Cesar Millan has set dog training back 20 years. None of the experts in the field - Ian Dunbar, Patricia McConnell, Karen Pryor, Pat Miller, Paul Owens or Nicholas Dodman even APPROVE of Cesar Millan, let alone would recommend him. I've done the research. I've been working with a certified positive trainer with a with Loki for over a year. People may be enchanted by Cesar, but his methods are still bogus. And that's not just MY opinion:
Quoting from the Chicago Tribune May 23, 2006
"To call his operation a psychology center is a total paradox," says veterinary behaviorist Nicholas Dodman, director of the Animal Behavior Clinic at Tufts University's Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and author of "Dogs Behaving Badly" (Bantam, $14). "I think, like a bullfighter, he understands how to approach and work around a dog, but thereafter he stops. He doesn't understand separation anxiety. I doubt he knows what obsessive-compulsive behavior is. Basically, with a smile, he's going to war with these dogs."
Dodman says Millan relies on two musty tools popularized a half-century ago by heavy-handed military dog trainers and considered out of vogue amid the current emphasis on reward-based training. One is "positive punishment," where an adversive action -- "poking and jabbing and pulling and prodding" -- is applied to get the dog to stop a behavior. The other is "flooding," in which the dog is "basically drowning" in something it doesn't like, sort of "Fear Factor" for Fido.
"Imagine," says Dodman, "if there was a new Dr. Phil for children, and he said, `If your kid is playing too many video games, get a big paddle and whack him on the head.' People would be incensed."
Veterinary concerns
This is the case with his colleagues at the prestigious American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, which shared its concerns in a letter to the cable network. (Among them: Nowhere on the show does Millan suggest that owners first rule out a medical cause for aberrant behavior.) And when news of the Gator lawsuit broke, Dodman says the chatter on the group's e-mail list was about volunteering to be expert witnesses against Millan. http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...ck=1&cset=true
Furthermore - the pack mentality that he has is also not based in science. There are many many articles to link to regarding this, but this person from The Bark Magazine sums it up nicely:
http://thebark.typepad.com/barking/2...n_millan_.html