Welcome the Dog to the Human World
Have you ever watched The Dog Whisperer and thought, 'Wow, that guy is amazing! What a great way to train a dog!" I know I have many times. Cesar Milan teaches one basic principle about dogs - a dog is a pack animal by instinct. According to Cesar, your job is to become the pack leader, a dominant Alpha male/female with 'balance'. I guess by 'balance' he means you should treat the animal fairly, as they would expect to be treated in a wild pack. He gets very good and fast results with this method. I won't say it's a bad method, but it's not the way I choose to train my dogs and here's why.
There's one thing very wrong with the 'you're the pack leader' concept - it assumes the dog inhabits a dog's world, and for you to control it, you must behave as a dog would, the Alpha male or female of the pack. For the majority of dogs who are family pets this means the owner will treat the animal as though it had only instinctual processes going on in its head, no rational thought processes. To refute that thinking go and watch these two short videos of Lucy's behavior: Lucy Remembers Her Ball and Lucy and The Vacuum Cleaner (links appear at bottom). A dog does not inhabit a dog's world unless it's in a pack of dogs, roaming the wilderness like a wolf, bringing down prey and sharing its kill. This is not your dog. Your dog wouldn't chase its supper if it went hungry for a week! It would no more kill a raccoon and rip its flesh apart than would your six year old child! If you do have such an animal it's a sure bet that it's a dangerous dog, one that causes people in your neighborhood to cross the street to avoid.
If you become the pack leader, you've descended into the dog's world. Having done so, the dog will integrate well with other dogs, live in a pack happily, know its place in the human pack, and generally behave well, but it won't reach its full potential. When you adopted the dog into your family, you didn't decide to become a primeval growler, (which can work if you have the cahones to back up the threats), you decided to introduce an animal into the human world. As the two videos show, Lucy is an animal with human-like tendencies developed to the full potential of her smaller dog brain. She, like 99 percent of dogs today, belongs to a family, has been introduced to human concepts, and lives in a human world. It's better that you train your dog to live well in your world, rather than you in its, for the sake of the dog and yourself. You will have a much better companion, and so will the dog. The dog will learn to love humans above dogs.
Lucy is a thinking dog. Lucy will position herself at the ready depending on where a person places their foot behind a ball. She correctly anticipates which way the ball will be propelled by the positioning of the foot. She also cheats quite badly, arriving at the destination of a tossed toy before it gets there. Her brain has computed where you're likely to throw or kick an object. Lucy knows which way you will kick a ball simply by shifting your weight from one hip to the other, without even moving your feet! Better than a goalie in football (soccer).
Lucy knows several hundred concepts and commands, from Jump In The Boat, to Don't Go In The Street. She rarely plays now but when she was younger I would throw her ball into the street (a rural highway) and when she realized the ball had gone out of reach, rolling into forbidden territory, she would put on the brakes and stop before crossing an imaginary line. That line used to be a piece of yellow rope lying across the driveway about 20 feet from the street. After she learned the concept the rope was taken away, she was allowed to go out to pee on her own; I could trust her not to go past the imaginary line. That concept, Don't Go In The Street, is central to a dog being able to live happily in the human world. It's the difference between a deer or a raccoon crossing the road and your pet's thinking. It has learned that highways (a human construct not appearing in the dog pack vocabulary) are very bad.
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