Anke: Welcome to the Soul Touched by Dogs podcast, the show for dog lovers
who see dogs not as toys or tools, but wise souls worth our respect and care.
I'm Anke Herrmann, and I'm your host.
I talk to wholesome humans, people who do great work for dogs and their people.
So come and join us for today's conversation.
Hello and welcome, Inez.
I'm so excited to have you here.
I, I
Inez: am, I'm very excited too.
Anke.
Thank you for asking
Anke: me.
Yeah, I, I knew right from the start I wanted to have Paul some Newmans on,
on, on this show, and the first person that jumped to mind for me with you,
so I'm super happy to, to be here.
We've kind of known each other little.
On social for quite a while, and so I'm really, really excited to share
you with other souls touched by dogs.
So while, why don't we just start out, give people like two minute
birds eye, like where are you based and how the heck did you get
Inez: into all the dog work?
Oh gosh.
Well, okay, so my name is, is Robinson.
I'm originally from the uk, lived in Spain now since 1995.
I can't even work the mess out on that.
So I just say 1995 now.
Um, February, I came over with my two young kids, my husband at the
time, and, um, lived on the coast.
I now live in.
And in Elle Grande.
And, uh, when, um, I came out, I originally came out with my first ever
dog and she passed away when she was 14.
And then I was dogless for quite a while.
A single mom.
It was just, it wasn't the right circumstances.
And when Pat and I got together, uh, this is all his fault.
You see, when we got together, he said, I'd like to get a dog.
Um, my ex-wife really wasn't very keen, but I'd like to get a dog.
So we started off with a, uh, golden retriever who needed a new home.
He was 11 months old and Charlie loved him to pieces.
And he was great.
And then, uh, when he was about six, we were, we felt ready for a second dog.
Second dog we got from a local rescue, aaa.
And she was also a golden retriever.
She'd been used as a puppy farm bitch, um, really badly,
extremely underweight, very poor.
And two vets said, you'd be lucky to be lucky for her to live another six months.
She was that broken and her organs were going.
Everything was was bad.
So I started researching a little bit about dog nutrition and stuff like that.
Um, and basically we brought her back to life and she lived for
another seven and a half years.
So, and, but through her, whilst I understood people abandoned
their dogs, they were starving dogs, I didn't really know, didn't
really know what was going on.
But through her, I saw what was going on.
So from her, There was another dog I got.
I ended up getting onto some of the Facebook groups and things,
and there was another dog that 48 hours from being put to sleep.
Beautiful dog.
She looked like a golden retriever.
In fact, it says golden retriever in her passport because my, I showed my husband
and he said, we can't let that happen.
We went straight the next day down to pound.
We took her out.
We, she's still with us now.
She's somewhere between 14 and 16 years old, because they said she
was between four and six back then.
And we're not a hundred percent sure of her, of her age.
And, uh, it sort of went from there.
And then we started seeing more dogs and more, more dogs needing help.
And some of them were, came in as fosters and stayed.
We ended up with eight dogs.
We were, uh, we had seven dogs.
We were living on the coast in a townhouse with a small 35 square meter garden.
Both working from home, both taking them out.
And one of my dogs, uh, was one of the neighbors got arrested.
Uh, all the sorts of stuff that goes on in in Marvea.
And um, the police said, do you want to take this dog?
And they had a five month old Belgian Shepherd mal.
And I'd become aware of the breed and thought.
Too much dog for me.
I don't really wanna get involved.
Anyway, took him on and I fell in love with that particular breed.
A lot of training with him, a lot of brain work.
'cause we didn't have the space for them to run.
They went out once a day for walks, uh, for the actual physical exercise
they played inside the house.
And then we moved up to Arin El Grande.
So that's how I got involved with dogs.
And then I got involved with dog rescues and now I have my own
little rescue and I specialize more in the Belgian Shepherd Malinois.
And we have seven dogs at home.
And a cat who thinks she's a dog.
Anke: As a husband somewhere.
I like that.
That's an episode for another day.
Like we're gonna pop something in like that was a real sort like
all of that is Liket has a book.
T has a
Inez: book.
Tig might be a second book coming out soon.
Anke: That's, so, that's amazing.
Amazing.
She's
Inez: working, she's working on another book.
That's why she's been so quiet lately.
She's, uh, she's working on another, not another book.
That's incredible.
Um, so, so through my dogs, um, I, with Max, it was actually
what happened with Max one day.
He had a collar on normal collar.
Went to go outta the house and some kids were walking past
on the private urbanization.
Anyway, I stopped.
He snapped around and came outta the collar.
Take him outta the collar because his neck was thicker than his head.
