Krisykris, of course you have a right to your opinion and I respect that you see what you do and from what you've seen, come up with your opinion. From your frame of reference, it looks good, looks like these dogs are truly rehabilitated. And some in fact are. Some, it has been reported regress badly somewhere down the road.
What I'd like to offer you is a look at what people think who have studied dogs for years, not only in the wild, but in captivity, what behaviorists see...their frame of reference. It is much larger I believe because they've been in the field for a very long time and their whole life is about observing, studying, doing tests, including brain studies, hormonal comparrisons, the whole bit. They understand very well dogs' body language and how they interact with one another. Their entire life work is about learning dog behavior. They train, they experiment, they observe. They have advanced degrees in behaviorism and ethology. They rehabilitate aggressive dogs too and very successfully. There is more to it than Cesar Milan demonstrates...a lot more to it. For instance, he uses positive punishment (that is....adding punishment) to dogs who have OCD. (obsessive compulsive disorder) I've seen him give collar corrections to dogs obsessed with chasing shadows or lights and give them that, "cheh" and step toward them, intimidating them to stop. OCD is a medical condition. Neurotransmitters and receptors are out of whack. Can you imagine using punishment on someone who is doing something on account of a neurological malfunction?
Please read the following, the link and the other thing, and see what you think. Even if you don't agree, it's still educational and interesting.
http://www.4pawsu.com/dogpsychology.htm
More on Millan: Guest Blog by Jolanta Benal
The thing about being a dog trainer and behavior consultant who works hard, and continues to work hard, learning as much about the science of dogs as I can—about how they grow, develop, and learn; about their communication and interaction with humans and nonhumans—the thing about studying the science and then having a discussion with a Cesar Millan fan, is that you feel as I imagine a paleontologist feels having a discussion with a creationist. The sense that the other party is living in an alternative reality is a little disorienting. How the heck does someone get to be an expert on a species when he has made no scientific study of it whatever? How does it happen that other people accept his claim to expertise? I don’t mean the fellow has to have a degree, I just mean it would be nice if he gave the impression of having read and understood, say, James Serpell, Karen Overall, Steven Lindsay, or Patricia McConnell. Given his truly weird ideas about dog social behavior, he could use a look at Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, and Roger Abrantes, too.
Here are my qualifications for talking about Cesar Millan’s methods: I have watched several episodes of his show, and I read the interview in the Times last Sunday. Some fan of his is going to post and say I’m insufficiently familiar with the man’s oeuvre, but sorry, I didn’t have to eat the whole salad to know that large parts of it were very, very bad.
Here are the things I do like: Yes, it’s important for dogs to get adequate exercise—most of them don’t. Yes, the suburban backyard is a jail cell for a dog. Yes, it’s good to act calm around a fearful dog. And yes, everyone living in a household has to know what the rules are for that household, and that includes the dogs.
Also, the one really good thing Millan does, as someone who works with dog behavior on TV, is get across the message that behavior can be changed. I cringe when a client asks me about Millan’s methods, but maybe that client wouldn’t have called a behavior counselor if he hadn’t seen CM on TV.
But that’s it. Apart from what I’ve cited above, Millan, as a behavior expert, seems to be a member of the Flat Earth Society.
That Times interview. Does Millan know that dogs probably evolved as semi-solitary scavengers in the vicinity of human settlements? “In the natural dog world, the dog is always behind the pack leader.” Oh pull-eaze! The closest thing to the “natural dog world” today, if prevailing scientific theory is correct, is probably a Third World village, and you can see for yourself in any such place that the dogs travel kinda sorta together but often alone, in a very loose way, basically focusing on whatever piece of garbage they can find to eat. I don’t know where he got that “90 miles a day” thing, either. These are skinny dogs hanging around the dump, or the tourist restaurant; it would be astonishing if they traveled 20 miles a day, let alone 90. To what purpose? They can’t afford that kind of energy expenditure, for pete’s sake.
And am I really supposed to believe that when my dogs and I are taking the same boring last-pee-before-bedtime walk around the block that we take every single night, and they walk ahead of me, it’s because they’re staging a palace coup, not because they … um … know exactly where we’re all going? We’re on a country hike, my dog-who-loves-to-swim realizes we’re getting near the creek and pelts ahead of me to jump in. Whoops, was that my pack leadership going by? Or was he just excited about getting in the water?
Science isn’t the only thing missing here—a little common sense might come in handy too.
As for the TV show—I’ll just talk about one episode: the Great Dane afraid of shiny floors. Yes, Millan succeeded in getting the dog to walk tractably on shiny linoleum floors, and he did it by inducing what’s called learned helplessness. He dragged the dog onto the linoleum and kept him there. The dog's efforts to escape did not work, and the dog gave up. That is learned helplessness. It’s not the same thing as being comfortable and relaxed. At the end, the Dane’s tail is down, his head is down, and he is drooling profusely. For those who have eyes to see, he’s a picture of fear and misery.
Sadly, his guardian had had the right idea: she was laying down carpet runner for the dog to walk on. I would have started exactly the same way, and when he was comfortable walking down the hall, left a little gap of linoleum, small enough so he could step over it. And slowly the gap would have grown. I would have put Musher’s Wax on the dog’s paws so as to be sure he had traction: remember, he was afraid of shiny floors because he’d taken a bad spill on one. The hallway would be a place of fun with his guardian and chicken treats.
I’m sure this would have taken longer than Millan’s method, but at the end the dog would have been walking happily and confidently, not hanging his head and drooling.
And that’s the trouble with Cesar Millan. He’s got a hammer—the dominance idea—and he thinks everything he sees is a nail. He’s constantly forcing what needs to be gentled along. And it’s all very well overpowering dogs when you work out every day and have a Y chromosome on board, but what is my five-foot female client with two little kids supposed to do? What about the elderly man with a brand-new hip? What if you are a man who works out every day but you don’t enjoy physical confrontation as a way of life? What are you supposed to do then?
Call a clicker trainer.
