Cesar’s Doggie Do’s — and Don’ts
DON’T treat a dog like a human. “No dog on this planet is a human. Can you love them like you love a human? Absolutely. But a dog is a dog.” DON’T adopt a dog based on emotion alone. “When you do things out of emotions, you don’t see logic. When humans make the decision to adopt a dog, they have to take into consideration the practical things such as costs, for example.” DO walk your dog at least twice a day, every day. “Dogs are not programmed to be inside a home 23 or 24 hours a day. For a dog, that’s just a really bad life.” — Adam Buckman
guests and family members. For example, in the premiere epi-
sode of Better Human Better Dog, a tiny, very spoiled Yorkie with a social- media following was so protective of his female owner that his aggressive- ness toward the woman’s new hus- band was threatening their marriage. But in this and other situations,
Millan’s understanding of canine behavior tells him the dog is not to blame. “It is not the dog, it is not the breed,”
he said. “You can’t blame animals.” But you can blame the humans. Dog
owners, he said, make a very funda- mental mistake when they treat their dogs like humans or, in his words, “when they don’t honor the identity of a dog. “At the moment they aren’t honor-
ing their dog’s identity, they create instability and anxiety,” Millan said. “The people that come to me, they have made the mistake of humanizing their dogs. “When people have horses, they
love them very much, but they never treat them like humans,” he said. “However, man’s best friend is
the only pet that a human blames for everything because humans change
the dog’s identity. A dog owner will say to himself, ‘He’s like a human, so he knows what he’s doing.’ No, he doesn’t.
“Remember Major, the dog in the
White House [a German shepherd owned by President Biden and his wife, Jill]? He bit a security guard and a National Park Service worker [both last March],” Millan said. “But Major is a German shepherd.
He doesn’t know his ‘dad’ is the presi- dent of the United States. He doesn’t know he lives in the White House. “They blamed the dog, but it’s not
the dog. There is no knowledge behind a dog’s instincts. It is all reaction. Humans have to remember this.” Millan, 52, was born in a rural area
of Mexico and grew up on a farm where he developed his unique rapport with animals, particularly the dogs that lived there. He emigrated illegally to the United
States at the age of 21 with $100 in his pocket and spoke no English. He became a U.S. citizen in 2009. In his fi rst job in the U.S., he
worked as a dog groomer in Los Angeles and did other odd jobs, while also developing a side busi- ness as a dog trainer in L.A.’s tough
South-Central neighborhood. An article in the Los Angeles Times
in 2002 about his unusual talent for interpreting canine behavior and then correcting it caught the attention of TV producers, and his TV career was born.
Millan is divorced and the father of
two sons — Calvin, 21, and Andre, 26. Today, Millan is based primarily at a sprawling, 45-acre dog-training facility known as the Dog Psychology Center that he developed some 30 miles north of Los Angeles in Santa Clarita, Cali- fornia. The Center is featured prominent-
ly in his new TV show. It is where the show’s human and canine clients come to receive his advice and hope- fully learn how to apply his teachings to controlling their dogs when they return home, where Cesar and his oth- erworldly affi nity for communicating with dogs is not there to help them. With that challenge in mind, Mil-
lan tries to train dog owners to take his methods home with them. “Any dog around the world can behave exactly the same way it behaves with me,” he said. “It is just that the whole world has to do the same thing I do.”
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