Our approach to evaluating dog life jackets was mainly observational. After all, how do you measure static buoyancy and face angle of these hyperactive, lovable bundles of joy? Rather than gathering typical empirical data, we focused mostly on the opinions of the owners of each dog since they intuitively knew if their pet was at ease or if they struggled with fit and performance.

It is important to remember that some dogs are naturally at ease being in and around the water. Other dogs are a little more tepid. We often hear pet owners say "My dog swims." and fail to see the point of a doggie life jacket. However, we witnessed that even the strongest dogs tire, putting them at potential risk, especially if a pet owner or rescuer takes awhile to recover them after a fall overboard or tumble off the dock.

A note about intended "use" should be inserted here. You might want to think about whether your dog's jacket is primarily an aid for an accidental fall overboard or will it be used primarily for beach fun, swimming and retrieving. If your dog will be wearing a life jacket aboard your boat all day and used primarily as a safety precaution, you might want to think minimal and comfortable. If swimming is the primary intended use, a securely fitted larger jacket might be a better approach, depending on your dog.

To give the dogs regular breaks we assigned two dogs to each pet-size category so that all sizes of each jacket could be tested without over-working the dogs. Since dog life jackets typically come in small, medium, large and extra-large sizes, we selected dogs that ranged from 12 lbs to 130lbs. Here's how our dogs sized up.