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    "headline": "Dogs swim the doggy paddle by reversing their walking footfall order, an Italian study of six retrievers found",
    "description": "Dogs swim the doggy paddle with a diagonal leg sequence, the reverse of walking, an Italian study of six retrievers in a glass-walled pool found.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-11T13:18:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "Pets & Animals",
    "keywords": "Dog paddle, Golden Retriever, Labrador Retriever, University of Rome Tor Vergata",
    "articleBody": "Drop a retriever in a pool and its legs do something they never do on a walk: they swap the order in which they move. When Italian researchers filmed six rescue-trained dogs swimming, they found the familiar doggy paddle runs the walking footfall sequence almost in reverse, with the front legs doing the heavy lifting. The study, by Giovanna Catavitello, Yuri Ivanenko and Francesco Lacquaniti of the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the Santa Lucia Foundation, was published in PLOS One in 2015. It still offers one of the clearest looks at what a dog’s limbs are doing under the surface. Six retrievers and a glass-walled pool The team worked with three Golden Retrievers and three Labrador Retrievers averaging about 35 kilograms, supplied by an Italian water-rescue dog school. The dogs walked, trotted and galloped outdoors, then swam toward their handlers in a pool of roughly 10 by 5 meters whose transparent sides let a camera see their legs underwater. A total of 54 swimming strides were analyzed. The footfall flip On land, a walking dog uses a lateral sequence: a hind leg moves, then the front leg on the same side, then the hind and front legs on the other side. In the water the dogs switched to a diagonal sequence, front leg first, then the opposite hind leg, then the other front leg and the remaining hind leg. The paper describes the order as “basically reversed” compared with walking. Reference works describe the stroke as effectively a “trot” in water, and the data fit, since trotting dogs also move diagonal legs together. Each stroke has two halves. Pushing a leg backward is the power stroke, the water version of a foot pressing the ground; bringing it forward again is the return. The researchers found the swimming strokes were much bigger than walking or trotting steps, and the front legs swung up and down by more than one full limb length, which the authors link to keeping the head above water and the body from sinking. How fast is a paddling Labrador? Swimming was the slowest of the four gaits, but not by as much as you might expect. The dogs averaged 1.44 meters per second. Multiply by 3.6 and that is about 5.2 kilometers per hour; multiply by 2.237 and it is about 3.2 miles per hour, close to a brisk human walking pace, achieved while pushing through water. A swim stroke also took about as long as a walking step: the difference in cycle duration was not statistically significant. Why dogs do not need lessons Inside each leg, the coordination of thigh, shank and foot followed the same underlying pattern across walking, trotting, galloping and swimming. The authors suggest that shared pattern may explain how quickly dogs adapt to water, writing that “as soon as a dog is plunged into water it can swim.” People, by contrast, use very different coordination in the water and usually have to be taught. The trade went the other way, too. Humans copied the stroke: the dog paddle is thought to be the first swimming style our ancestors used, learned by watching animals, and prehistoric cave art in Egypt appears to show it. It is often the first stroke young children pick up, and militaries have taught it because neither arms nor legs break the surface, which keeps it quiet. Limits apply. Six dogs of two closely related breeds, filmed with a single 60-frame-per-second camera, cannot speak for bulldogs or dachshunds, and the authors note the shoulder blade was hard to track so close to the waterline. For more dogs in motion, see Badiyaa’s look at corgis that hit 25 mph in NFL halftime races and Finland’s Pentulive puppy cam of six Lagotto pups, a breed originally used as a water dog. Further reading PLOS One (PMC): Planar Covariation of Hindlimb and Forelimb Elevation Angles during Terrestrial and Aquatic Locomotion of Dogs Wikipedia: Dog paddle Image: Olgierd Rudak, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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