July 31, 2021
Terrible dog training, sugarcoated with New Age woo: Cesar Millan is back on TV
How To Train Your Dog With Love + Science - Dog Training with Annie Grossman + Anamarie Johnson PhD (Formerly known as SchoolAbout this episode
To many people, everything they know about dog training has come out of the mouth of one man: Cesar Millan. For nine seasons, on his show, The Dog Whisperer, he told people that they needed to fix their "energy" and become more assertive in order to get their dogs to be "calm submissive." He showed how to get dogs to do what he wanted by using punishment, force and coercion, although he had other words he used to describe his methods... words having to do with "joy" and "positivity." He managed to put a New Age-quasi-spiritual-spin on antiquated methods, and the public ate it up. In anticipation of his brand new show, Better Human Better Dog , Annie discusses her current, and past thoughts about Cesar Millan, and plays several interviews where he talks about his shows and his beliefs about dogs and the humans who, according to him, cause all their problems. 2012 blog posts Annie wrote about Cesar Millan: Cesar Millan’s secret training technique: Kicking dogs in the stomach https://bit.ly/2Vk6ZKG Cesar Millan’s techniques: choking, shocking, and setting up dogs to fail https://bit.ly/379zDRd The Dog Whisperer is cancelled, but Cesar Millan will not stop existing https://bit.ly/3rKi3Nc Having their say: Cesar Millan’s fans (and a few detractors) https://bit.ly/3BYHsr0 Alan Titchmarsh 2012 interview with Cesar Millan, aka The Dog Whisperer https://bit.ly/3xjBzB7 --- Trailer to Better Human Better Dog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upo4WZOnlLU&t=1s Millan discusses shows ABC 7 Chicago https://abc7.ws/2TKmQl7 --- Related episodes: Episode 68: Is Dominance Really A Thing? Cesar Millan, Libertarianism + A Dog Named Pizza https://bit.ly/377FYg9 Episode 44: Are you talking to your socks? Marie Kondo, Cesar Millan & training humans with snake oil https://bit.ly/3lmV7SO --- Like this podcast? Review and rate us on iTunes and shop in our online store, StoreForTheDogs.com ! StoreForTheDogs.com items mentioned in this episode: The Culture Clash by Jean Donaldson https://storeforthedogs.com/products/book-culture-clash --- Partial Transcript: Annie: I really hate Cesar Millan. I have found that there are basically three kinds of people. The first kind of person falls into the category of many of my friends, where those people just don’t care at all about Cesar Millan, and see my hatred of Cesar Millan as some sort of quirk about me. Kind of as if someone, I don’t know, you know, someone who hates the Beatles. It’s something you know about them that sort of doesn’t make a lot of sense. Then, there are people I know who are dog trainers like me, and pretty much every dog trainer I hang out with feels the same way as I do about Cesar Millan. Then there is a third category of person who loves Cesar Millan to the nth degree. And these people are very vocal about how much they love him. And, you know, this is a podcast essentially about dog training... Full transcript at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe