Q&A Episode!

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It's the Dog People Podcast with your host Jack Lawrence. Secretly, I decided to start this podcast For some free dog training advice. You know, Malinois seem to be like the dog at the moment. Like, I think people see them on Instagram doing these incredible things. Yeah. Going, oh my God, that's awesome. And then they get one like, oh my God, what the fuck have I done?

And Max O'Neill.

You would not believe how many people I meet and I go, what made you want to get, say, an Aussie Shepherd? They go, I don't know. I go, had you met one before? They go, no. If you want to ask me how often I walk my own dog a week, it's only twice a week.

It's the Dog People Podcast, the podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to shout, it's okay, it's friendly. My name is Jack Lawrence. Max O'Neill, down under dog trainer. Max, it's another special Q&A episode. Thanks to our legendary mates at Knowse, a multi-award-winning Australian pet insurance company built to help pet parents stay informed and supported throughout your pet's life. Get more information at knowse.com.au. That's K-N-O-S-E.com.au, issued by Pacific International Insurance. So big shout out to those legends for being on board and helping us create more content. Thanks, Jack. We've got some great content for you and a Q&A in regards to a few questions we've had on the socials. Don't forget, we've got a Facebook group, The Dog People Podcast, and you can follow us on Instagram as well as, of course, Max @downunderdogtrainer. All right, Max, we've got a Kelpie issue from Isabella Thorpe. She says she's got a 5-month-old Kelpie and she's really struggling at basic training anywhere else besides the bedroom. From day dot, she said, we did small training sessions in our bedroom with him and then we slowly moved it outside, but he became less interested. And now at 5 months, he basically refuses to do the training anywhere else besides our room. He may last 3 tricks max outside, then runs off to do something else. We use his food as his treat, but have noticed using a toy outside helps, but we can't heel, middle, or rollover with the toy. He will just jump and try and grab it. We've tried a lead, which doesn't help and is making him collar sensitive.

Cool. There's heaps to unpack there, Isabelle. Great question, actually. I was really stoked when this one came through because there's heaps of little nuggets to unpack there. Sorry, Isabella with an A, my bad. So let's look at the first thing. So right off the top, we look at environmental conditioning, right? That dog sees the bedroom as his classroom and the outside as a play area. So straight away he's like, no, Mum, like, we're not going to train out here. This is where, you know, this is where I train in the bedroom and I'm not training out here. But the second thing, if we go into things that are a little more deeper, is where our dog's value lies. That's the main problem we're having. When we're in the bedroom and there's not a lot to do, training becomes the most exciting option. So he's happy to do it and he's like, yep, cool. The moment you go outside, the environment is clearly more valuable than the training and versus— and more valuable than what's on offer, notably the food. And we do want to continue to persist with the food because, like you said, toys are great to add in later to training. But trying to, you know, like lure with a toy and all this, this gets a bit crazy. Toys are greater later when our dogs know how to do the thing, and then we can give them the toy after the behaviour.

It took me ages to get Kira onto Doing stuff with the toy, like the heel and middle and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. For the— to start with, I needed to do— we just got her absolutely to the point where she had just had it down pat. Every— everything we were doing. And we did it with food to start with. No, didn't introduce the toys for a while.

