Great timing. The Dog Reader has posted two articles on How to Teach your Dog to Swim. Here’s Part I from yesterday. And here’s Part II from today. Thanks to Catherine Forsythe for these two thoughtful articles.
I would have changed the subject for today, but these two articles were too good to pass up.
It was great to hear someone else say that dog’s don’t automatically learn to swim.
The Dog Reader’s process is certainly more scientific than we’ve been doing with Callie, but I’m delighted with Callie’s progress. She had a brief introduction to the lake three weeks ago. This trip, she’s been in the water on three different days. The first day, she took just a few puppy paddles. The second day, yesterday, she was swimming short distances — about fifteen feet. Today, she was totally comfortable in the water. We have her on a thirty-foot leash, but she would have gone beyond that if we let her. The next step will be to get her swimming off our boat dock, instead of from the beach. This will be a little tricky, as we don’t want her to swim out into the lake and the boat traffic. So we’ll be working with a leash and working hard on getting Callie to “come” when called.
Our process with Callie moved a lot faster than the Dog Reader’s process. This may be because Callie is a Golden Retriever, and Goldens are bred to swim and they love to swim. It did seem to work pretty well to use Callie’s “retrieving” instincts to trick her into moving into deeper water. All she needed to do was to learn that her body is buoyant. Once she got this feeling, she was off and swimming.
What a great way to bond with your doggie during the summer! Swimming in Lake Arrowhead was Jamie’s (My Doggie Says…: Messages from Jamie. How a dog named Jamie “talks” to her people) favorite thing in all the world, and I can now see that Callie won’t be far behind.
Thanks for the kind comments. Callie looks terrific. She will be loads of fun. I just wanted to let you know that there will be a Part 3 to my series on swimming. I am so glad that you found the articles to be useful.
Catherine Forsythe