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Founder's Story
In an Unsafe World: Michael Hussain and the Future of Protection Dogs | S2 Ep. 177
00:18:03
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- [00:00]
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Suede Michael Hussein
Foreign.
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Podcast Host
Welcome back to Founder Story. Today we have Suede, Michael Hussein and Suede, you are the founder and trainer at Alpen House Shepherds. We had a really interesting conversation almost a year ago now, maybe six months ago about what you're working on and I'm super excited to learn more about what's happening in Europe, in the US and other places and just more about shepherds. I think I shared a story. When I was a kid, I always wanted a shepherd and it did not get along with our cat and I had to choose the cat. Looking back, I think it might have been a mistake. But sweet. I'd love to understand. How did you get into founding this company and why?
- [02:18]
Suede Michael Hussein
Yeah, I mean it's, it's a long story and I'll do my best to abbreviate it and just, you know, pick out the highlights, but basically I got A protection dog. My first protection dog, my first train dog, about six years ago. And it was something that I've been looking into for a while, almost a decade, just toying with the idea, playing with the idea, lining up sort of my understanding of protection dogs as, you know, with a reality that I would ultimately be in, where I could actually have one, be able to care for it, be able to, you know, have a dog with me in the way that I wanted to have a dog with me at all times in my life as part of a lifestyle. So it took a long time and I went through a long period of research, in depth research, trying to figure out the right dog to get and what's involved. And it was completely confusing. I mean, I've got a background in management consulting and we do a lot of due diligence in that field. And doing due diligence and protection dogs is basically impossible, I found. And so ultimately I selected a dog, you know, was using the techniques and methodologies that I knew how to make decisions based upon the research that I did. And it was a beautiful dog, a phenomenal dog. I fell in love with and very happy to have selected him. O'Connor, Vamhouse, Trendy Germany, German origin, trained in Germany to the highest level in IGP and just a beaut, just exactly the dog I wanted. And what I ultimately came to understand after I purchased him, despite all the assurances from the person that I bought him from, and despite, you know, the decades of experience that the person had working with these dogs and the, you know, degree from one of the best schools on the planet that this individual had this dog. O'Connor would have not actually protected me in real life. He was sold to me as a protection dog. It was sold to me as having tracking capabilities, obedience capabilities, and yeah, he had certificates and all that stuff. But in reality, in the real world, none of those capabilities would, would have been able to come into play, not even the obedience. So it was an eye opening experience for me and it led me down a path of researching how to train him myself in all these different disciplines. And one thing led to another, led to another, led to another, and I fell in love with dog training, I fell in love with protection training and I decided to embark on it on my own because I could see that the entire space of protection dog training, once I began to understand what was actually involved with both the space and the actual training of real protection dogs that are lovable, loving, social, stable and safe in the real world, there was a huge dichotomy between those two things, what it actually took to make those dogs and what was actually being offered and created and purchased by people in the marketplace looking for a protection dog were two entirely different things. And I wanted to create real protection dogs for real clients. And that vision is what consumed me and what ended up dictating the past five years of my life as I embarked on that path. And that was the sort of foundational spirit and set of moments that unfolded for Alpenhaus shepherds to be born.
- [05:53]
Podcast Host
I think protection, safety, security are really on a lot of people's minds now. You know, I've been watching how, you know, basketball players in the US Their homes have been robbed at, I have friends recently, their homes were broken into and robbed. Luckily they were not there, but they've, you know, the.
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Rosetta Stone Advertiser
Supposedly there's a group of people doing.
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Podcast Host
This at different places. They're tracking people, social media. So when, when I think of safety and protection, I'm really curious as to what even is a safety, protection dog or protection dog and why a shepherd?