Yeah. When you know to switch is when your dog can do the thing, the behaviour without any food inside. So once you can do heeling without having to have food in your hand, or you can sit or down without food in your hand, that's when you can mark your dog. And then rather than bring out food, you bring out Toy, play, toy goes away, you make them work to bring it back again. So that's when you know you're ready, but we're not there yet, especially with a 5-month-old dog with some, a couple of little training issues. So what you need to do, Isabella, is I want you to do 2 or 3 sessions per day, little mini sessions, 5 minutes maximum, right? And for the next couple of months until this is repaired, is this is your dog's sole source of food. Okay, so during those 3 sessions, we're gonna go outside, we're gonna have our kibble. So we're training for the food that he needs, not the food he wants. Wants fluctuate. Some days I want cake, some days I don't, I'm too full. But I always need food— dinner, breakfast, things like that. Okay, so if we're training with dessert, the wants will fluctuate. Train with his main diet, number one. Number 2, you're gonna go out there and start your 5-minute session. The moment that he opts out and goes, nah, I'm good, 2 things are going to happen. Number one, the restaurant closes. That meal gets poured back into the bag. Okay. He doesn't get another opportunity to earn it. We go, okay, cool. You don't want to train. That's fine. Number 2, he needs to go into his crate. Okay. If he wants to skip training and try and do something more fun, he'll continue to make that choice. We go, oh, okay. You can end training. That's fine. But you're going to your crate. Simple as that. If he sees through training to completion where you're out of your food, cool, now you can go and play, go do your thing. But if he chooses to end it prematurely, then he goes back in his crate. Think of it like this, right? So growing up, I used to try and pull a sick day on my mum every now and then. Hey, Mum, I'm not feeling well. Can I stay home from school? She's like, yeah, sweet. But you're not watching TV all day. You're going to catch up on homework and assignments and sleep and this and that. And I go, actually, you know what? Screw this. I actually might just go to school. It sounds better. Okay. Same. If he's thinking of ending training, of going and having freedom and playing, doing what he wants, then ending a training session sounds sick. I want him to go, oh no, I want to keep training because the alternative is going down and laying in a crate and doing nothing. It's not making our crate a bad place. It's just when we compare them, if we have training, we see that above it is freedom and environment and below it is chilling in the crate. So naturally crate becomes a better option. Okay. Does that, does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

Yeah.

Just at the end of the day, as you said, like, I mean, opting out of the training for him at the moment is more fun.

Yeah, it's a way to—

that's exciting. And I'll come back when I want to do it. And I know mum will train with me and I'll get what I want. That's when I decide I want to come back.

Exactly.

But right now I'm going to go do this because that's more fun.

Exactly. And if we just keep returning to the bedroom, all that's going to happen is, you know, that's just

reinforcing

it. Spot on. So the second part is we talked about closing the restaurant. So whatever his daily allowance is, let's just say as an example for easy math, his daily allowance is 3 cups of food. Okay. And he gets that, you know, brekkie, lunch, dinner. Now, whichever meal that he skips, let's just say you get up first thing tomorrow morning, Isabel, after you listen to this and you go, all right, we've got 1 cup of food, let's do our training. And let's just say after 1 or 2 tricks, he's like, nah, I'm good. All right, go pop him in the crate, pour that back in the bag. We still count that as— that's 1 meal down. We don't now add that cup into later in the day to try and top him up. Because again, he'll just go, oh, I'll knock it back now. I'll knock it back at lunch. I'll just have a huge dinner to make up for it. I'll train when I'm ready. No, no, no. Every meal you just get your one cup regardless of what you did in the previous session. Simple as that. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

That's, that's it. That's an easy fix, Isabel. Just do those couple of things and that will sort that out. No problem at all.

Of course, we've spoken about this before, but a lot of people see that as trying to starve your dog, saying, oh, well, if you, if you, if you don't do what I'm telling you to do, then you're going to starve. But it's, again, as we've said in the past, it's, it's more about building that drive, like building the excitement around, okay, I'm going to do this because I get this. I get to— it's like Kira, when I first got her, no food drive, couldn't care less about food. She was not interested. And as you said, okay, we're going to move everything to hand feeding, number one. Like everything that you do is just hand feeding and everything comes from you, comes from you, comes from you.

And it's conditional.

Exactly. And I've noticed even now, like, I mean, she injured herself again. Honestly, it drives me insane. So she had to have 2 days off. From training, we went out today, absolutely went hammer and tong.

Oh yeah.

Because she's been deprived of it. Exactly. Not out of cruelty, just because she's not done it. So, so as soon as you sort of deprive a dog of something and they go, hold on a second, this may get taken away from me. I'm going to give this my all.

Yeah.

