Post by RealPitBull on Dec 15, 2012 12:44:47 GMT -5
Ok, well, there is much about this article that is spot on about Cesar but this is also an anti Pit Bull author. Well, just read it and let me know what you guys think.......
skeptifem.blogspot.ca/2011/07/cesar-millan-is-asshole.html
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Cesar Millan is an asshole
Cesar Millan, also known as The Dog Whisperer has a show on National Geographic Channel about dog training. A warning pops up on the screen continually stressing that you do not try what he does at home, or in the absence of training professionals. If one takes a look at any dog forums it will become obvious that people try his methods at home all the time, and swear by them.
Watching the show is a bit painful at times. There are episodes about dogs with serious aggression problems, some of which may be caused by brain abnormalities or some other medically treatable problem. The dog whisperer will come in and try to wear the dog out by letting it flip out for minutes at a time. The show is edited so it is impossible to know exactly how long the dogs are allowed to thrash about and get agitated. Millan has been criticized for his use of choke collars for correction on his show, and sometimes he seems to use it until the dog becomes immobile. He also does what are called "alpha rolls" to roll the dogs over to make them immobile.
In this clip, Cesar instructs two women on how to correct their pit bull (which keeps lunging at the face of any visitor and must be in a muzzle all the time as a result). They do exactly what Cesar says, and he makes up some bullshit about their body language being wrong. Cesar says they need to do a kind of push against the dog with their foot when he starts to act up. Cesar demonstrates, they copy, and it doesn't work. He says this to them afterwards about why:
When you ladies were touching... you were in a lower intensity level. He was at a 7, you were at a 3. When he is at a 7, you have to come out with a 7 or an 8.
What the hell does that even mean? If pushing the dog with your foot in a certain manner works, then it should work. Why would owner have to worry about their "intensity level" if the method was sound? Shouldn't he have told them ahead of time about intensity levels instead of springing it on them after it failed? Later in the clip they try again, and it doesn't work, AGAIN. Cesar then tells them that the way their torso was facing when they did it was wrong. These methods suck if you have to be told what way every part of your body should be facing, but only AFTER it fails, rather than beforehand. It is more likely that he has to invent reasons that things went wrong.
If you watch the show with an ounce of skepticism, it becomes clear that he just makes shit up as the show goes on. What he says to do doesn't work quite a bit of the time, and he finds some nit-pick about the way that a person imitated him. He cloaks how clearly he is making it up in jargon. You can see the frustration on people's faces often when they do exactly what Millan did and do not get the desired result. The heavy editing of the show makes it seem likely that Millan did not always get the desired result either, he just tried until it may have worked for an unrelated reason, and then that take is used to make it seem like he is an expert. He seems to work a lot like a cold reader, just making up what people want to hear. He takes advantage of Confirmation Bias the same way a psychic would, too.
Confirmation Bias is the tendency of people to remember "hits" rather than "misses". This means that they will pay attention to and remember things that confirm their previously held beliefs, and forget or discard things that do not. It is the way that psychics, who cold read and cannot improve upon chance in guessing things, gain believers. Anything the person does get right is what a psychic believer remembers, not the amount of stuff that the psychic said that did not make sense. Cesar Millan has a great advantage over his audience in this regard, because misses do not have to make it to the final cut, and the premise of the show plants the ideas in viewers heads that he has some kind of mysterious dog power.
The main thrust of Millan's philosophy is that dogs are pack animals (like their relative the wolf), and that someone has to be "the alpha" and lead the pack. It is your job to be the alpha so that your dog obeys you and behaves. This would make sense if dogs and wolves were interchangeable, but they aren't. In Nova's Dogs: Decoded, a wolf is raised alongside domesticated dogs and other dogs are raised amongst wolves. Wolves do not behave at all like domesticated dogs despite the change of environment. The behavioral aspect of dogs is exactly what was modified to make them different than wolves. Looking back to wolves in order to learn how to take care of your dog has little merit as an idea in light of this. The worst part is that the research on wolves that Millan appears to be basing his philosophy off of was extremely flawed to begin with.
