I agree with everything Melanie said.
He does not know dog behavior, what he interprets from dogs' body language is flat out wrong. He calls dogs dominant who are showing fear or showing an interest in something and not paying attention. They simply haven't been taught yet. He calls dogs dominant who are eager to go for a walk and want to go out the door in a hurry. This is as simple as a dog not having been taught manners....to wait. He finds something like dominance or alpha to explain every conceivable behavior. He takes a more complicated explanation instead of looking for a simpler explanation first, which is always the way a scientist or researcher looks at things. You don't skip a process and go for an obscure or amiguous reason before going through the more obvious reasons to come to a conclusion. He uses catch phrases which have no specific contextual meaning; calm assertive, positive energy, leadership (meaning yank, alpha roll, shove, poke) Where does it say dogs or wolves use a lot of physical stuff to show leadership? Nowhere. No recent research shows that. Alpha wolves (and dogs aren't even wolves) use very, very little physical stuff. They hardly care what's going on at all other than breeding, sometimes hunting and food distribution. Other than that, they don't go around keeping everyone in line constantly. They couldn't care less what the others are doing most of the time. I've read numerous journals and studies on this and what Cesar thinks and does seems so ridiculous, it isn't even funny.
His reliance on the theory of pack behavior is way off base because there's much more recent scientific data which says that dogs evolved from solitary village dogs after evolving from an ancestor of the wolf. These village dogs had no need to be in a pack and our domestic dogs have even less need to be in a pack. They are simply living among us. Pack animals hunt for their food and breed, reproduce and raise young. Our dogs aren't doing any of that. Pack animals MUST be conspecifics. (members of the same specie) Those are the ONLY reasons for a pack. In fact, wolves are not even always in a pack unless these factors are present. Hunting small game does not require a pack formation. Wolves are many times seen by themselves. Some seasons require them to be in a pack. Most packs are nothing more than Mom, Pop and the kids. It's not this big 50 dog thing Cesar calls his pack. That's the most unnatural thing that he has going. Comparing anything when in captivity is not indicative of how it operates in the wild. We are simply not a pack with our dogs. Dogs know we're not their specie.
Sure, we need to be leaders. How else could we have our dogs live peacefully with us and live how we want them to? That does not require force, punishment, aversives and extreme domination. There are other ways to teach dogs how to live with us and go by our ways. All they need is to be taught, to be shown and those methods are best served by appealing to a dog's nature....that he is an opportunist and does what works. So....we make what we want from the dog work for the dog. Operant and classial conditioning based methods are in line with how all mammals learn and are particularily suited for a very opportunistic animal like a dog. It's shown all the time. Many good trainers rehabilitate dogs who are every bit as problematic as the ones Cesar works with. He just doesn't know the science, has a good Hollywood thing going so why fix what ain't broke? He's making millions. I've heard of many regressions with his "methods" on some of those dogs....lots of them. It's all Hollywood hype. He is no whisperer, no mystic ability to communicate with dogs at all. He forces, squelches and supresses behavior so that it stops. Big deal!
Cesar bases all his "methods" and all his interpretation of how dogs behave on a foundation which is misinformed, proven inaccurate and begotten from horribly inaccurately done research which has since been disproven. There is no scientific backing for his ideas. He just grabs onto this old, outdated, disproven nonsense and pretends to know about dogs. All he's doing is shutting down dogs and supressing behavior....not only the target behavior, but most all behavior. He's taking dogs and turning them into toned down versions of a dog, a skeleton of a dog as far as their spirits and personality goes. I saw him yanking the he!! out of a dog's neck the other night on a show (had to change the channel) when the dog turned his head like 3 inches to the left to look at something. The dog was walking nicely but his head moved and Cesar let 'em have it. HARD. This is a ridiculous way to teach a dog. The guy is ridiculous. He's no trainer. I can't believe people fall for this nonsense.
In all fairness, I have seen a few things I think are fine which he does, but just a few. How often do you see him rewarding a dog? His main reward is the absense of punishment. I agree with being calm around a nervous dog. Duh. I agree with giving a dog ample exercise, but not the amount he sometimes promotes. He needs to get these dogs exhausted in order for them to "behave." Many of the dogs he is forcing have their heads down, they're drooling, their ears are laid back, their tails are lowered....all signs of stress. He calls that calm submissive. Yup...their submitting all right. Why is this considered a good thing? Good trainers can get the behavior they want without all that, but instead with a dog who has his head up, ears forward, tail up and jaunty, a lively expression. In fact, this is a requirement for a show dog. You can't have a dog moping along the ring looking submissive.
He's been bitten many times because of forcing a dog, alpha rolling a dog when the dog is terrified. All he had to do was take a little more time and condition or desensatize the dog to the stimuli. Not a lot more time, but a little more. I took a dog who was 20 times worse than one he worked with to cut nails and in three days had this dog accepting it just fine. He got bitten because he was determined to "win." And he cut the nails in ten minutes but got bitten in three places and scratched up too. Ridiculous.