This is how naive I was about dogs when I was like a, I would call myself a normal
dog person back then, and so I'm standing there holding this lead and a collar goes.
Like this.
He's going, woo hoo.
I'm going Go go for a run.
And he's jumped up at these kids.
They've fallen over.
Parents are going crazy.
Max has rent them run off.
I haven't shut the door.
The other dogs are coming out to say hello.
It was, it was, honestly, it was pandemonium, chaos, panic.
It felt like a lifetime, but it was about 30 seconds.
Um, child.
The child was okay a little bit, a couple of scratches and things, but nothing,
but it made me realize I had to be very careful and Max was also starting
to really pull, uh, at 11 months old.
Now, my fault, I hadn't taught him properly to loosely, you,
you, you sort of expect your dog to walk properly beside you.
So I looked around for harnesses and I found a lady who made a very specialized
harness that she had developed a no pull, no escape harness, bought one for him.
Then bought one for all the other dogs because it was amazing how it
took some pressure away from the neck that he stopped pulling completely.
He was more comfortable, he was more listening to me, et cetera.
So fast forward a few years, we've moved up to Arin and the lady passed away.
I got on with her very well.
I was, I was passing business to her because being in rescue,
people would say, my dog's pulling.
Can you help buy this, buy this, buy this.
It's brilliant.
It's brilliant, it's brilliant.
They last forever, et cetera, et cetera.
And she passed away.
Just old age and I was waiting that somebody was gonna take, take the
reins up because over time as I'd taken rescues on, I was giving a, a
harness away with one of my rescues for safety and security and everything.
So I got down to the one last harness.
I wasn't letting go of that, and it broke.
So stitching came undone and I'm, I'm.
And a year after she passed away, still nobody had taken up the reins.
Nobody had, nobody was making anything, anything the same.
I tried other, other makes and things.
Nothing is good.
So in the end I thought, right, well, I'm gonna have to do it myself.
So I bought myself a little secondhand sew machine of, uh,
marketplace, Facebook marketplace.
Found where I could get the webbing and the bits and pieces
because I still had the one.
So I was able to get all the bits and pieces and the hardware.
Not a clue what I was doing.
Um, trying to get this sewing machine to work that nearly ended
up out of the window a few times.
I can tell you I was in tears of frustration.
I had to walk away from it sometimes.
Kill this machine, sit down in there, YouTube.
What do I do here?
Right?
Okay.
Get it to work.
Get it to work, get it to work, and made my first harness.
And then I made another one and I gave it away.
You know, it sort of started to build up a little bit of a reputation.
And now I have, uh, two sew machines.
They're right next to me here actually on, on the dining table.
This says, I've work from, my work from home.
If you saw this table, it looks so clean on the screen.
Anke: That's like studios.
I know, I know, I know.
I've got a
Inez: whole rack of webbings and different colors and strengths and
thicknesses and all the rest of it.
Um, and I make them, and, and it's developed from there.
People now ask me to make, uh, There are special clips that go
around the backseat of a, of a car.
So they then clip onto a harness for safety in the car.
Somebody asked me to make three of those.
I made three of those.
I've got some orders from it, from posting that I make personalized colors,
um, and all sorts of different things.
I can do different designs and things.
I do the stuff.
And we're
Anke: gonna obviously have the link to all of this below here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I'm really curious because I got like, I've never liked like collars
for my dogs, you know, I always thought like, I wanna, you know, if
something happens, you know, and like, I don't wanna pull 'em by the throat.
So I always thought, and I got a lot of slack like in, in Grenada
and oh, you know, if you have a harness, the dog will pull more.
And I'm like, that's not my experience, you know?
So what, what, what's special about, 'cause yours have like a
really interesting construction.
There's this kind of thing around the waist and Yeah.
So they're not just, um, so what, what's the piece that
kind of stops them from pulling.
Or what's the, like, which piece of, of the design?
Like
Inez: how does it work exactly?
So the harness, uh, if you think of a standard harness that goes sort of
onto the shoulders and down through the chest, okay, it's called a Y front.
Now, the, if, if you have a clip on the back, Yes, a dog can pull because
it's like a, they, they're like horses.
They, they don't pull, they push into the collar, so they will hunch down.
This is what Max did with his collar.
He pushed into, and he could drag me along with my trainers,
and I'm skiing behind him.
Um, and he was, he wasn't even a year old.
I thought, well, that's my responsibility.
If he goes, wants to go to somebody, I can't stop him.
So if this is the head of my hand, is the head of the dog, Uhhuh,
it comes through like this and it come, then it comes underneath
the, the chest and around the back.
And then there's a waist part.
Okay.
I can always show a picture.
It's a bit difficult, but the, the magic bit is, is this bit here and
it's, it's, it's called a Martin Gale.
