I have mixed feelings about Millan. (I know this is a bit long—but they’re mixed feelings. They take some space to work out!) I think he’s in tune with dog body language, and I enjoy watching the times that he takes an insecure or fearful dog and bolsters their confidence. He has also helped save many dogs from being put down for aggressive behavior—behavior assumed to be “hard wired” into them, but was really them coping with a various situations— while simultaneously trying to help them work through psychological trauma/discontent. I appreciate his push towards showing people that our communication with our dogs has tremendous influence, and that dogs have complex, nuanced psychology.
But I also wish he would let go of the dominance/submissive theories of dog behavior. He doesn’t need them. (The more the situation veers towards domination the harder time I have watching it, too.) Yes, studies have found that wolves establish a social hierarchy of dominance. However, those studies were of wolves in stressful, confined lab situations. Later studies of wolves (and feral dogs) in more natural settings show them living a more relaxed, familial (for lack of a better term) structure. (Source Live Science article discussing various studies on dog psychology and dog training methods).
More from the article:
Mech has been studying wolves for 50 years now, yet only over the past decade has he gotten a clear picture of these animals in their natural habitats. And what he’s found is far from the domineering behavior popularized by Millan. “In the wild it works just like it does in the human family,” says Mech. “They don’t have to fight to get to the top. When they mature and find a mate they are at the top.” In other words, wolves don’t need to play the “alpha” game to win.
The article also talks about how measures of a dog’s stress and fear hormones are heightened when he/she lives in such punishment/dominance situations. Ironically this makes them more likely to behave aggressively. It goes on to compare the different methods of training—and also to suggest a reason why a dominance method translates so well to the TV, where a more effective, less stressful method doesn’t offer as dramatic a show…
But at the same time, the most dramatic changes we see in Millan’s shows are when he takes a dog to his dog psychology center to socialize with the pack—most of the time, the dog literally just socializes with the pack… and that pack doesn’t have an internal dominance hierarchy. In fact, Millan actively works to prevent such hierarchy from becoming established—all of his pack dogs are at the “same level” with each other, and they get along marvelously. This is probably what frustrates me more than anything—the methods Millan has the most success with seem to be the ones that aren’t dominance. He has control over the situation—and he can read changes in the situation as subtle as a look or tensing of muscles—but that’s not dominance, even though he and his show says it is, and even though that control and perception becomes conflated with overt acts of dominance.
In the article, I feel that author tends to combine “dominance” with “punishment” and “familial” with “positive reinforcement”; while they are separate things, and a more careful discussion breaking down each separately would be useful, I also think it’s probably fair to combine them the way he has. Even if not exact, they do have significant overlap. Humans in positions of dominance tend to lead with more “forceful” methods, and tend to focus on maintaining “control” using such methods—especially when they’re told that’s all a dog “understands”... besides being stressful for the dog, I think such attitudes hugely undercut Milan’s own efforts at getting people to appreciate dog psychology. It makes a dog’s rich inner life seem like a simple computation of “who has more power.”
…A “familial” structure doesn’t need dominance, it has trust and loyalty—which are more “powerful” and reliable.
If you watch Milan with Daddy or Junior—he’s not being the overt dominant character the show promotes. Daddy and Junior are his partners, given a fair amount of autonomy. It’s the mutual trust that makes them such an asset…
And this is why I have such mixed feelings. I think Millan’s taking his own intuitive understanding of dogs, but then overlaying a flawed theory of dog behavior and human concepts of hierarchy… I think his successes come from his own intuitive understanding, but then we are presented with the flawed theories, particularly for aggressive cases.
The show is supposed to present extreme cases. At least, it did in the beginning—“red zone” cases, dogs whose owners were soon going to have to put down because they were such a danger. Millan was the dogs’ last chance. Perhaps such heavy-handed intervention really is necessary to be able to reach these dogs, get them to a state that won’t cause them to be euthanized, get them to a state in which they are calm enough to be worked with. I don’t know. But that being the case, it frustrates me how much everyone acts like that’s the way you “treat dogs.” I don’t think a dog that far whacked out (especially given the studies that show how differently a dog responds to a stressful situation than a normal one) can be used to prove that dogs “need” someone to dominate them. But that’s the “logical” conclusion everyone jumps to, probably because it puts dog behavior on a nice and simple linear gradient for us, probably because it simplifies things for us—if a red-zone dog is just higher up on a gradient of behavior, we can approach every situation in the same way—maybe at different volumes, but the same way. We don’t have to think about how to react.
Millan suggests the red-zone cases show you what happens when your dog is not properly submissive—an ominous image—a way for him to connect his success with the dominance theory. The show presents it as this-is-how-you-handle-your-dog (I don’t care if they have the “don’t try this at home” disclaimer—stepping through the techniques and presenting a theory of dog psychology that says not being the “dominant” might give you a dangerous dog is basically saying “do this at home or else.”) And then viewers, despite not having red-zone case dogs, go ahead and use these techniques on their dogs—because they saw it on TV and it was a simple algorithm so it must be true. And it all frustrates me.
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