How Many Poodle Rescues Have I Followed? Oodles

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Published 6:30, FEBRUARY 6, 2026

DURING THE PANDEMIC, everyone wanted a puppy. Then people tired of their dogs. Puppy mills couldn’t find homes for their litters, and those churning out doodles had too many breeding poodles on hand. While searching for my own pandemic puppy, I stumbled upon a poodle rescue group on Facebook. From fostering a few dozen dogs annually, the rescue was, a couple of years into the pandemic, trying to find homes for more than a hundred over the course of a year.

I read about a backyard breeder who wanted to offload two pups, white fluffballs, large and small. The large one had lost all the toes on a front paw to an infection, so that, painfully, he put all his weight on his knuckles when he walked. The small one had a strong heart murmur. The rescue dubbed them Stan and Ollie, as in Laurel and Hardy, after conducting a fundraising competition to choose their names. A vet made a padded sock to cushion Ollie’s toe-less paw.

Each morning, I’d return online, avid for more of Ollie’s adventures. Ollie went for walks by the beach, posed for photos wearing a handmade “Adopt Me” sign, bootie strapped over his injured foot. Once Ollie got fitted for a brace, he began racing about with greater abandon. Ollie’s foster human regularly posted what he dubbed “Ollie’s Song of the Day,” including that oldie, Glen Campbell’s “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” with its lyrics about a long and winding road leading who knows where, which made me weep.

But I didn’t want to rescue Ollie, or any of the dogs I read about on the site: poodles who’d never known life outside a breeding barn; dogs surrendered by their owners due to “changed life circumstances”; the puppy born with a cleft palate who almost died from aspirating milk, went through four operations to fix his mouth, and found his fur-ever home on Mother’s Day. I wanted other people to rescue them, compassionate, open-hearted people who, unlike me, had the devotion and patience that rescuing seemed to require.

Instead, I brought home a standard poodle puppy from a breeder, a companion for my six-year-old poodle, the great-granddaughter of my first, who had been bred from a line of show dogs. Yet I couldn’t give up my addiction to the stories of rescue poodles, pulled in by their redemptive narrative arcs—how the dogs went from trauma, through tribulation and care, to finding their happily ever after. I read their stories the way, years before, I’d read Jane Austen novels compulsively, finding consolation in the marriage plot while convalescing on the couch during a health crisis. Now the world, lumbering out of the pandemic, seemed to lurch from one calamity to another: wars, vicious politics, rising global temperatures, new highways paving over ecologically sensitive wetlands. Reading rescue-poodle stories allowed me, on a small scale, to feel better about things.

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One day, I stumbled on a post about Mozart, barky and miserable, sprung from the Montreal SPCA. Within half an hour of his foster picking him up, a volunteer groomer stepped up to clean him, in the process revealing hot spots and skin infections under his matted, stinky hair. More posts followed: he suffered from separation anxiety and couldn’t be left alone. Moved from one foster home to a second, he slowly settled.

Some weeks later, I came upon a new post about Mozart. A home had been found, at least temporarily, with a man who already lived with a poodle—who turned out to be Mozart’s father! (Mozart’s breeder was listed on his microchip, which hadn’t initially been checked.)

Here was a dog story worthy of Charles Dickens: loving beginnings, harrowing journey, surprise revelations of identity, the second chance. And here’s a further Dickensian twist: Mozart’s father is the father of my younger poodle. They’re half-siblings. When I peer at a photograph of Mozart’s tawny eyes, I see Holly’s. What separates them? Luck. Which makes me shiver. For aren’t we all one step away from Mozart’s fate, threatened by vulnerability when we least expect it, never knowing when we’ll be in need of rescue?