Why Every Dog Needs a Job

Hello, dog peeps. Jack here. Just a quick one before we get into this episode. You may or may not be aware that when I'm not talking dog stuff with Max, I in fact interview people who are incarcerated in prisons across the United States on a show called One Minute Remaining Stories from the Inmates. And that show has been nominated for an award in America. And I would love your support if you've got 60 seconds to click the link in the show notes of this episode and just vote for my show. That would be amazing if you could. Thank you very much indeed. Oh, and don't forget to verify your email address. Otherwise, the vote does not count. Thank you.

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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. Go oh my god that's awesome. And then they get one like oh my god what the fuck 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.

Welcome to the Dog People Podcast, the podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to say, it's okay, he's friendly. My name is Jack Lawrence, not a dog trainer, just a dog training enthusiast, but of course joined as always by the man who knows what he's talking about. Thankfully one of us does. It is Max O'Neill from the Down Under Dog Trainer. Uh, Max, we are talking about giving your dog a job. Now that doesn't mean sending your dog off down the mines, uh, or sending it off to an office to go and make you some cash. Let's explain what you mean by give the dog a job.

Yeah. So giving a dog a job is, we'll go a bit into it a bit deeper today. I do think it's almost become a bit of a buzzword or a terminology you see quite a lot online. Like your dog needs a job. I don't really see anyone disagreeing with that, but what I do see online is a lack of is more detailed information. What it really means, you know, or the way I think of it is giving your dog some level of accountability just throughout the day, just going, hey, there's going to be a certain period where there's a level of enforceable expectations. Hey, I expect you to do this and I will enforce these actions and these things need to happen. And rather than just being like sporadic, oh hey, a bit of this, bit of that, I think it's really good for him to have a set window where these things need to happen. So the reason why I say this is because 95-99% of our dogs are working breeds. Okay, when we looked around our class the other day, we had all sorts of different dogs. Even the, even the Dachshunds, even the Cavoodles were saying, hey, These guys are working breeds. Even the big fluffy golden retrievers, working breed. There's very few breeds like, you know, other than say like, you know, the Pomeranian, etc., where they're just designed purely just to be a nice little toy dog and just to, just to be cute and fluffy. But regardless, every dog does need a job. So, some period throughout the day and some other little bits and pieces sprinkled in where there's some enforceable expectations. So, the reason we want to talk about this again is because we just don't see many much detailed information. Everyone's like, all right, well, I'll give my dog a job. I'll make them shake hands before dinner or something like that, or we'll go for a walk, but your dog drags around the block. That's not a job. A job is that set period where things happen your way and you give your dog that purpose. So that's what it is. The reason why it's so important is because all of our dogs have this little nagging feeling at the back of their brain telling them they're supposed to do something. Most problematic behaviours we observe in our dogs are really just fulfilment-seeking behaviours. They're really just doing things that feel natural for them, and they've got this little itching feeling at the back of their brain they're trying to turn off— negative reinforcement— so that our dogs can go and feel better about, about themselves, really. And I guess we can only compare it to, you know, when you go to bed at night and you feel like you've forgotten something, or you're meant to do something that day, and you've either— it's just gnawing at the back of the brain. You're either feeling like, oh, what was this thing? I can't quite remember what it was. Or you were supposed to do something that you said you would and you didn't do it, and you always feel like guilty about it. Our dogs feel that, but times 100. It's magnified massively because we've never been selectively bred, but they have. We've applied eugenics to them, and now we have all sorts of different breeds. It means if we're looking at Kira here, for example, lying down next to us on the bed being good, is Kira is a cattle dog. Her parents were cattle dogs, her grandparents were cattle dogs, so on and so forth. Now, the breeders who were, you know, not at first created the breed, and then the breeders who then kept the breed going, every time they were deciding which of their dogs to breed from, they were looking at the dog with the most amount of work drive. Which of these dogs just wants to work? If they had a few males and a few females, looks would have come into it, a bit of that, a bit of temperament, but mostly it was which of these dogs just wants to go. And that same decision of who's got the most work drive was made for 100, if not more, generations of dogs until we end up with the ones we have today. And again, that's not just for Kira and her cattle dog nature. That's the same for your Labrador, your Golden Retriever, your Poodle, your Cavalier, your Rottweiler, your Whippet, everything, all those dogs.

