Cesar Millan or Victoria Stilwell? Who Would You Rather Have Train Your Dog?

Aug 9th 2010

You have a dog you just can't get to behave. Who would you turn to? That seems to be one of the questions raised in a recent Time Magazine article called, "Dog Training and the Myth of Alpha-Male Dominance."

The article stirs up a long-running debate among experts in the dog training and behavior world about what is the best way to work with dogs. Many experts have gone on record against Millan's use of dominance techniques -- finger jabs, quick flicks to a dog's flank and forcing a dog onto its back -- to assert control over an aggressive or misbehaving canine. "He's a charming, one-man wrecking ball directed at 40 years of progress in understanding and shaping dog behavior and in developing non-punitive, reward-based training programs." one expert wrote in a 2006 New York Times op-ed piece about Millan. (Millan will be the first person to tell you that he is not a dog trainer, but akin to a "dog psychologist.")

Victoria Stilwell, the British dog trainer and star of Animal Planet's,"It's Me or the Dog," espouses the positive-reinforcement method of dog training, and the liberal use of treats to coach an ill-mannered dog into displaying better behavior. "She uses positivity as a counterpoint to dominance theory and reserves her aggression for the poorly behaving humans," says the article's author, Jeninne Lee-St. John.

Viewers of his popular show, "The Dog Whisperer" on the National Geographic Channel know that Millan is not averse to using a bag of treats to lure a shy dog out of a kennel, for example. But the main thrust of Millan's techniques is based on dominance theory, in which the dog submits to the human.

Experts quoted in the Time article say that this dominance style is based on an outdated study of wolves. That study suggested that the alpha-male wolf emerged by displaying aggression over other wolves and the idea is that because dogs are descended from wolves, humans need to display alpha behavior (or be the "pack leader," as Millan would say), dominating their pet dogs to get them to behave.