time to do it yourself, you’re going to be handing over $600-800 a year to a groomer.

Not only can a service dog charity not afford this kind of bougie care for their dogs in training, they don’t want to pass that kind of financial responsibility onto their recipients, either.

Too Smart. People think service dogs have to be smart. They don’t! In fact, smart dogs are very difficult to live with. They get bored. They amuse themselves by playing tricks on you. They plot out The Perfect Kitchen Counter Heist.

Poodles are generally very well behaved, but they have a mischievous streak which is sometimes mistaken for stubbornness. If you teach a poodle to open the door, they’ll do it when you ask… except when they think you need some livening up. Occasionally a poodle will think this is the perfect time to run circles around you because they know you will have to chase them, and poodles LOVE a good game of tag.

Sound Sensitive. Herding breed dogs, like border collies and aussies, are bred to live on quiet country farms where the noisiest thing around says “baaaaa”. They must listen for the shepherd’s whistle across long distances, and hear it well enough to know exactly which direction he wants them to take with the sheep.

But public city life is loud. So you need to look for a weirdo who barely notices sound. But they can’t be deaf, either, because that can make them jumpy and nervous.

Prey Drive. We all know that retrievers can get addicted to balls. But most retrievers can also sit and watch a bike go by if they know there’s a cookie in it for them. Bred to wait in the bushes until the hunter sends them to get the ducks, retrievers are usually able to inhibit their predatory urges to chase things. But herding breed dogs have had this emphasized. For many herding dogs, it is frankly impossible not to chase a moving object that has just whizzed by at close range, no matter how desperately they want to please you. 

Too Smart. Like poodles, herding breeds tend to get bored and restless. They don’t like lazing around under your desk all day. Without plenty to keep their brain busy they tend to develop hobbies we dislike, such as competitive barking, home remodelling (that baseboard has GOT to go), and food-stealing. 

Tendency to be shy. Everything listed above is not a bug – it’s a feature. We wanted them to be sound sensitive, and smart, and driven to chase things all day for no rewards beyond a gruff “that’ll do” from their shepherd. If we ask them to do a job that involves lying down, not chasing things, and ignoring noise and they hate it, well… that’s on us.

But all breeds have faults that their fans try to weed out, and for many herding breeds, including Corgis, Aussies, and Shelties, it’s a dislike of unfamiliar people. The shyness fault can be small, such as a mild dislike of being patted by strangers, to full on shouting rude threats at people who walked into the coffee shop.

If your aussie has this fault – and sometimes it doesn’t appear until adolescence – your dog can learn coping skills, but they just can’t help being uncomfortable with new people. And no service dog can be happy unless they are happy being around strangers every day.