And then we chuck them into a backyard and expect them not to do anything.

They go, hey, welcome to early retirement. Have fun. And what's really interesting, you chat to anyone, you go, if you won the lottery tomorrow and you could fully financially retire, what would you do? 99% of people I speak to, whether it's friends, family, or clients during a consult, People would say, oh, I'd probably live it up for like a year and then I'd get really bored. So I'd go and volunteer and do something.

Yeah. Because everyone needs a purpose.

Spot on.

Everyone needs a purpose. You need to wait. When you wake up in the morning, you need to do something. You need something to do. Otherwise you just sit around and you— that's right. You get bored, you stare at the wall and you just go, oh, which is what our dogs are doing. But as you said, then that's when that breeds the frustration. And because they're not humans and we're, you know, we get frustrated or bored, we go, well, okay, well, I'll go do something. Whereas dogs, if they're in the backyard, Then, then they don't have that, then they'll find an outlet, whether it's digging, barking, chewing something, destroying, all the rest of it.

Yeah, exactly right. And that's it. We understand this so well about ourselves. You know, you look at every stage of human development and we will try and apply some sort of job or task or structure so that we don't get too bored and get up to mischief. You know, you've got school on. Once school's on, you know, you'll try and get early adults and, you know, late teens into some sort of sport or some type of recreation or some type of trade or uni or something. And then from there we go into the workforce, because when people are bored, we get up to weird shit. And it, you know, perfect examples during COVID whenever everyone either had to stay at home or couldn't go to work or lost their job, whatever, the world went absolutely mental. And that state we found ourselves in as a population, as a world, most of our dogs live in that headspace each and every day. When I chat to people, you know, oh, did you keep your job during COVID No, I couldn't work for 6 months. How are you, mate? I was, you know, crawling up the walls. I was manic. I was like why do you think your dog's doing the same? Okay. And that's sometimes when we like, you know, we speak about things like humanizing our dog or anthropomorphizing our dog. We don't want to, you know, don't put our— project our human things onto our dog. But I think sometimes we almost go too far from that and we end up, you know, forgetting that they're a sentient being that has needs as well. And sometimes it's a really easy way to look at it, to compare them to us, because quite often there are some pretty fair comparisons. And in the same way that we need structure and purpose, so do our dogs. That's, that's why they need it. And Like we said before, all the stuff we, our dogs tend to get up to is quite often just fulfillment-seeking behavior. They've just got that gnawing feeling at the back of their head that they can't quite turn off unless we give them a job.

Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the US, offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as 2 days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as $0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com/startnow. That's growtherapy.com/startnow. growtherapy.com/startnow. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

You're either all in on this model, or maybe you're building with another. You're either speed, or is it security? You're either custom, or are you ready to use? Or you're AWS AI. With hundreds of models, ready-to-use agents, speed and security built in, you don't have to pick a side. You can have them all. How will AI revolutionize your business? AWS AI is how.

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And then, you know, there might be people listening to this going, well, but Max, I take my dog out twice a day. We go for an hour-long walk each time. Like, you know, surely is that not a job for the dog? We're going out and we're walking together and we're doing this big route. You know, what more do I need to do?

Well, yes and no. It can be, or it can't, or it might not be depending on how you apply it. Is the walk could just be equivalent to exercise. And again, you might be a multi-multi-millionaire now who's just won the lottery and you go to the gym once a day. But again, is that structure and purpose? Not necessarily.

Exactly.

