After a life on farms, with his dogs working hard for him, Tony Mulvihill is returning the favour to his tireless mates.

On a peppercorn plot of land in the backcountry near Marulan in New South Wales, Mr Mulvihill invites farmers and city folk struggling with their working dogs to come and learn a new way to relate to them.

"I used to do what my father and grandfather did: try to break their will a little bit, so hopefully you can resurrect them and mould them into your own likeness," Mr Mulvihill said

"And that just doesn't work."

A secret learned from an Oregon cowboy

Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance are credited as the pioneers of 'natural horsemanship'. ( Photo: Julie Baldocchi )

Mr Mulvihill has an unconventional way of getting the most from a working dog.

On his paddock, there are no sounds of whistling, no shouts of command, no barking or yelping.

Just one simple word — 'back' — is all Mr Mulvihill has to say to his sheepdog Don to send him off in a cloud of dust, to muster sheep almost invisible in the distance.

"There is only one secret I've got, and that is: you put your right or left hand over your mouth, and you don't say much to your dog."

It is a secret he learned 30 years ago, watching the renowned Oregon buckaroo Tom Dorrance break in horses with a method called 'natural horsemanship'.

"He was the original horse whisperer, if there was ever such a person," Mr Mulvihill said.

"He could read a horse, had empathy with the horse, just knew exactly what to do and how to do it."

In Tom Dorrance's words, the aim was to help the horse to "use his own mind".

"You are trying to present something and then let him figure out how to get there," Mr Dorrance once said in a book by his brother.

Briefly studying under the cowboy, Mr Mulvihill saw that his method could work for dogs.

But it took a decade to figure out how.

Tony 'makes it easy'

Tony Mulvihill has successfully trained his dog Don using the gentler method. ( ABC News: Jake Evans )

Over the past seven years, more than 2,000 dogs have benefited from Mr Mulvihill's not-for-profit program 'Downunder Working Dogs', the product of his years of experimenting on a gentler, more co-operative way to work with dogs.

"I always try to look at it from the dog's point of view. It's pretty simple, you know?" he says.

Mr Mulvihill first uses gestures and blocking to show the dog where he wants it to be — making the right decisions easy to do and the wrong decisions hard.

"After a while the dog works out what he's doing is bringing the sheep to you, and if you magnify that into a bigger yard, a bigger paddock … you can stand there and roll a smoke, or talk on your mobile phone," he said.

Pieta Leechburch has been bringing her dogs to Mr Mulvihill for years. ( ABC News: Jake Evans )

Pieta Leechburch from Richmond, north-west of Sydney, has been bringing her city dogs out to the farm for years.

Her pup Bolt had only ever seen sheep once before.

Even so, he quickly adapted; he learned not to cut in on the sheep, he knew to keep the flock between himself and Ms Leechburch, always pushing towards her.

And he learned all that from Ms Leechburch's footsteps and gestures.

"You can see him making decisions, you'll see him do something where he's not meant to be, and he'll go 'oh nup', and he'll pop himself back into place," she said.

"It's those instances you can tell they're learning, 100 per cent learning."

Farmer Jeb Warner, 18, said before Mr Mulvihill's course, he used to shout and lose his temper when his dog Boo made mistakes.

"I had lots of bad habits, [I went] friggin' off my brains at her sometimes," Mr Warner said.

"Before I came here, I got a few books and they were just confusing the hell out of me. Tony doesn't so much dumb it down, he just makes it easy to understand."

Doing it for the dogs

Mr Mulvihill says he wanted to do his part to help working dogs. ( ABC News: Greg Nelson )

Mr Mulvihill said he saw the difference just from a day of work.

"People who are in the city and they've got a working dog, they always say the dog is so much better at home," he said.

"It's not as stressed, it's a lot more chilled out."

"If they're on a property and they've got a working dog, they're a lot more valuable in the sense of their work output, they know where to be, they know what to do."

Mr Mulvihill said it was all about paying back the debt to the dogs for the help they have given him over his life.

"If I can't leave this planet without having done something to help them out, then you know, I'd have trouble looking in the mirror every day," he said.

"If I can help educate people in how to handle and take care of their working dogs, then I've done something to improve their lot."