BISMARCK, ND ( KXNET ) — The summer swim season may be coming to a close, but that hasn’t stopped some pooches from taking the plunge.

And the K9 force of two local police departments is reaching new potential through pool time.

“They’re just kinda like people. You know, you put them through stress and adversity, and they work through it. They build up their confidence; they build up their self-esteem,” said the commander of Bismarck’s K-9 Unit, Lieutenant Chad Fetzer.

Last weekend, the Bismarck Police and Mandan Police departments teamed up to give their K9s some much-needed water training at the Wachter Aquatic Complex after the outdoor swimming pool closed for the season.

Water training is a sequence of aquatic exercises K9s are placed through, and the training helps develop their skills in physical health, adaptability, and deployments in water bodies. Even though Fetzer says that deployments in water aren’t common, they’re valuable for keeping the city’s furry force both fit and fierce.

“It generalizes to other situations, where, okay, maybe we haven’t done that exact scenario, maybe they haven’t seen that, but they know they can work through it ’cause they worked through other situations,” said Fetzer.

However, Fetzer confesses that police departments in the area have very few places to conduct their annual water training.

Working with the Bismarck Parks and Recreation District, four K9s from the Bismarck department and one K9 from the Mandan department received a couple of hours of water training last Saturday.

During their training, K9s learned how to swim in deeper and sometimes choppy water, jump off a three-foot ledge — which Fetzer says the K9s had never done before — and successfully complete fend-off drills, where a decoy wears a bite suit while the dog apprehends the suspect, in the waves.

And by putting dogs through controlled stress, K9 units are able to remain effective enough to keep communities safe.

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