Joni Hall and Neil McDonald on being part of ABC documentary series Muster Dogs

Hall is a cattle trainer, a job that sees her living in a truck with her dogs housed in a large trailer on the back. With no set home, she moves every four days, working at different farms across Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. In particular, Hall works with training young cattle - called weaners - preparing them to be separated from their mothers.

"I'm one person instead of four people, so it means they can keep mastering while I'm training their cattle," she says.

It's all a process of training the dogs while trying to train the cattle.

And the latest addition to Hall's muster dog team is Chet, who has been with Hall since he was three months of age.

The kelpie was given to Hall as part of a new documentary series set to air on ABC on Sunday, called Muster Dogs. In it, Hall and four other graziers see if they can train kelpie puppies - from award-winning kelpie breeder and trial dog champion, Joe Spicer - to be muster dogs in 12 months - a job that usually takes three years.

Over a year, each of the puppies has four different training markers they need to meet. This starts with simple things such as recognising their own names, and ends with harder tasks to determine whether they can herd livestock.

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"I don't normally put that sort of pressure on my young dogs, only because I don't have to," Hall says.

"But I found it quite easy to train Chet. He just sort of met all of his markers naturally.

"He loves to do everything to please you. He'll do anything you tell him to, even if it is dangerous. He's a typical boy if that makes sense. No thinking through nothing."

The entire premise of the show - whether you can train a muster dog in one year rather than three - is more than just a challenge made for television. It aims to have a wider impact.

Ultimately if you opt for a 12-month training cycle rather than one that takes three years, it can save time and money, improve the welfare of stock, and make working on the land safer and more enjoyable.

Sure, the participants are given the best chance with a quality pup to begin with, but the result is still reliant on how well they can train a dog to muster.

Neil McDonald has been training dogs since the early 1980s when his muster dog needed - as he puts it - some manners.

But it's experience training people with muster dogs that sees him on the four-part series as the main training expert - a status that he has been working on most of his life.

McDonald started learning the sheep-shearing game when he was just 14. It was then - as a hobby - that he started studying the habits and characteristics of working dogs.

"I got a dog and put him under my wing and made a project of him, and he became like a person. That's probably what a lot of people haven't got with dogs. They're not humanised enough," McDonald says.

As McDonald started to successfully train his dogs he began participating in yard dog trials. The attention he got at the trials then led him to start a training school specifically for muster dogs in 1989.

"A lot of people are concerned that the dog they're bringing to the school is going to be the problem child, but there's been one before and there's going to be another one," he says.

It's a career that takes him around Australia, from the green pastures of regional Victoria to the red dirt of the Top End - including for his role as an expert dog trainer on Muster Dogs.

Yes, the series' participants have trained dogs before, but they have always trained them over three years, not one. So if anyone is going to be able to get the graziers over the line, it's McDonald.

"If you talk to an average person on the land, where dogs aren't that important, the old street word is a dog never comes good until it's three years of age. And that doesn't have to be," McDonald says.

McDonald says there are many variables at play, but a lot of it comes down to the dog itself. It needs to have the right, natural instinct and it has to want to shepherd livestock. And that's why kelpies and collies are primarily used.

Sure, some dogs will do it better than others. McDonald says that even with quality muster dogs, it can take some time for the animal's instincts to reveal themselves, holding up the training process.

When it comes to the pups used for the Muster Dogs' experiment, the difference was that they showed their instinct early in life. When they arrived with their new owners at three months old, they were already showing signs of wanting to shepherd the livestock.

"If that didn't happen, the program couldn't have been the way it was," McDonald says.

It's interesting watching this documentary sitting next to your own dogs. Most of us wouldn't consider our dogs to be particularly naughty, but our four-legged city slickers wouldn't know where to begin with livestock.

Obviously, Muster Dogs is not a how-to guide of how to turn your lap dog into a mustering champion. But there are some universal tips for dog owners.

The most important of which, according to McDonald, is setting boundaries.

"For example, if you've got a brand new pup and you bring it home, don't let it have the whole of the backyard. Make it a cage so it's got to learn in that part of the yard and extend it out. If you put it in the house, don't let it run over every room and wreck every couch," he says.

"So set some boundaries. Put it in a big cardboard box in the laundry at night. They've got to learn to live well when they're not physically touching you all the time."

Aside from universal training tips, McDonald says he hopes Muster Dogs will provide viewers with insight into something much broader - life in rural Australia and the issues faced. Come for the dogs, but stay for the insight - so to speak - from five vastly different parts of rural Australia, where there is a labour shortage.

"What we're trying to do is create more awareness of what's needed in rural Australia as far as having new chum come into the industry, and be able to step in with a bit of a system and an understanding and be well accepted," McDonald says.

"So a lot of it's about creating a more profitable, viable, enjoyable workplace and the dogs are a vehicle to make that happen."