We have a Swimmer!

Labrador Retrievers were bred to retrieve fishing nets from the icy cold waters of the North Atlantic. This explains their thick, water repellent, double-coat, webbed feet, and otter like tail - all things that are used for swimming. Given this information, one would think that a Lab would naturally know how to swim and love it. One would be wrong. :)

Apparently, we have spoiled Georgia with her kiddie pool. She LOVES the water and loves to play in her pool, but she expects the ground to be under her feet at all times. The few times we've tried to get her to swim in a big pool, she completely freaked out. She can swim when she falls in, she just didn't know it, and certainly didn't think it was fun. :) Well, now that we are in Montevallo with a good park to play in, we decided to make her learn to swim in the creek. My theory was that if she could wade into deeper water gradually, she would realize that it's okay when the water gets deep and wouldn't panic. Dave took her to the park while I was gone to Charlotte and let her stomp around a bit in the water. He said she was really funny going deeper and deeper, but stomping her feet the whole time to make sure the ground was still there. Once I got home, I bought her a 50 foot leash so she would be able to move around in the water and we could still control her. We took her back to the park Saturday, walked her a lap to get her hot and thirsty, then took her to the little beach entrance to the creek. At first she just splashed around until Dave found a stick. He started throwing the stick for her, and she did just was she was supposed to do, found it and brought it back! She could swim! The more he threw the stick, the more she wanted to swim and retrieve it. I know we looked like lunatics cheering and clapping for her when she actually swam out and back to get that stick, but we were so proud! Our water dog is actually a water dog now. :) We took her back Sunday, but she was still very tired and there were too many kids and dogs around for her to focus for long periods of time. She swam, but we lost a few sticks because she kept getting distracted. :) I'm such a bad dog mom, I just realized that I didn't even think about taking the camera to get pictures of her swimming. Maybe next time.