Then they come out of the gates and they're firing and they're listening to you and it's just, it's great. And then that, then, then you don't have to do that forever, obviously, because it just becomes ingrained in them. And it's just like, this is what we do. This is life. This is how things work.

And that's the best point that Jack just said, is that this is not a forever thing. You'll have a couple of tricky days. days, you might have a tricky week maximum where you're like, oh God, like he's, he's never getting to his 3 meals. At some stage that switch will flick where he goes, oh, I get it now. And you're not even, it's not like you're not offering the food, you're offering it to him. He's just not taking it. And it's, this is, this is one of those things for his own good, especially for a herding breed like a Kelpie. Okay. Is a couple of things. If we have such low value in our dog's eyes, our dog is just forever in environments going to completely lose interest in us and hyperfocus on everything else.

Yeah.

This will eventually lead to reactivity, fixation issues, rounding everything up, and eventually you'll go, well, now I can't take him anywhere. And then it's an even bigger issue to fix. So number one, we do it now while he's young. The other issue is Kelpies are bred to naturally be quite apathetic towards food. And this is a very intentional breed trait of theirs because Kelpies, when they're, you know, running around in a paddock herding, if they're going, oh, sheep poo, oh, cow poo, oh, horse feed, oh, a dead animal. And they're constantly scouring the ground like a Labrador for food, they're going to be a shit worker. They're going to miss a lot of stuff. So when farmers were breeding, they were like, oh, you know what? He's a great worker, not that interested in food, which means he doesn't need to work for food. He will just work for free. Plus he's not scrummaging on the ground. Perfect. So Kelpies are bred to be a bit that way, which means we sometimes need to manually activate their food drive, just like Jack did with Kira being half herding breed as well.

Yeah. The biggest thing is don't give up.

Yeah.

Because if you give up, then it's like, it's the same situation with anything to do with dogs, like putting, using a crate. They bark and bark and bark. You give up, take them out. Next time you put them in, they'll bark for longer and louder and all the rest of it. It just gets worse and worse and worse. So if you're going to do it, you need to commit to it and don't give up. Because if you do, the dog just learns, okay, well, I've just got to hold out and I'll get what I want eventually. And then it just goes longer and longer.

That's it. This might take a bit. Your dog's going to be fine if they're that hungry. They would eat. Okay. So don't go, oh, like he's not eating. Yeah, cool. And he's clearly not that hungry. Sometimes it takes a couple of those days to flick that switch. And the last example I'll leave you with is I work with a lot of rescue dogs. A lot of these dogs have come from the street where they go, oh, they're picked up in the back of Ipswich living on the streets. Those dogs never have a poor food drive. They probably went quite a bit of time at one point without much food. Supply and demand. And they, they never quite lose that. Just a thought.

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All right. Speaking of food, our next question is a food question, Max.

Yes. So we've got another one in the group from Andrew Hearts Hartley. He goes, hey guys, I've got an episode request. Can you fellas talk about some potential dog foods to purchase? Say top 5 kibble picks and top 5 raw fresh food picks, things available online slash large pet store chains. Yeah, cool. So Andrew, we'll answer this in a couple of parts. Number one, I'll give you my sort of top recommendations off the head. I probably won't have 5 for each, but I'll give you a few for each, the ones that I like. And then we have at some stage got a dog food nutritionist coming on board to chat about these things. The one we had fell through because they're no longer doing it anymore. So we've just got to find another one where we're going to go into this topic way more in depth for you guys. And do a bit of a mini-series on dog food, dry, raw, all those sort of things. But off the top of my head, let's go through kibbles. So I won't go through ones that I don't recommend because we can't do any of that sort of shit on air.