- [06:31]
Suede Michael Hussein
So really good questions, you know, and the most of the best questions that emerge when you're talking about or thinking about protection dogs are just the simplest of all questions. So what is a protection dog? What is. What it, what should it be? Everyone has in mind this, what I call the dream of a protection dog. Where it's safe, it's stable, it'll play with your children, it's safe around your parents, it's safe when your friends come over. It's a perfectly social dog. But if you need the dog to, if you snap your fingers, issue a command, it will immediately go into protection mode and fight very aggressively to defend you, to defend your wife, to defend your children, to defend your parents, to defend your property. And then you can immediately snap your fingers as well and turn the dog off. The reality is that that is not at all true. Protection dogs that are sold and commonplace in the marketplace all over the world, not just in the United States, do not fit that criteria. They're either going to overprotect you as a general rule, or they're going to under protect you. So that means that generally speaking, they may be safe and social, but they won't really protect you in real life, like Connor, or they will really protect you in real life, but they're not going to be safe and social. We've heard a lot of horror stories about this, about people buying a protection dog. And the dog was constantly looking for a fight, would constantly bite people, nip at people, lunge at people out in public. And owners have to give these dogs away over and over and over again. They don't have any control. There's no real world obedience. We've heard stories about dogs having to be kept on a leash inside the house. And people come away thinking that, oh, you know, I thought a protection dog was this way, but in reality it's this way. And I guess that's how protection dogs are. They just are overprotective. They're naturally aggressive, because that's a protection dog. So that is, you know, the reality, which is very different from the conception that most people have when they look into this. At Alpenhaus, we can create that dream that people have where they are safe, where they're stable, where they're social, but they will also be turned on and able to protect upon command and then subsequently turned off and able to go back and being a normal dog and play with your children and then be turned on again immediately whenever you desire. And, you know, we have these capabilities shown very clearly on the videos that we put out on our YouTube channel. So, you know, this isn't just me talking and telling you what we do. We actually prove it and demonstrate it in the media that we publish about our dogs and about our program. So, yeah, so that's the answer to the first question. And shepherds. Why shepherds? Well, a couple reasons. Number one, I love shepherds, so I like working with dogs that I know and dogs that I love. Number two, shepherds are the highest performance dogs in the world. Belgian Malinois, Dutch shepherds, and working line German shepherds. We focus on Dutch shepherds and Belgian Malinois because they are the highest performance dogs. We do the highest performance training in the world at Alpenhaus. So we want to use the most athletic, the smartest, the quickest. Quickness is very important. The speed is very important. So they're very fast. If you ever God forbid, have to really deploy a protection dog in your defense or in the defense of your family, you want that dog to be deployed in a way where it can engage in a fight and win that fight. And the faster it is, the stronger it is, the quicker it is to intercept an arm with a weapon to run at someone and take them out if they're about to pull a gun, those things matter. And Dobermans, Rottweilers, all the other breeds that people look at for protection dogs, simply don't have those characteristics. They're going to be slower, they're going to be slower thinking. And that can mean the Difference between a fight that's won and a fight that's lost. And, you know, God forbid one of our dogs is ever used in real life. But we prepare our dogs to be used in real life. We think about them being used in real life, and so we want them to be able to be used in real life and be used in a way that they're going to win and win decisively.
- [10:59]
Podcast Host
So having the experience you do, being the expert trainer that you are, I think it's always a question on people's minds as to how does one get started training a dog? So do people bring the dog to you with already some existing training? Should they do some training beforehand? Or do you, you know, start to finish?
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Rosetta Stone Advertiser
Do you do all the training?
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Podcast Host
And if they should bring a dog with some training, what are some training tips that you have?
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Suede Michael Hussein
So, really good question. We get this a lot. We only work with our own dogs. We only work with dogs from lines, genetics that we know. There's very good reasons for this. We want to get the healthiest dogs. Belgian Malinois, Dutch Shepherds are the healthiest dogs on the planet. They're going to last the longest, they're going to have the longest service life. They don't really have hip problems, they don't have elbow problems. And we at Alpinauis want to be able to look through the pedigrees of these dogs. We understand the parents, the grandparents, the great grandparents. We know what they did, we know what sports or, you know, utilities they were used in, whether it's the police, whether it's the military, we understand these genetics. And so we work with our own dogs. We get them, for the most part when they're puppies, eight weeks old, maybe a couple months old, but normally it's eight weeks old. And we develop them over the course of their lives. And the reason we want to do that is because we shape the way that they see the world. We shape their understandings. They go out into the world, and they have a very specific set of. Of understandings. And we also, in addition to shaping their obedience, in addition to shaping their protection, we also shape their socialization. So we train them and teach them how to be social. And this is a very complicated and nuanced thing to be able to shape and mold a dog in any one of these things, but in all three of these things simultaneously. So, I mean, it's. So there's no one else that does it like we do it. So that's how complicated it is. So for clients to bring us A dog that they have. It's not something that we generally do or would want to do because it's too complicated. We don't know what's happened to the dog. We don't know the dog inside and out like we do with our own dogs. And therefore I can't give the assurances to the clients of what they're going to get. I can tell them probabilities, but I can't give them assurances with our dogs that we develop and we train. I know them better than the back of my hand. I know them better than the clients know themselves. So I can pair a dog with a client to the degree that I think is appropriate for really an elite level bond, which is what we're trying to do.
