"Our Clients . . .

. . . are at the heart of Finnesse Poodles breeding program.  The beginning was tough as we strived to produce Champions and adhered to breeding practices that were considered the norm at the time. We know what it's like to be a client with expectations to get a beautiful well-bred, healthy, happy puppy from a reputable breeder.  Unfortunately, Victorian Era status quo breeding practices rely on a closed stud book.  That means the gene pool cannot expand. In theory, any purebred is susceptible to inbreeding and linebreeding to one degree or another. The standard poodle in particular went through a period where popular sires were used to such a extent that a mid-century bottleneck caused some autoimmune diseases to be fixed in the breed. Science tells us that genetic diversity is healthy and necessary for a population to survive. Royal families such as the Hapsburgs died out because of the practice of inbreeding and linebreeding to siblings and close cousins to preserve their families position in society. This is why we do not call ourselves preservation breeders.  We are RESTORATION BREEDERS. Using genetic diversity results from University of California Davis and the BetterBred tool, extensive health testing, and Intervariety(IV) breeding we are striving with every litter to produce dogs with seriously higher genetic diversity than the average Standard Poodle. This is also how we have been able to produce MOYEN poodles from time to time.  In our opinion, preservation breeding is fundamentally flawed and a restorative approach is the only way out of the predicament faced in many purebred dogs today. Since the POODLE is one breed, we are able to combine miniature pedigrees with standard pedigrees for diversity. It is very interesting to note that stud books that were once "closed" are being opened in some countries, such as Norway, in order to bring structural health back into some breeds. AKC is considering a proposal from a purebred club to allow stud books to reopen for a specific breed.  

For the sake of the breed and those who love poodles we feel our breeding practices go above and beyond by injecting a serious dose of diversity into the few litters we are able to produce. We hope our clients will appreciate the outcomes." ~ L.E.Pietarinen