




As I've said before, Zoe was a very timid dog when we got her. She was bullied by her brothers and sisters in the litter. In the year that we've had her, she's grown in confidence. It's been an incredible transformation and a real privilege to watch.
We always wanted to make sure Zoe could swim, and this post is all about how we did it.
We started taking Zoe to the beach to start with. She wouldn't go in past her knees and the waves were pretty off-putting. Add to this I think she was still very nervous. We decided to change location and started taking her to a loch (lake) near our home and gently encouraged her to get into the water by throwing things for her to chase.
It very quickly became apparent that she didn't really care what we threw, she was more interested in catching the splashes that whatever we threw made. This was a very helpful piece of information later on.
The more she got in the water, the more she wanted to be in the water, so we encouraged her as much as we could from shore.
Trust has to be the most important thing in getting Zoe to swim. If she didn't trust us, she wasn't going to follow us. So although it seems that we may have wasted a lot of time, we did get her to trust us, which paved the way for what we did next.
The weather has been pretty lousy all winter and spring, so we would take Zoe to the loch, but we wouldn't risk going in ourselves. Summer came along though, and it's been a fantastic summer! We took Zoe out and tried to get her to swim. She swam a little when we threw a stick in at one point, but she still wouldn't go out too far. By this point she was out up to her chest, but that was her limit.
One warm day I decided to just wade out into the water with her. I splashed water to get her to follow me out, and she did follow. I didn't quite get her to swim though because I didn't have a change of clothes to go in deeper.
We tried again the next time we were out, this time using a pontoon next to a slipway. We had to really ramp up the excitement levels for Zoe to get her to want to go into the water more than she was afraid of it. This meant a lot of splashing and squealing at her. Eventually it paid off though. She walked into the water down the slipway, while I splashed water from the pontoon. She swam out to me, squeaking the entire time and using her mouth as a scoop for the water. She swam!
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