Swimming Pools
 

First time posting here. We have a five pound Yorkie girl that is my constant companion. I love her so much!! We are soon moving into a home with an in-ground swimming pool. I want to make absolutely my baby is safe and knows how to get out of the pool if she happened to fall in. Although I can't imagine that she would ever be out there without me, I must make certain she is able to get out on her own should it happen because if anything happened to her I would just lay down and die.


For those of you with pools, please advise what you have done to insure the safety of your babies.


Thanks in advance for any advice.

Great question. My family had a pool and a smallish dog when I was younger. We had a safety fence around the pool. Our safety fence was a permanent wrought iron one, but there are also temporary ones that work for both small children and pets:

https://www.google.com/search?q=pool...h=604#imgdii=_

You can also teach your Yorkie to swim and have a ramp in the pool for escape: Gamma Skamper Ramp Pool Ramp for Pets at PETCO

We have a pool too with a fence around it. My boys are never out there unless I am. It's so important the pup is never near the pool unless someone is there. If the pup falls in she will most likely not know how to get out. One of mine fell in a couple of times and I could see he would have drowned if I wasn't out there. He had no idea how to get over to the steps to get out. He just flailed about in the spot he fell in. I was always within a few feet when he had his accidents so I was able to get him out real quick. There are also life vests for pups if you want to get one of those.

Jackson swims amazingly, we don't have a fence around the actual pool, just a fenced in yard that the pool is in. I don't worry about Jackson much because he won't swim unless I am out there anyway, he does lay on the step occasionally w/o me. But he has been swimming for 5 years now and knows how to get in/out of pool. He's only fallen in twice and that was when he was being a dummy and gets over-excited at four wheelers etc driving by our fence and doesn't pay attention where he's running, and both of those times he nonchalantly just kept swimming towards the steps. So he doesn't panic.

Lilly, on the other hand, our JRT mix has fallen in a few times the same way (over excitement, running and being hyper) and she flips out and acts like she doesn't know where she is, even though we put her in the pool a lot to practice and get her to the steps. So we watch her closely. We didn't start her as young in the pool though and I wish we would've.

Actually in this video, she almost does a 'slip' when she was running towards Jackson as he was diving in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMV2...nJy0e5dC5PD9qA

I would just teach them how to swim - for one, it's FUN! and they get good exercise, encourage them to enjoy it, use treats or favorite toys... and swimming is an essential life skill. Even if you can't get them to like it, they need to at least KNOW.

Our pool is fenced in , so not available to Ziva and Abby unless I let them out. They have been swimming since their first year and now automatically head for the steps. In the beginning it is helpful to have two people- one holding them back in the pool on "boogie"floating boards then me standing on the steps signaling them to jump and swim to me. It didn't take long til they were swimming, but they are never unsupervised, they can get tired/ chilled pretty quickly.

We have an in-ground pool and our rule is just that they can never be out in the backyard alone. We do have a scamper ramp, but I don't know if they'd ever use it as we've tried to train them on it and it tends to scare them...but at least it's there in case of some freak thing happening.