Today, we had a rare Saturday without projects to take up our time.
Alice came up with the idea of making the trek to Millie Bush Dog Park out in the far west Houston suburbs. We go to a little dog park about 10 minutes drive from our house several times a week to give the hounds some room to stretch out and run. But Millie Bush is a 40 mile one-way drive so it hasn't been on our regular agenda. The place is huge, 13 acres, with two big dog ponds, one on each end. And doggie showers so you can wash the mud off before the trip home. Seriously.
About five minutes in, we're mosying in the general direction of one of the ponds and Tucker's ears stand up. He goes "on alert" and then takes off at full gallop towards ... what? There's a little white dog, sometimes he flashes back to racing and thinks little white dogs are that dang rabbit he could never catch. But no, he flies past the white dog and literally launches himself out into the pond!
Over the course of the next hour or so he is in and out of the water. And the really odd thing is, he only goes in when he sees another dog in swimming. Lots of labs running in and out fetching balls and doing normal dog things. Every time Tucker sees another dog in the water he goes flying in after it and follows it out. I swear he's acting like a lifeguard! "Hang on, buddy, I'm coming".
Greyhounds swimming are ... interesting to watch. He's got pretty much no body fat to help him float so it's a lot of work for him to swim. After a while he had really exhausted himself. Also, it was a little cool. So he'd come out and be shivering with his teeth chattering. I finally had to put a stop to it and walk him out away from the ponds.
The last picture looks like "Nessie", Tucker, the Loch Millie Monster.
3 comments:
Great pics! We have a couple dog beaches here (on Lake Michigan, so it's too cold to swim right now) but I have this irrational fear that one of my greyhounds will run in, be unable to swim, and get swept away by the undertow. And since I have 3, they'll get swept away in 3 different directions. I'm crazy, I know. So the first time I take them, I'll only let one run loose at a time to start. ;)
Gert's been down to the beach at Galveston. She didn't much like the water. We haven't been down there since we got Tucker. He's so easily spooked that I don't think we could let him off the leash down there.
We have no experience with our two greys with water, and we don't go to dog parks around here. So we don't really know if they like water or not.
But, before we got Ride (our older grey)years ago, she'd been in several homes prior to ours. And in one of the placements, she apparently jumped (or fell??) into a swimming pool that was covered for winter, and got caught between the tarp and the water. Scary! She still has an old nail injury from that incident!
I think that's SO interesting that Tucker is attracted to the water like he is!
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