Experts off leash to find ways of the working dog Paul Weeding paid $12,000 for a sweet-natured working dog named Tom, who was two years old at the time. That was a year ago. Tom, a red kelpie - just like the one in the Red Dog movie, only smarter apparently - does the job of four men. On that score, Weeding says he made his money back in a matter of weeks. "Finding good men these days is impossible," says Weeding, 70, who has been running sheep in Tasmania all his life. And when you figure that $12,000 is three months' wages for one man, Tom's been a very good investment. Tom the wonder dog was trained by Matthew Johnson, 39 - a veteran of the training game for more than 20 years. As a kid he was winning state championships. Weeding calls him the dog whisperer. "If it was possible to get a dog to talk, [Johnson] would be the man to do it," says Weeding. For Johnson's part, he says good working dogs come from good genes; they're born to work and they love it. Even so, a handler puts "hundreds of hours" into training a pup to work reliably with livestock. For Johnson, what makes a good dog handler - and what makes for best practice in the breeding, housing and training of working dogs - has been tried and tested and handed down "over hundreds of years." To call the lore into question is as upsetting as, well, telling a woman she's doing a lousy job as a mother. "It gets up your nose," Johnson says. Next weekend, in Sydney, the Working Dog Alliance - a newly formed, not-for-profit charitable organisation established with seed funding from the federal government as part of the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy - is holding its inaugural conference. Over two days, 30 speakers - many of them university-based researchers - will give lectures on topics such as "Measuring and investigating factors which affect the performance of working dogs, their handlers and dog-handler teams" and "Why does animal welfare matter?" What gets up Johnson's nose is that "no one from the livestock industry is speaking to give our point of view." Johnson is part of the old school who fears the conference will lead to regulations in the industry that would do away with practices such as chaining up or appropriately cageing dogs when they're not working. "When they're not working, they need to be put away in the shade, with plenty of water and food," he says. But they get plenty of exercise daily. Mia Cobb, who worked as the manager of the training kennels and vet clinic facility at Guide Dogs Victoria for nearly 10 years, is one of the Working Dog Alliance's five directors. Others include Professor Paul McGreevy, a multi-award winning researcher from the University of Sydney's faculty of veterinary science. Cobb says the kind of concerns voiced by Johnson have been voiced by other people in the dog-training sector. She notes that an invitation for speakers was sent out to the livestock industry, via the National Farmers Federation. "We got no response," she says. Cobb said the alliance was founded to address a problem inherent in breeding and training practices across all sporting and working sectors, such as greyhound racing, police and customs, military and guard dogs, and carer dogs: the 50 to 70 per cent failure rate of transforming a puppy into an effective working animal. "They're just not making it through the puppy-raising and training process," she says. We know performance is strongly linked to welfare. The aim of the alliance is to improve welfare at all the life stages. In her research for a PhD that's near completed, Cobb examined the stress that trainee guide dogs undergo when they enter the kennel facility. In an experiment she used classical music, lavender essence and toys to "ameliorate that stress response." Vin Stapleton, 86, from Bushfield near Warrnambool, has been working on horseback with dogs since he was 10. He says treating a working dog well is plain common sense. "You don't get the best out of a dog by flogging him," he says. Was Stapleton open to using lavender essence and playing Albinoni's Adagio to his pups? There was such a terrible silence on the phone that we worried the veteran may have taken his last breath. Are you alive sir? And that's when he began to laugh. The photographs here have been taken from Working Dogs, a book project by Andrew Chapman and Melanie Faith Dove. Images from the book are being screened during the conference. The book launches on Sunday with live working dog demonstrations with ducks at the Collingwood Children's Farm, 11am, noon and 1pm.