The entire idea behind the show The Dog Whisperer is that a man with a certain kind of knowledge can have an almost supernatural control over the behavior of animals. He can fix almost any problem and can know exactly how to deal with any situation. He can keep the animals in his pack under control all the time. The fact that animals are unpredictable and that their behavior problems are complex is erased on the show by the mystique of Millan.
Cesar Millan is also a big advocate of pit bull ownership. He had an ambassadog (which was old and fat, like most pit bull ambassadogs are) that died recently. The pit nutters eat up the things he has to say about how to train your animals as a result. If you needed proof that pit nutters talk amongst themselves differently than they do to you and me, here is a thread about how you should always expect your pit bulls to fight, and take measures to keep them from killing each other while you are away. Some of the nutters say that the dogs were bred to fight and will kill each other if they are left alone too much, often along with stories about how their dogs unpredictably got in an awful fight. Others say that they are "an alpha" and train their dogs well enough so that they won't ever do that. This is rhetoric directly from The Dog Whisperer. Listening to this brand of crap also means that some folks will have dead or injured dogs.
Another troubling effect of The Dog Whisperer is that he is proof anyone can become a "dog behavior expert". He has absolutely no formal training. If you were working as a behaviorist, or considering it, you would have to be stupid not to adapt some of his rhetoric or methods. His popularity, as the only real source of animal behavior information in popular culture, makes it hard for other methods to be visible. When I go to pit nutter websites and read about aggression, they all say the same thing: visit a reputable animal behavior expert to get your pet straightened out. There does not seem to be much licensing of animal behavior experts at all, so after a pit bull attacks someone it may be taken to a Cesar Millan impersonator for treatment that doesn't work. Instead of common sense precautions, a person may just try to be the alpha of their household and feel assured that no further problems will occur.
You can see a trend in the pit bull chat thread; folks who buy into the "alpha" BS are likely to think that pit bulls are not more likely than any other breed to fight, or that you can love/socialize the fight out of them. When these folks find out that they are wrong, you better believe they are the first ones to dump their dog at the animal shelter (possibly after breeding a litter or two of them). As terrierman says, its the people who love pits that are killing them, not the haters.
Prominent animal behaviorists (from academic backgrounds) have written letters to National Geographic about what a travesty this show is, and also publicly criticize his methods. Cesar Millan does not have formal training in changing the behavior of animals, and his methods do not seem to work. After watching several episodes of the show, it seems as though many people are still scared shitless of their aggressive animals after Cesar is done "rehabilitating" them. Millan also gives the impression that almost any dog can be rehabilitated. In his book, Cesar's Way, he says he only met two dogs he couldn't rehabilitate. This is dangerous to inject into the already crazy pit nutter community. You can start to understand why a dog that attacked three people will be "rehabilitated", renamed, sent across a state line and adopted out to an unsuspecting family like Patron was.
The truth is that in dogs, aggressive behavior appears to be a mostly genetic issue. All current evidence concludes that the genetics of canines is a much stronger predictor of aggression than training or upbringing. As I mentioned before, Dogs: Decoded is a nifty summary of information and research about the behavior of dogs. They go into depth about an experiment with foxes (closely related to dogs) in russia. Foxes were bred for aggression, or lack of it, exclusively. They picked out the trait by placing a hand near a fox's cage. The ones that bit and postured were bred together, as were ones who were not at all aggressive towards a human hand. The experimenters also switched fox's at birth to see if the mother or family had any affect. It didn't. They went as far as to implant aggressive fox fetuses into the wombs of non-aggressive foxes, and vice versa. The results were still the same. The most interesting part of this experiment was that the foxes bred to be non-aggressive began to look very different from the aggressive foxes. Their ears, tails, coloring, and fur changed. Like pit bulls, these animals were bred only for performance, not looks. If you tried to breed the aggression out of pit bulls (if it were possible to while dog fighters selectively breed for it), it is likely that you wouldn't have pit bulls anymore. Craven has an in-depth post about this issue exactly, it is well worth reading.
