So after much debate I final­ly ordered a PFD for Vivre. The coast guard does­n’t reg­u­late dog pfds the way they do human pfds there are no reg­u­la­tions or qual­i­ty con­trol. Any com­pa­ny can make a dog pfd with­out any guar­an­tee of qual­i­ty. So I want­ed some­thing with a good rep­u­ta­tion and a lot of pos­i­tive reviews. The one I chose end­ed up being the Ruf­fwear K9 Float Coat. Which was iron­i­cal­ly my first choice to begin with. It is a bit more expen­sive than a lot of the oth­ers, but I got it on sale and Vivre’s safe­ty is worth the price.

Aside from the excel­lent reviews and rep­u­ta­tion of Ruf­fwear it was the only K9 pfd that pro­vid­ed the pounds of float for their pfds on their blog. I emailed Out­ward Hound about the float in their pfds and nev­er got a reply.  The design of the coat does­n’t inhib­it Vivre’s move­ments, so she should still be able to be her nor­mal ener­getic self. But should still pro­vide ade­quate float. It is short on her body, so her back end will be more like­ly to sink, but that will help to keep her head out of the water.

 

The two run­ners up were the Ezy­Dog DFD and the Skip­py Dog Vest.  The only rea­son the Ezy­dog lost was the com­plaints about the lift han­dle break­ing com­bined with the fact I could­n’t find the pound of float. ( I did­n’t email them. ) The oth­er con­cern was a review that said that the dogs mouths were very close to the water with the design of the vest. I had some wor­ry about waves.

The Skip­py vest I actu­al­ly did­n’t find until I had ordered the K9 float coat, but while I like the slim design and maneu­ver­abil­i­ty of the Float Coat for every­day use I think if I ever do any blue water sail­ing I will take a longer look at the Skip­py to use in addi­tion to the Float Coat.

I took some video of my train­ing Vivre to let me put the pfd on and adjust it. I have no idea how it turned out since I am still using my dslr and that just isn’t work­ing well if I can’t be behind the cam­era focus­ing. But it did­n’t take long.

No more than 10 min­utes. Of course a large part of that is thanks to the fact that Vivre is pret­ty okay with any­thing I do to her as long as she is get­ting atten­tion.  I’ll post more about the float coat after I take her to the lake to try it out.