The Dog

People Podcast legal team, i.e., Jack, won't be happy with that. But basically just take it as the ones I recommend are the ones I recommend. Probably my number one recommendation for dry food is Taste of the Wild. Their stuff is really, really, really, really good. It's expensive. It comes at a premium. But what you'll find is because it's so nutritionally dense, you'll actually end up feeding less of it. Same. Nelson is a big breed. He's probably close to 50 kilos now. I've not weighed him in a while. And when I serve up his bowl, we both look at it. We're like, is that it? But there's a lot packed in there and that's all he needs. So, it does last quite a while. I've got a variety of different things you can get, you know, like ocean fish, salmon, beef. They've all got cool names like, you know, High Prairie Goats and shit like that, but it's all really, really good stuff. So shout out to Taste of the Wild. And if you want to sponsor us, Taste of the Wild, we will take it.

We're here for it. That was a free plug. The next one might not be.

The second one I like and what I'm actually using for Nelson at the moment, because Nelson's having a bit of a spell from raw for a couple of reasons. The one we've got him on at the moment is From a brand called Enduro Pet Full Bore. So, this is actually for hunting dog. It's an ultra-high-calorie dog food. And the reason Nelson's on it is because anyone that's met him knows he's an incredibly active dog. He's an incredibly lean Rottweiler. He's not a big chunky one. He just looks like a giant pit bull. He's ripped. But he can sometimes be hard to keep weight on because he is just busy. So, we've got him on this one at the moment, and it's working well. He's actually looking really, really good on it. His coat's good. His muscle's good. He's putting on a nice amount of weight. He looks good. So it's Enduro Pet Full Bore. The last one that I like is one by Performa Dog. These are from the Von Forell dog trainers down in Melbourne that run this. And Performa Dog's another, yeah, good quality kibble that I really like as well. And also work quite well for Nelson. Off the top of my head, they're the 3.

Amazing. None of those ones that you've named there, I see advertised highly in commercials and certain places.

That's incredible.

Exactly.

What a coincidence, hey? The only sort of one, the last one I forgot that maybe is on TV is Scratch. Scratch is another really good quality kibble. That's another one that you can get subscription to your house and stuff like that. Not personally tried it, but I've met a lot of clients and I've dealt with it and handled it, tasted it weirdly enough, and it's good, high quality stuff. So Scratch is another good one as well. In terms of raw, the one that we use is Pet Mints Direct. They're located on the Gold Coast, I think Logan and stuff as well. Again, shout out Pet Mints Direct. Let us know if you want to sponsor us. But they're a good brand. We've used them for quite a while. They're always really good, heaps of variety, well priced. On top of that, other raw brands I recommend, I think Canine Country is one. But I've not really done, you know, I've kind of found a brand that worked for me and stuck to it. So no, Canine Country is one. And I think the only other brand I know is Raw and Fresh are also quite good. Big Dog is also good. Pet Barn, they're available. Pet Barn and Big Dog and Leading Raw are quite good.

Is it bad that Kira's diet is naturally from a dog food company? I buy—

From the butcher?

I buy chicken legs, chicken wings. I buy mince, beef mince. We get— she has— so every night she'll have beef mince. She has sardines, egg, a chicken leg, and some rice.

Perfect. Yeah.

All mixed together.

That's good. I used to do DIY as raw. DIY raw as well. All I'd say is if you are going to do DIY raw, make sure we model like the actual full animal. So you've got some protein in there, like the muscle meat, you've got bones in there. The other thing we're missing is maybe organs, right? Every now and then, like a kidney or liver, kidney, lung, things like that. Just some like organ meat will be really good. There's a whole heap extra vitamins and things in that that they do need.

Okay.

But yeah, no, that's all good. If you're happy to go DIY, that's That's brilliant. And another good point is you can get raw stuff from butchers. They typically sell pet mince for, you know, $5 a kilo, something like that. Only thing is it can vary in terms of the bone content, muscle content, things like that. But that'll make more sense once we do our pet food, you know, episode. But hopefully that helps Andrew's— Andrew, Andy, Andrew Hartley.

There you go. Another question episode for you. Q&A. If you've got any questions for us, the Dog People Podcast on Facebook. And on Instagram. We'll catch you on the next one. The Dog People Podcast is a Mashed Pumpkin production hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill. Edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence.

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