More About Dogs
I intend this post to be about two things: Dogs, and the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan. But first: Wow, has work sucked this week or what? I think I’m just about officially out of staff. I feel like they’ve been beating me up for nine hours a night over there. On top of that, after two solid years of nagging, I’ve finally gotten the Boss to have the ceilings professionally cleaned. I expect to be stuck at work until quite late tonight. Note To Self: Bring a book.
Right. Cesar Millan. If you like dogs at all, chances are, you’ve seen his show on the National Geographic channel. (Why he’s on NatGeo and not Animal Planet, I don’t know.) Millan is a self-trained dog behaviorist, and he espouses a more “natural” way of living with your dogs. He believes that here in America, we’re basically spoiling and ruining our dogs by not treating them — oh, what’s good way to put it? Not treating them like wild pack dogs, I guess. Basically, he claims that because we tend to humanize our dogs, and apply human thoughts and values on them, that we’re doing a disservice to our dogs.
Now, I’m of two minds on this one. First, I think the guy has some valid points. Second, I think he’s under-selling dogs a bit.
Millan believes that dogs should be raised differently, according to their instincts, to become better behaved and more healthy animals. He likes to talk a lot about “being the pack leader” for your dogs, and walking your dogs quite a lot, how to treat your dogs so that they behave the way you want them to, and so forth. He goes on about making sure your dogs are “balanced” and “in harmony”, and projecting the “right energy” to your dogs, and such, and it all gets to sounding very New Age-y and full of crap after a couple of episodes. (I wonder if this is because he learned his English in California, and Californians tend to just talk like that about anything, regardless.)
I was skeptical about Millan. I had seen his show several times, and of course, they make a very big deal of his abilities with dogs. They will show him walking up to dogs that are growling and snarling and generally freaking out, and a minute later, he’s walking them around on a leash, calm as anything, tail wagging, tongue lolling, happy as can be. It all looks very magical and startling on TV. It makes me wonder about how they edited the scene to make it appear that way.
I was intrigued by the show, but leery. It fell under the “too good to be true” category, particularly because of his magical response from dogs, in combination with all the goings on about “pack leadership”, “retraining owners”, “projecting energies”, yaddayaddayadda.
Recently, I spotted Millan’s book, Cesar’s Way, on sale at WalMart, and figured, “Eh, what the hell.” So I picked it up. It was a very interesting and entertaining book — a generally good read, even if you think Millan’s full of it. One thing I particularly liked about the book was that it went a lot further down the road of explaining what Millan is talking about, in terms of pack leadership and projecting energies and other such New-Age-sounding bunk than his show does.
Millan talks quite a bit about making sure that you are “projecting calm-assertive energy” around your dog. this was a bit of a sticking point for me, because I never really got what he was talking about. Like I said — sounded like New Age BS to me. However, reading the book, I remembered something. Back in the day, when I worked third shift waiting tables at a local 24-hour diner, Mary and I used to be able to spot trouble-makers as soon as they walked in the door. (We used to get a lot of trouble there, the customers mostly being drunk, stoned, crazy, or some combination thereof.) I couldn’t have said exactly what it was we got our cue from, some subtle body language, look in the eye, a “vibe” from the person in question, but we always knew. In fact, by the time we quit, we could sense trouble brewing without even being out on the floor at the time. You could almost smell it, like a particularly fine and subtle coffee.
This is what Millan is talking about, when he speaks of the “energy” you project to your dog. I remember many times when various customers would start trouble, and I would intercede. A troublemaker would be down in my face, yelling, snarling, swearing, whatever, and I would just stand, arms crossed, back straight, shoulders squared, not backing up, not giving ground, but not being aggressive myself. Just standing calmly, staring back, informing the customer, “No, I’m sorry, you need to leave now.” And so forth, stepping slowly forward until I had backed the customer out the door. It used to amaze people that I could do that, me being about 120 lbs soaking wet with change in my pockets, with some huge, hulking drunken redneck yelling down in my face, slowly getting backed out the door without hardly realizing until he was outside and the situation was over. “How in the hell do you do that?” People would demand. I would just shrug and say, “You don’t back down.”
As I was reading the book, a light went on. That was the “calm-assertive energy” Cesar Millan goes on about. That was the “energy” he meant, that vibe Mary and I used to pick up on, the way we handled fights by remaining calm and in charge and not backing down.
With this light having gone on in my head, I realized that this “calm-assertive” bit is the way I run my staff at the restaurant, or how I handle cranky customers, and so on. I don’t know what exactly you’d call it, responding to body language, how you project your own, but it’s real enough. And it certainly makes sense that dogs would be so responsive to it, seeings as their “language” is so heavily influenced by their amazing sense of smell and body language.
Well, that makes sense then, despite all the New Age lingo. That’s a real thing. I can work with that. It’s how I treat my dogs, anyways. I’m the alpha, and Jazz and Grim know that. Jazz likes to argue about it, but that’s the way small dogs are. They handle dominance differently than large breeds do.
The other thing that Millan goes on and on about is walking your dogs. He likes to go on about pack migrating habits and bonding with your dog, and so on and so forth, but between you and me, what it really boils down to is tuckering your dog out so they don’t get up to mischief. If they’re tired out, they don’t get into trouble, and they listen better, because they don’t have the energy to argue. Heh.
I think, though, that Millan sells dogs short by claiming that we “humanize” them too much. I’ve also lived with dogs my whole life, and dogs do, in fact, have thoughts, feelings, motivations, and personalities. Dogs are extremely adaptable animals, and I think, being raised in a “pack” of humans, that they adapt just fine to the way we do things. I think that, like most things, the real answer to how to train your dogs is somewhere between the way we learn in America, and “Cesar’s Way”.
The majority of the dogs we see on Millan’s show have been raised (and ruined) by idiot owners, who’ve let their dogs run rampant. Just like with kids, if you don’t raise ‘em right, they misbehave.
