Comical dog whisperer teaches Thais to roll over (in the aisles)

IN WHAT WAS likely Bangkok’s biggest-ever gathering of dog lovers with hardly any actual dogs in attendance, Mexican pal-to-all-pooches Cesar Millan packed Royal Paragon Hall on Wednesday night, even with ticket prices starting at Bt2,000. Not a bad turn-out for a guy who’d never even been to Thailand before. But he’s certainly well known here thanks to his hit TV series “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan”. 

The whole affair was quite riveting and funny. It could have been a one-man stand-up-comedy show, except that Millan had a herd of Thai dogs onstage to assist him in demonstrating his training techniques. 

After greeting the audience with a perfect wai and “sawasdee krub” and a few more lines in Thai, Millan said he’d long dreamed of visiting the country. Peeling off his jacket to reveal a red sports jersey with his name and the numeral 1 on the back, he explained that his mission in life is to show people how to be happiest with their dogs, just as a dog’s mission is “to fill your life with happiness”. 

In a human-canine relationship, both sides can be happy, he said, “unlike human-human relationships, where nobody gets to be happy unless the man can figure it out what he did wrong!”

There were a lot of great lines like that. Listing species that kill, he named “the crocodile, the shark and your ex-wife”. “I know that from experience!” he laughed. Then you have species capable of completely ignoring humans – cows, cats and teenagers. 

And here’s something we didn’t know: “The dogs in Mexico are skinny, but they don’t have psychological problems. But the chunky dogs in the United States, they do!”

The best part of the show was when Millan had the mutts onstage with him – with their owners. First he demonstrated what not to do, commanding them, “Nang nang ning ning” (sit, sit, stay, stay). He was good at imitating how each owner reacted to his or her dog’s behaviour. When he got down to business, though, it was like magic. He deployed “assertive energy” to calm them down or get them in line (the dogs, not the owners). None of the owners could manage that. 

He advised the owner of a boxer to change its leash, and then the dog sat perfectly still despite having three bowls of yummy food within gobbling distance. How’d he do that? The leash itself was magical and would be on sale soon, he kidded.

All these jokes, unfortunately, had to withstand pace-killing translations into Thai. Andrew Biggs, the local farang TV personality who is famously fluent in Thai, did a fine job with the translations, but he was inadvertently spoiling Millan’s timing, and the show ended up running long. Simultaneous translation through earphones would have been a better approach. Most of the crowd watches his show in English anyway and know enough of the language, and Millan kept everything simple too.

He wrapped up the show by explaining the number on his back. All of his life he only wanted to be the world’s No 1 dog trainer, he said, only to discover that it’s the humans he has to train. Well, he certainly seems to understand human behaviour, because he then hopped off the stage to sign autographs and let the fans take pictures with him. And that, for many people, was the real highlight of the evening.