- [13:46]
Podcast Host
Sounds like a very personalized experience. It's really about matching and right fit versus like I have a dog, I bring it to a trainer, they train the dog because of how complex a situation the dog could be in that you want to ensure that the dog is really at up to speed, at par to be able to possibly have to do something in the real world. I mean, I didn't even know this was like a thing. I think it's amazing just because, you know how close people are, a bond with, you know, human and dogs and how they can even protect you on top of, you know, helping you with anxiety, being there as like your best friend. I didn't even realize, you know, what they could be used for on top of all that. So when somebody comes to you, how do you make sure that they are a right fit to have a dog?
- [14:39]
Suede Michael Hussein
It's a great question and I don't want to go into that answer too much, believe it or not, because there are certain things I look for and some of them are tangible, some of them are intangible. And I, I really need to understand the client authentically so that I know that they're right for this program, so that I know that they're right for these dogs. But what I can tell you is the right client for us is going to be a client that is patient, that is open minded, that understands that they're getting the best of the best in a dog in all ways. The obedience, the socialization and the protection. They understand that they are getting a very finely tuned instrument and that's what they want and that's what they're willing to really focus on. They're at a point in their lives where, you know, they're, they're not going to simply have this dog as a status symbol. They're not going to simply have this dog as something that's around the house that they kind of really don't pay that much attention to, but expect a lot out of. That's not the right client for us. Because these dogs, if you're not. If you're not preoccupied with these dogs that are coming to you, you're not going to get the most out of these dogs. And these dogs aren't going to get the most out of their relationship with you. And it's not optimal and ideal for the dog. And just as importantly, or more importantly, it's not optimal or ideal for the client. And there's plenty of other dogs that that client can go to and plenty of other people that those clients can go to to get a dog that is more appropriate for them. So that's, you know, that is, I think, what I would tell clients that are thinking about this. If you're. If you don't have that sort of mentality and that, that bandwidth and that interest, most importantly, then Alpinas probably is not for you.
- [16:41]
Podcast Host
I can see, you know, it is a commitment on both ends. It's a commitment for the person, it's a commitment for the dog. It's going to create, I'm sure, an amazing bond for them, their family. But you got to put in the work and you got to be willing to commit to it, commit to the process. But having a, you know, having someone like yourself to do a lot of the work, I know for me, you know, having a dog or puppy and then training, it's so much work. I. And that's just, you know, a regular dog in regular training, not anything that had any complexities involved. So, you know, I would rather work with someone like yourself who can do all of that. And then, you know, I have the dog ready and I don't have to go through those stages at least because I am no expert in any sort of training.
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Podcast Host
But if you want to get in touch with you that want to find out more information, how can they do so?
- [21:12]
Suede Michael Hussein
So our website is a great place to start. AlpenHouse Shepherds.com Alpen is a LP I N House H A U S so quite German even though we're based in France. Alpenhaus and then Shepherds S H E P H e r d s.com we have a YouTube channel as well. Alpenhaus Shepherds and we have an Instagram and all this is very small. We are a very small organization. I'm the, the trainer. I handle all the clients. I integrate our dogs with the clients. I'm doing all of this myself. You know, we are designed to be a best in class organization which means that at every step of the way we have to do things the best possible way. From the diet to the genetics to the healthcare to the, to the environment and conditions our dogs live in, to the client interaction to making sure that that integration with the dog and the client goes perfectly. And I'm the one that's responsible for all that and I'm the one that does it. So I would have it no other way. I don't want to hire anyone to fulfill any of those responsibilities other than myself. So yeah, so Instagram, YouTube and the good old Internet.
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Podcast Host
I imagine it's great for social. I've seen, you know, some dog training videos and videos of dogs people love. People love watching animals. Suede Michael, who's saying this has been great. Thank you. I'm so glad that you were able to join today. I know this has been months in the making and thank you for sharing all that you're doing and I hope to one day when I get back to France. I love to meet with you there, check out what you're doing in person because I think it's, you know, nothing short of incredible. Providing safety, providing protection, providing a bond to somebody. I think, you know, we all need all those things in life nowadays. But thank you so much for joining us today on Founder Story.
- [23:04]
Suede Michael Hussein
The pleasure's all mine. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
- [23:12]
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- [23:42]
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- [23:58]
Podcast Host
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- [23:58]
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- [24:04]
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