Snopes: The Poodle Story is Not True

Yes, the rumors were flying recently that Japanese women had been bamboozled into buying sheep that they thought were poodles. One has to wonder, what does it say about those of us that went for this rumor? One would either be gullible, or think Japanese women are, and that line of thought may well make one are a bit prejudiced. Either way, people who believed this rumor have got some introspection coming.

The notion that anyone who had ever seen a dog (which is most everyone) could be fooled by sheep proffered as poodles is as implausible (if not more so) as the idea that anyone could really mistake a rat for a dog. (The claim that “sheep are rare in Japan and most people do not know what they look like” is just silly: even schoolchildren who have never seen live sheep learn to identify them from pictures and drawings and can recognize them as something distinctly different than dogs.) And in this case the tale is not something that supposedly happened to the indefinite “some tourist” in “a foreign country,” but to thousands of Japanese in their homeland, people who were reportedly shelling out the equivalent of $1,600 per sheep-dog before anyone caught on to the scam and blew the whistle.

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