Meet the man who believes doggy paddle can save your pooch’s life
IS your pooch feeling peaky? Or does it need to lose a few pounds?
It may sound barking mad, but one dog lover has come up with a novel way of curing various canine ailments – a few laps in a swimming pool.
Gareth Dunne has built a booming business with his purpose-built canine hydrotherapy pool, as dog owners aim to improve the health and social life of their beloved furry family members.
Gareth opened SharpWells Hydrotherapy, across the road from the Meath Dogs Trust Centre in Ashbourne, seven years ago, to help pooches with various problems. And his unique swimming lessons help dogs get fit, lose weight and also aid with muscle and joint pains – and various other ailments.
Dubliner Gareth originally combined his love of dogs with his engineering education when he set about looking for a specially designed pool to aid his own pooches.
‘I bought the pool for our own dogs to use at home,’ Gareth told the Irish Mail on Sunday. ‘I looked into it and at the time there were very few places offering hydrotherapy for dogs so we looked into the training, went to the UK, came back and seven years later, here we are.
‘It’s good for dysplasia and arthritis: a lot of dogs come here after surgery to rebuild muscle that they had lost.’
Marvin, the black lab in the pictures here, first went to Gareth five years ago with his owner Martin Troy after he was recovering from hip surgery.
‘The dogs swim and the resistance of water can be 42 times harder than a limb moving through the air,’ he added.
Such is the success of his ingenious idea that he recently quit his job as an engineer to become a full-time canine swim coach and physio.
‘I gave up my job two years ago to work with the dogs at Sharpwells full-time,’ he explained.
‘Demand had really taken off and slowly it got busier and busier so I bit the bullet.’
He now has, on average, 70 dogs a week who pitch up at his pool for their half-hour session.
Gareth charges €30 for the session, which also includes a shower and blowdry for the wet dogs after their swim.
His doggy venture has become such a success that he is set to appear on the forthcoming second series of Dog Tales with Andrea Hayes on TV3.
In the series Gareth will be seen in the pool with a beagle called Lewis who had just gained freedom from a lab where he had been used for testing.
The therapy was a success and there was a happy ending to Lewis’s shaggy dog story: he was adopted by new owners.