'Dog Whisperer' may have a point

By DENISE FLAIM

Newsday

In certain dog-training circles, it takes something approximating courage to make the following statement, but what the heck:

Cesar Millan is not the anti-Christ.

It might surprise the average dog-owning Joe or Jane to know that there is a maelstrom of hostility over the star of National Geographic's ''Dog Whisperer.'' On dog-centric e-mail lists, his advocacy of collar pops and alpha-rolls has led positive trainers -- who advocate reward-based training instead of coercion -- to verbally eviscerate him with a ferocity that belies the training maxim of ''Reward what you like, and ignore the rest.'' The American Humane Association has called his training techniques ''inhumane, outdated and improper.''

Now, I'd just as soon alpha-roll a dog as let him teethe on a pair of Jimmy Choos. But at the risk of having the purely positive police repossess my clickers, I am hard-pressed to join the wholesale condemnation of Millan.

Do I think purely positive training is the ideal? Yes, in the same way I think a natural diet is. Do I think Millan's techniques sometimes cross a line -- or potentially could, in the wrong hands? Yes. But not everyone can work with a clicker, or forgo any and all punishment. Maybe one day compulsion-based trainers will see how much more eloquent and effective positive methods are, but that's the whole point of evolution: It's a process.

There is one overarching message in Millan's show that is as simplistic as it is powerful: Let dogs be dogs.

Sounds commonsensical enough, but is it? We call our dogs ''furkids,'' we dress them up for Halloween with enthusiasm usually reserved for toddlers. We tote them around in fancy carriers, send them to spas, hire animal communicators to let them unburden.

Harmless indulgence? But for your Amex balance, perhaps. But somewhere in the mix enters the idea that people should feel guilty for crating their dog when he needs stricter boundaries, or cutting down her kibble ration when she's getting too chunky.

They are dogs, I remind such owners. Dogs.

Many dogs self-destruct with noodle-spined owners, a tendency that has to do with the species' historic role as consummate moocher.

Nature in her wild wisdom programmed dogs to have a relationship with humans in which we call the shots.

Do I agree with everything Cesar Millan does or says? Certainly not. But you don't have to eat everything at the Sizzler buffet, either. Millan's exercise mania speaks to our suburban dogs, who often wreak havoc in dog parks because their social lives have been stunted by postage-stamp lots and stockade fences. Students of body language can spend hours deconstructing Millan's pivot points and postural inflections. He is talking to those dogs, but not with words.

I don't know if there is a great risk that the untutored or unsophisticated will copy Millan's more physical tactics, despite all the on-screen warnings ''not to try this at home.'' As a friend of mine said on a doggie e-mail list recently, if someone asks you to demonstrate how to turn a screw correctly, ''and if they then take the screwdriver from you and proceed to stick it in their eye, it is neither your fault, nor the screwdriver's fault.''

I don't know how one effectively saves idiots from themselves. What I do know is that a life with dogs is a process, one that ideally leads us away from overtly physical techniques such as Millan's, and toward the more motivational and reward-based ones of the positive trainers I admire.

But I also know that many newbie owners aren't ready for positive training: The lingo baffles them, the sometimes self-righteousness of the movement repels them.

You have to walk before you can run, and therein lies Millan's appeal: He shows us that something has gone wrong in our relationships with our dogs. About that, at least, we should listen.

Monterey County Herald | 10/23/2006 | 'Dog Whisperer' may have a point

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