I dunno why they're called Martin Gale's, maybe some guy called Martin Gale
invented it in the first place, but it's just a, is there's a piece of material.
So it connects the two shoulder straps to the T piece that goes under the chest.
So basically what happens is when the dog pulls this piece, Keeps the force coming
round so the person is behind the dog.
The dog will usually lunge forward.
This piece pulls the shoulder and the bit underneath sort of together.
Not in a hard way, not in a horrible way.
Doesn't rub or anything.
Doesn't move, doesn't cause any bald fur or anything.
But what it does is it redirects the force.
So like a ship, you know where the ship goes forward, you can pull
it round with a piece of rope.
Oh, tons and tons of ship you can pull with a rope.
Same effect.
So the dog just thought the force just is redirected, drown Pickle, who is
half mastif, if I put a collar on her or anything else off, she trundles
and I'm behind her, no question.
Put this on her.
It is like walking a feather and I can hold her with two fingers.
So
Anke: then you've got like a least club clip in there.
So the, yeah,
Inez: it's just, it's just a, it's just a D-ring at the front so you can
attach the leash to that, and that's it.
So you have the leash, it's at the front on the chest, and it just,
Whichever side you are standing, it redirects the dog ground.
That's
Anke: so cool.
Inez: Really, I, it's a really simple thing.
It's a bit silly, but it's really simple.
Um, and I have the waistband for two reasons.
What I found with normal harnesses, because they're just around the
chest and the, and the neck.
Even if they are front clipping, but they're solid, they, they
don't have this moving, moving part is it can ride forwards.
So if the dog pulls backwards, it can ride forwards.
And dog people don't realize they can put their legs like this and then they're out.
I've had that happen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot people have.
So the waistband a stops it riding forwards.
It keeps that balance Yes.
Of, of the harness of the dog isn't uncomfortable.
It doesn't freak out that suddenly this thing's being pulled over its head.
And the waistband stops it from getting out.
So you have that added security.
Um, and some, some dogs, I mean, I made a, a whole load for a
rescue they had with gal GOs.
They didn't want the foot no pull bit.
They wanted a big clip on the back instead.
Um, but they wanted the safety, as they call it, a safety harness.
This is a three point harness.
Yes.
So I make those as well,
Anke: especially gals, you know, with a big chest.
Like it's, and they'd be so easy to come out of
Inez: that.
Yeah, yeah.
Because standard harnesses are made with standard things,
so the waist is, is too big.
For a gal go, and because I make them to measure, I take four measurements.
So I, I give people a diagram, they give me the four measurements, and from
that, and there's loads of adjustments, there's seven points of adjustments.
So you get that perfect fitting for that dog.
I
Anke: love it.
I, I totally love it.
I, I already know some people on this list gonna love this.
Inez: And I ship, I ship worldwide.
Actually, I have customers.
I've got one that's going to the States, um, this week.
Oh, that
Anke: is fabulous.
Yeah.
And, and so definitely we're gonna pop the link there and Yeah.
And, and I think, I love the, I mean, obviously, uh, you know, I
used to make, made to measure stuff.
Yeah.
Like dance costumes, but it's like the made to measure makes.
The difference.
Inez: It makes a huge difference because I'm, I'm unlike anybody else, you know,
I bought loads of stuff and you get a collar and it doesn't, it's, it's okay.
It doesn't quite fit right.
Or a, you know, a harness and you sort of, you can see it's
not comfortable for the dog.
It's like us, isn't it?
You know, like a bra you can not Right.
Fitting bra, it just ruins your whole day, doesn't it?
I mean, there's no question
Anke: about So true.
The bra for the dog.
Have your heart bra.
That is funny.
I love it.
Well, thank you so much.
Uh, I will have you back because we have a whole bunch of other topics
to talk about, but um, yeah, I think.
I'll, and we'll put apic, send me a picture.
'cause I've saw, I've seen pictures where you have like the, you know, like
a, a black, shiny kind of dog where you, you know, wears the Suki as Suki.
You know
Inez: where you can, that's eight dogs.
Really?
We have, we got eight dogs.
She's perfect.
She is.
She's sitting behind me Nice and quiet.
Doesn't move,
Anke: you know, just like send me a picture as well so we can show, because
like this is gonna be podcast as.
You know, people might, but I wanna, I want people to see what it
actually looks like, it looks like.
Sure.
And, um, and the link where, where they can get it and where
can get in touch with you.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Inez: And um,
Anke: you know, make sure we have lots of dogs in perfectly fitted bras
Inez: Oh, fantastic.
Thank you.
Anke: Thank you.
Take care.
Inez: You too.
Thanks so much for listening.
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