Vacation is over now, and I’m back in the movie production business. 🙂 Anyway, I’ve had a chance to edit some of the video clips from Callie’s swimming lessons.

These clips were taken near the shoreline of Lake Arrowhead in California. In the earlier ones, Callie is on a leash. There’s a reason for this. Lake Arrowhead is a big lake, with lots of boat traffic, including some water skiers. So we wanted to keep Callie out of the boat traffic until we’re absolutely certain she will come when we call her.

In the first few clips, you’ll see Callie just trying out her newly found swimming skills. These were taken on about day-three of her swimming lessons. On the first few days, she got over her fear of the small waves and found the courage to take her first few doggie paddles. This seemed pretty easy once she learned that she could float. In one clip, she retrieves a wooden stick, instead of her fancy “floppy disc.” Probably forgivable for a six-month old puppy.

The music you hear in the background is The Noisy Neighbors band, playing on a floating barge.

The last few clips show Callie retrieving her “floppy” without a leash. At this point, we trusted her to return to shore, and we had enough people to chase her down if she decided to swim too far. These clips were taken around days four through ten of her “swimming lessons.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHJmkxHag-Y

Why “teach” a dog to swim, you ask? Isn’t that a little like teaching a bird to fly? Well, not really. Not all dogs are able to swim right away. And if a dog has a bad experience in the water, it might get spooked about swimming and decide it’s a bad idea. So the game plan here was to give Callie a good experience, under controlled conditions. We’ll work our way up to letting her swim close to our boat dock in the open lake — once we’re certain that she will come when we call her.

For some great articles on teaching your dog to swim, see Catherine Forsythe’s three-part series on the Dog Reader.

Coming soon, some Callie-playing-soccer video!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Relationships, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.