Twig, Clearwater's Skateboarding Dog

Shelly Maslak's reminds me of how deep our natural love of animals goes. We love - and are inspired by - animals, often because limitations seem less, well, limiting to them.

Winter the dolphin is our most famous example. But there's another animal spreading joy in Clearwater: a skateboarding dog.

That's right. We have a local canine skater, a Sheltie named Twig. She's a feisty featherweight who's been skating for a couple of years now, and she's proud to ride for the Gulf Coast Skate Shop Team in Dunedin.

Twig loves to skate up Beach Walk on Clearwater Beach and entertain the crowd by skating down the double set of stairs in front of Post Corner Pizza. To cross train, she's recently taken up skimboarding and loves the new board she got at Mandalay Surf Shop.

She's a local girl, but she performs all over Florida: at a Marlin's pre-game show in Miami, at the Happy Paws Pet Expo in Ft. Lauderdale, at Mallory Square in Key West, and right here at the Clearwater Pet Festival.

And Twig skates for a cause - she skates to support Junior Trainers. She's donating money she's earned performing to sponsor a contest to encourage kids to discover the fun of training their own dogs. Details are on her website: www.twigskates.com

Twig's Youtube videos have won her fans in all 50 states and in countries all over the world: in North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. www.youtube.com/twigskates

So how has a local girl captured the imagination of people in so many different cultures?  You can judge for yourself after you see her videos. My take on it is that we all love to see the joy of limitations discarded. We get a vicarious lift and sometimes get inspired to look differently at our own limited thinking about what we might be able to do.

As Henry Ford put it, "Whether you think you can or can't, you're right."