Canine expert or dog torturer?
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Hollywood's "whisperer" divides the animal-loving world
His clients included some of the biggest names in Hollywood – Jennifer Aniston, Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes – or, perhaps more accurately, their dogs.
Cesar Millan has adopted the title of dog whisperer to explain his skill in taming badly behaved mutts.
He is the go-to man when your canine is so disobedient and so dysfunctional that you’re desperate and will pay anything. To such people he is a godsend, but to certain animals-rights advocates and some of his rival dog trainers, his methods border on torture.
Many would like to stop him, but his fans swear by his methods of recovering control of a dog that imagines it has become boss.
Millan is a star in the United States.
He had a successful reality-TV show from 2004 to 2012, “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan”, and he often goes on tour with his dogs in order to demonstrate to owners the proper way of handling a pesky pooch.
His stated objective: dogs, being tribal animals, must learn to recognise their owner as the “leader of the pack” and obey him.
The 44-year-old admits he has no formal qualifications in dog training.
“Some people say I have a gift,” he shrugs during a recent German tour.
In 1990, then 21 years old, he slipped illegally from Mexico into California and held a series of jobs – veterinary assistant, dog trainer and dog groomer.
These jobs brought him into contact with Hollywood film stars, and thus began his rise to fame. US citizenship and a TV audience of millions followed, plus best-selling books.
He is now the man the US media consults when it has a dog question and needs an expert to interview.
It’s one of those rags-to-riches stories that are of the fabric of the American way of life.
Millan preaches this rule to dog owners: you must not only love your animal, but also guide it.
The human must always present himself or herself as leader of the pack – calm but determined. You must create a balanced being out of the dog by presenting it with challenges, including lots of exercise, spiritual stimulation and games.
“What you’re trying to achieve is a condition of calm submission,” he says, often using terms like “energy” and “communication”.
“We talk with dogs as if they were people,” he complains. Instead, one should take a cue from how dogs naturally deal with each other.
“With the very first contact there should always be a quiet, wait-and-see atmosphere.”
Millan sets out three basic rules that can also help people who are afraid of dogs: “No words, no eye contact, and no touching. Let the dog come first to you. It must of its own accord grant its trust.”
It is noticeable how Millan seems calm even while directly dealing with dogs that are aggressive and snapping their teeth. So, how many times has he been bitten?
“I don’t keep count. And when it happens, then it was my mistake: bad timing.”
He plays rough with problem dogs, and this is where his critics go livid with anger, including in Germany, where Millan and his dogs were booked for an eight-city tour.
“Cesar Millan’s methods are based on punishment, domination, subjugation, pressure and threats,” intones Birgitt Thiesmann of a German animal protection society, Vier Pfoten (Four Paws).
And Udo Kopernik of the German Canine Association (VDH) says about Millan’s methods: “In no way do these correspond to today’s scientific knowledge.”
The VDH accuses Millan of sometimes using “violence-prone techniques such as blows, kicks, an extremely tight neckband (and) electrical shocks.” Such methods are banned under German animal protection laws.
The VDH cites one scene from the TV series in which Millan kicks a dog in its side because the animal has just bit his hand. There was another episode where Millan forced an aggressive dog onto its side, on the ground, and held it there until the dog stopped twisting and resisting. Millan calls this method a “relaxing” of the dog.
Critics demanded this scene be taken off Youtube.
Millan can only shake his head at the critics. “There are 300 episodes of ‘Dog Whisperer’ and they pick out three of them. All the others, where I go in-line skating and running with dogs, when I reward them and pet them, (the critics) don’t watch.”
He feels misunderstood by his critics. “They don’t understand who Cesar Millan really is. I am the biggest dog fan on this planet!”
