Casual Fridays

There's a great show on National Geographic, Friday nights at nine. It's called "The Dog Whisperer" starring Cesar Millan, a "dog behaviorist", not a dog trainer. Meine Frau and I have just gotten through the first season episodes via Netflix, and it's been an education. It's amazing to see this guy walk into the home of a troubled dog (or more often than not, untrained human owners), outline the dog's issues, and in minutes, the dog is behaving like a star pupil. Well, most of the time. He's got a pack of formerly abandoned dogs which have been rehabilitated, and they "help" reeducate the troubled dogs from time to time.

Cesar sees himself as a dog psychologist, and his main discourse is stating that dogs are "our children," but they are "Fluffy," dogs, and at the core, animals. It's our American culture to treat our pets as children, but the dogs are thinking like pack animals and will take advantage of our failure to appreciate that. Not that we're not supposed to love and care for our pets as companion animals, but at the root, they still have animal instincts. Number one issue with most of the owners - they're not walking the dog enough, or not walking the dog with "a calm, assertive manner." He says that so much, it's now my drinking game buzzword. But give Cesar a while to work the dog, and the same day, the dog is completely reversed its "bad habits" and the owners are - nearly all of them - stating "I can't believe that's my dog."

Armchair Generalist: Casual Fridays

technorati tags:dog, psycholgy, whisperer, behavior