I looked again this weekend at Cesar Millan’s 300 page paperback “How To Raise The Perfect Dog,” (and for only $15 dollars) and I re-read his 20 page guide to housebreaking a puppy. Five or six pages are devoted to just getting the dog out of the car and into the house, and then the really complicated stuff begins.
I respect Cesar Millan, despite what I consider unjust and irrational accusations that his training methods are cruel and abuse – they are not – the real problem is that like so many other trainers who sell books and videos, his training methods are truly complicated, worse even than the best-selling manuals for housebreaking babies.
He drove me to the late author E.B. White’s “Man’s Meat,” a chronicle of his life on a Maine farm. White wrote a lot about dogs, and he has a great chapter on dog training in “Man’s Meat.”
The problem of caring for dog has been unnecessarily complicated White wrote, and this was in 1938. White would probably not believe Millan’s book or the complicated world of the dog in modern-day America.
Millan has a long chapter advising people to play like a dog if we want to help the dog learn how to play, a problem no dog of mine has ever had. Tie a stuffed animal to a stick, move it slowly back and forth. I am not going to play like a dog and wag and wiggle a stick like they like when I am with my dogs, let me be honest about that. I will be happy to buy a stuffed squeaky dog and toss it at Fate.
She takes it from there.
You want to love a dog but not love a dog, is my idea.
“Take the matter of housebreaking,” says White. “In the suburbia of those lovely post-Victorian days of which I write, the question of housebreaking a puppy was met with the simple bold courage characteristic of our forefathers. You simply kept the house away from the puppy. This was not only the simplest way, it was the only practical way, just as it is today.
“Our parents were in possession of a vital secret – a secret which has been all but lost to the world: the knowledge that a puppy will live and thrive without ever crossing the threshold of a dwelling house, at least until he’s big enough so he doesn’t wet the rug.”
Although his mother and father never permitted a puppy to come into the house to dump on the floor and chew the carpets, they made up for the indignity, he recalled, by always calling the puppy “Sir.” In those days, he said, dogs did not expect anything elaborate in the way of shelter, attention, food or medical care, but they did, he insists, expect to be addressed in a civil way.
Cesar Millan writes for a very different audience at a very different time, and very successfully. The dogs have crossed the threshold, some people would call the police if a puppy was left in the garage for a few days, and the police would actually come.
Why has dog training become so complicated? It’s pretty simple. We live in a capitalist culture, and one of the big ideas behind capitalism is to make almost everything in life seem so complicated that only the chosen and anointed few can possibly grasp how to do it. And sell what they know to people conditioned to think they know nothing. Dogs are a $39 billion industry in America, and Cesar Millan has earned a good chunk of that.
If training a dog was made to look easy, nobody would buy expensive books and videos to try to figure out how to do it. They would do it themselves, it is not brain surgery, dog owners did it for thousands of years. They figured things out for themselves.
Any son or daughter of a farmer can housebreak a dog in ten minutes, or tell anyone how to do it, and free of charge.
Millan’s training methods are sensible and successful, at least in his very wealthy and marketing-driven world. Remember, this is an entertainer who appears on TV, he has a staff of a dozen or so people, he does not live the way you or I do.
White’s parents in 1930 didn’t need a book to figure out how to train their dog, they just used their own instincts and common sense, and it worked out. A lesson there for us.
White understood that there is no such thing as a perfect dog, and if there were, no rational dog lover would want one. The perfect dog doesn’t come from a book, no one has ever trained a dog to be perfect. No one has raised a child to be perfect either, the idea is kind of creepy.
A truly companionable and indispensable and trustworthy dog is an accident of nature, a miracle in its own way. You can’t guarantee it with breeding, you can’t buy it with money, you can’t rescue it from a group or shelter. It just happens, a combination of many things that are mysterious, including luck and good timing and genetics and the litter.
Red came to me from a breeder and minister in Virginia, a remarkable woman and wonderful border collie and sheep dog breeder named Karen Thompson.
Karen read a book of mine and knew intuitively that Red belonged with me. She just knew it, and I was frightened and puzzled until I chose to trust her and she was right. Nobody could ever have told me I would get this companionable and indispensable dog in that way.
If there is a God, he was watching out for the two of us. If you ever get the idea to have a perfect dog, be very wary. Someone is selling you the canine equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge.
I have my own advice for you: Don’t.