I am not saying The Dog Whisperer has only bad advice to offer. There are good suggestions sprinkled in with the crazy nonsense. Not treating animals like children and making sure that they get adequate exercise are pieces of sound advice that Millan regularly dispenses. All of the positive info is available from other sources, so it seems unwise to get the info from someone like Millan who lacks credentials and honesty in giving advice.
skeptifem.blogspot.ca/2011/07/cesar-millan-is-asshole.html
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Cesar Millan is an asshole
Cesar Millan, also known as The Dog Whisperer has a show on National Geographic Channel about dog training. A warning pops up on the screen continually stressing that you do not try what he does at home, or in the absence of training professionals. If one takes a look at any dog forums it will become obvious that people try his methods at home all the time, and swear by them.
Watching the show is a bit painful at times. There are episodes about dogs with serious aggression problems, some of which may be caused by brain abnormalities or some other medically treatable problem. The dog whisperer will come in and try to wear the dog out by letting it flip out for minutes at a time. The show is edited so it is impossible to know exactly how long the dogs are allowed to thrash about and get agitated. Millan has been criticized for his use of choke collars for correction on his show, and sometimes he seems to use it until the dog becomes immobile. He also does what are called "alpha rolls" to roll the dogs over to make them immobile.
In this clip, Cesar instructs two women on how to correct their pit bull (which keeps lunging at the face of any visitor and must be in a muzzle all the time as a result). They do exactly what Cesar says, and he makes up some bullshit about their body language being wrong. Cesar says they need to do a kind of push against the dog with their foot when he starts to act up. Cesar demonstrates, they copy, and it doesn't work. He says this to them afterwards about why:
When you ladies were touching... you were in a lower intensity level. He was at a 7, you were at a 3. When he is at a 7, you have to come out with a 7 or an 8.
What the hell does that even mean? If pushing the dog with your foot in a certain manner works, then it should work. Why would owner have to worry about their "intensity level" if the method was sound? Shouldn't he have told them ahead of time about intensity levels instead of springing it on them after it failed? Later in the clip they try again, and it doesn't work, AGAIN. Cesar then tells them that the way their torso was facing when they did it was wrong. These methods suck if you have to be told what way every part of your body should be facing, but only AFTER it fails, rather than beforehand. It is more likely that he has to invent reasons that things went wrong.
If you watch the show with an ounce of skepticism, it becomes clear that he just makes shit up as the show goes on. What he says to do doesn't work quite a bit of the time, and he finds some nit-pick about the way that a person imitated him. He cloaks how clearly he is making it up in jargon. You can see the frustration on people's faces often when they do exactly what Millan did and do not get the desired result. The heavy editing of the show makes it seem likely that Millan did not always get the desired result either, he just tried until it may have worked for an unrelated reason, and then that take is used to make it seem like he is an expert. He seems to work a lot like a cold reader, just making up what people want to hear. He takes advantage of Confirmation Bias the same way a psychic would, too.
Confirmation Bias is the tendency of people to remember "hits" rather than "misses". This means that they will pay attention to and remember things that confirm their previously held beliefs, and forget or discard things that do not. It is the way that psychics, who cold read and cannot improve upon chance in guessing things, gain believers. Anything the person does get right is what a psychic believer remembers, not the amount of stuff that the psychic said that did not make sense. Cesar Millan has a great advantage over his audience in this regard, because misses do not have to make it to the final cut, and the premise of the show plants the ideas in viewers heads that he has some kind of mysterious dog power.
The main thrust of Millan's philosophy is that dogs are pack animals (like their relative the wolf), and that someone has to be "the alpha" and lead the pack. It is your job to be the alpha so that your dog obeys you and behaves. This would make sense if dogs and wolves were interchangeable, but they aren't. In Nova's Dogs: Decoded, a wolf is raised alongside domesticated dogs and other dogs are raised amongst wolves. Wolves do not behave at all like domesticated dogs despite the change of environment. The behavioral aspect of dogs is exactly what was modified to make them different than wolves. Looking back to wolves in order to learn how to take care of your dog has little merit as an idea in light of this. The worst part is that the research on wolves that Millan appears to be basing his philosophy off of was extremely flawed to begin with.
The entire idea behind the show The Dog Whisperer is that a man with a certain kind of knowledge can have an almost supernatural control over the behavior of animals. He can fix almost any problem and can know exactly how to deal with any situation. He can keep the animals in his pack under control all the time. The fact that animals are unpredictable and that their behavior problems are complex is erased on the show by the mystique of Millan.