But it could be. So again, if you just go, go for a walk around the block and just let your dog drag you, of course that's not any sort of job. But again, if you've got enforceable expectations and if you've got a period of structure and purpose where you go, hey, we're going for a walk, I'm going to be in charge, and my expectations are that you do XYZ. I want you to maintain a loose leash, keep some level of engagement, and don't pull me for most of the walk unless— And then, of course, we're going to treat it like any job. I will give you breaks. I will let you go and sniff. Okay. We want to act as our dog's boss in that moment. But again, there's a level of enforceable expectations. It's us going, I expect this from you through this period of the day so that your dog gets home and feels like they've had some level of a job or a task that day. And your dog's job doesn't have to be Breed-specific. Jack doesn't need to go and get, you know, 100 head of cattle and let Shakira chase them around as much as you'd like that. If you've got a Golden Retriever, we don't encourage you to buy a shotgun and head down to the lake. If you've got a Dachshund, don't go and try and find some badgers or moles and send them down in the tunnels. Like, your dog's job doesn't have to be breed-specific. It just has to be a window every day where we go, hey, you need to be doing this. For example, some jobs my dogs does. Hey, when the mail arrives, I need you to come down and help me bring it in. That's just 5 minutes, but it's a job for him. Hey, when guests arrive, your job is to stay on your bed until I release you. Hey, if someone knocks at the gate, you're allowed to bark until I tell you to stop. When we go for a walk, I need you to listen to me. When you need to come to class, your job is to demo. Things like that. Okay. It's just giving your dog a window every day where they have a job. So Nelson goes to bed every night and goes, today was a good day. Today I've got that out of my system. I'm feeling good. And then it's rinse and repeat tomorrow. But quite often, most of the problems I see in people, I'm like, we could fix a lot of this stuff without dealing with the behaviour directly. You know, it's just giving you some structure, routine, purpose back, giving your dog a job will fix so many of the things that you're likely seeing.

So, you know, someone listening to this right now who, you know, they've got their dog and they're saying, okay, right, I'm up for giving my dog a job. How do I go about working out what that job is? Would you say, you know, first look at the breed, look at what they're meant to do. And then work your way from there?

Yes and no. Like, I think that's where we look at the difference between, say, enrichment and a job. Because again, like, what Nelson finds enriching, you know, biting things, chasing things, tugging things—

It doesn't necessarily—

Exactly. It doesn't necessarily— it doesn't need to be a job where I go, hey, every day when that man in fluoro rocks up, you better like go for him. Like, it doesn't always work. And same, like, you might not have— let's say you've got a dachshund, you know, we provide them some outlets that help them feel like a dachshund, but we might not be able to create a job around it because we're like, well, You know, again, in Queensland, I mean, it's not like we have rabbits that are tunnelling in our yard or anything like that. So that's the important bit. We want to go, okay, I want to give my dog every day a way to sort of spin their breed-specific dials and get that out their system. But that doesn't necessarily have to be their job per se.

Okay.

So the job again just has to be a window where there's some enforceable expectations and just a good structured walk, some place training, or just certain periods throughout the day where you go, hey, I expect you and I will enforce that you behave a certain way in this period. And just finding your dog and giving them enough. And every dog will have a different level of work ethic. Again, your cattle dogs, your Malinois, things like that are notorious for needing a huge amount of this each day in order to be fulfilled. And they're also notorious for showing some pretty crazy, you know, behaviour presentations if we don't give them that. On the flip side, if you've got, say, a pug or a French bulldog, 5 minutes a day and they might go, that is me done. If you, if you can give me that a day, I will not get up to any mischief. So it's And most dogs kind of operate somewhere in between. It's just finding what works for you and your dog is a nice healthy balance.

As you can see, my place training is going really well through the whole thing. Kira, who's supposed to be placed, is just currently walking around the entire room and knocking things over. Thank you, Kira. I appreciate it. We're gonna have to work on your job, mate. Uh, well, look, as always, if you've got any questions, uh, for Max, then make sure you chuck them in the Facebook group. Just search the Dog People Podcast, or on Instagram as well. You can message us there. We'll see you next time. 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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