Lady Tara Thea LePoodeau was her name, but of course, we called her Tia.
She was one of a kind and she was my first Standard Poodle.
For those who knew Tia, they will be the first to tell you what a wonderful and brilliant girl she was. So happy, loving and smart! And boy did she have that “poodle prance” mastered! She made every day of my life fun and fun-filled. She loved to be loved, but even more than that, this Standard Poodle loved to show off.
My favorite story is the one where I decided she and I both could use a training refresher. Just something fun and rewarding to do. Tia was actually quite well trained, so I thought it would be nice to do some advanced training classes and off we went to Pet Smart. Standard Poodles love new challenges and thrive on the stimulation of learning new things, and Tia was true to her breed in that regard!
In less than 10 minutes of outdoing everybody else in the training class, the trainer asked if Tia could be the Standard Poodle that she used to show the rest of the class what was wanted of them. Tia stepped right into the center of the training circle, wagged her tail, sat down, and gave her paw to the trainer (who had only asked me if she could be her assistant)!
She spent the rest of the training weeks proudly showing all the other dogs how things were done! That trainer loved Tia through and through. She told me that Tia had spoiled her because she was so smart and so easy to work with.
Tia passed those traits down to her puppies and to this day, we’ve got beautifully smart Tia puppies out there in the world amazing their owners and constantly giving them bragging rights!