Cesar Millan is also a big advocate of pit bull ownership. He had an ambassadog (which was old and fat, like most pit bull ambassadogs are) that died recently. The pit nutters eat up the things he has to say about how to train your animals as a result. If you needed proof that pit nutters talk amongst themselves differently than they do to you and me, here is a thread about how you should always expect your pit bulls to fight, and take measures to keep them from killing each other while you are away. Some of the nutters say that the dogs were bred to fight and will kill each other if they are left alone too much, often along with stories about how their dogs unpredictably got in an awful fight. Others say that they are "an alpha" and train their dogs well enough so that they won't ever do that. This is rhetoric directly from The Dog Whisperer. Listening to this brand of crap also means that some folks will have dead or injured dogs.
Another troubling effect of The Dog Whisperer is that he is proof anyone can become a "dog behavior expert". He has absolutely no formal training. If you were working as a behaviorist, or considering it, you would have to be stupid not to adapt some of his rhetoric or methods. His popularity, as the only real source of animal behavior information in popular culture, makes it hard for other methods to be visible. When I go to pit nutter websites and read about aggression, they all say the same thing: visit a reputable animal behavior expert to get your pet straightened out. There does not seem to be much licensing of animal behavior experts at all, so after a pit bull attacks someone it may be taken to a Cesar Millan impersonator for treatment that doesn't work. Instead of common sense precautions, a person may just try to be the alpha of their household and feel assured that no further problems will occur.
You can see a trend in the pit bull chat thread; folks who buy into the "alpha" BS are likely to think that pit bulls are not more likely than any other breed to fight, or that you can love/socialize the fight out of them. When these folks find out that they are wrong, you better believe they are the first ones to dump their dog at the animal shelter (possibly after breeding a litter or two of them). As terrierman says, its the people who love pits that are killing them, not the haters.
Prominent animal behaviorists (from academic backgrounds) have written letters to National Geographic about what a travesty this show is, and also publicly criticize his methods. Cesar Millan does not have formal training in changing the behavior of animals, and his methods do not seem to work. After watching several episodes of the show, it seems as though many people are still scared shitless of their aggressive animals after Cesar is done "rehabilitating" them. Millan also gives the impression that almost any dog can be rehabilitated. In his book, Cesar's Way, he says he only met two dogs he couldn't rehabilitate. This is dangerous to inject into the already crazy pit nutter community. You can start to understand why a dog that attacked three people will be "rehabilitated", renamed, sent across a state line and adopted out to an unsuspecting family like Patron was.
The truth is that in dogs, aggressive behavior appears to be a mostly genetic issue. All current evidence concludes that the genetics of canines is a much stronger predictor of aggression than training or upbringing. As I mentioned before, Dogs: Decoded is a nifty summary of information and research about the behavior of dogs. They go into depth about an experiment with foxes (closely related to dogs) in russia. Foxes were bred for aggression, or lack of it, exclusively. They picked out the trait by placing a hand near a fox's cage. The ones that bit and postured were bred together, as were ones who were not at all aggressive towards a human hand. The experimenters also switched fox's at birth to see if the mother or family had any affect. It didn't. They went as far as to implant aggressive fox fetuses into the wombs of non-aggressive foxes, and vice versa. The results were still the same. The most interesting part of this experiment was that the foxes bred to be non-aggressive began to look very different from the aggressive foxes. Their ears, tails, coloring, and fur changed. Like pit bulls, these animals were bred only for performance, not looks. If you tried to breed the aggression out of pit bulls (if it were possible to while dog fighters selectively breed for it), it is likely that you wouldn't have pit bulls anymore. Craven has an in-depth post about this issue exactly, it is well worth reading.
I am not saying The Dog Whisperer has only bad advice to offer. There are good suggestions sprinkled in with the crazy nonsense. Not treating animals like children and making sure that they get adequate exercise are pieces of sound advice that Millan regularly dispenses. All of the positive info is available from other sources, so it seems unwise to get the info from someone like Millan who lacks credentials and honesty in giving advice.
I haven't encountered anyone educated who uses that terminology seriously.
I look forward to learning much here