Hello there, welcome to talking dogs. It's a pleasure to have you here. I'm Graham Hall, and for well over a decade I've been showing humans how to train their beloved, but often unruly dogs.

I'm known as the dog father, and you might recognise my voice from TV's dogs behaving very badly.

Now I'm bringing even more experience and advice to you in this podcast in the hope that if you're running out of patience with your dog, you'll be able to leave confident

and that you're armed with new training tools to try.

In a little bit, I'm going to have a think about some of the unexpected benefits of taking

your dog out for a proper walk. Things you might not have thought of before. But I want to start

by getting into some news that's been doing the rounds recently over the last couple of weeks.

Germany has introduced a new

dog welfare law that amongst other things insists that people have to walk their dogs, that's a good

thing, right? But they've been very prescriptive about how often and for how long.

So what is this new proposed law in Germany? Well, it's not just about dogs, it's for all animals and it's for their welfare. So the principles are kind of really good,

things like you shouldn't keep a dog chained up, you know, all day long, you shouldn't leave a dog in a

house and go to work and just

forget about them for many hours on end and all that kind of thing. But they've also put a rule in,

and this is what's really caught the eye of the media, about walking your dog. So the principle is,

if you've got a dog, you should walk it. Quite right, too. Of course, we all know a dog in the neighbourhood that we know lives in a house and we've never seen

them walk their dog. And that is, of course, wrong. So the new law is looking to sort of address

that, right? But what they've done, and it's sort of, I suppose it's typical politicians,

you know, they've put a rule in, take an expert advice. I suspect the agriculture

minister, you know, she said, I've taken expert advice on this, I've taken advice, perhaps she's

not a dog owner, I don't know. But the rule is, you've got to walk your dogs twice a day,

and it's got to be for a total of an hour. There was some confusion. It is a total of an

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