Cesar Millan is the host of Dog Whisperer, on the National Geographic television channel. In every episode, he arrives amid canine chaos and leaves behind peace. He is the teacher we all had in grade school who could walk into a classroom filled with rambunctious kids and get everyone to calm down and behave. But what did that teacher have? If you’d asked us back then, we might have said that we behaved for Mr. Exley because Mr. Exley had lots of rules and was really strict. But the truth is that we behaved for Mr. DeBock as well, and he wasn’t strict at all. What we really mean is that both of them had that indefinable thing called presence — and if you are going to teach a classroom full of headstrong ten-year-olds, or run a company, or command an army, or walk into a trailer home in Mission Hills where a beagle named Sugar is terrorizing its owners, you have to have presence or you’re lost.
Behind the Dog Psychology Center, between the back fence and the walls of the adjoining buildings, Cesar has built a dog run — a stretch of grass and dirt as long as a city block. “This is our Chuck E. Cheese,” Cesar said. The dogs saw Cesar approaching the back gate, and they ran, expectantly, toward him, piling through the narrow door in a hodgepodge of whiskers and wagging tails. Cesar had a bag over his shoulder, filled with tennis balls, and a long orange plastic ball scoop in his right hand. He reached into the bag with the scoop, grabbed a tennis ball, and flung it in a smooth practiced motion off the wall of an adjoining warehouse. A dozen dogs set off in ragged pursuit. Cesar wheeled and threw another ball, in the opposite direction, and then a third, and then a fourth, until there were so many balls in the air and on the ground that the pack had turned into a yelping, howling, leaping, charging frenzy. Woof. Woof, woof, woof. Woof.
“The game should be played five or ten minutes, maybe fifteen minutes,” Cesar said. “You begin. You end. And you don’t ask, ‘Please stop.’ You demand that it stop.” With that, Cesar gathered himself, stood stock still, and let out a short whistle: not a casual whistle but a whistle of authority. Suddenly, there was absolute quiet. All forty-seven dogs stopped charging and jumping and stood as still as Cesar, their heads erect, eyes trained on their ringleader. Cesar nodded, almost imperceptibly, toward the enclosure, and all forty-seven dogs turned and filed happily back through the gate.
3.
In the fall of 2005, Cesar filmed an episode of Dog Whisperer at the Los Angeles home of a couple named Patrice and Scott. They had a Korean jindo named JonBee, a stray that they had found and adopted. Outside, and on walks, JonBee was well behaved and affectionate. Inside the house, he was a terror, turning viciously on Scott whenever he tried to get the dog to submit.
“Help us tame the wild beast,” Scott says to Cesar. “We’ve had two trainers come out, one of whom was doing this domination thing, where he would put JonBee on his back and would hold him until he submits. It went on for a good twenty minutes. This dog never let up. But, as soon as he let go, JonBee bit him four times.…The guy was bleeding, both hands and his arms. I had another trainer come out, too, and they said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of this dog.’”
Cesar goes outside to meet JonBee. He walks down a few steps to the backyard. Cesar crouches down next to the dog. “The owner was a little concerned about me coming here by myself,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I feel more comfortable with aggressive dogs than insecure dogs, or fearful dogs, or panicky dogs. These are actually the guys who put me on the map.”
JonBee comes up and sniffs him. Cesar puts a leash on him. JonBee eyes Cesar nervously and starts to poke around. Cesar then walks JonBee into the living room. Scott puts a muzzle on him. Cesar tries to get the dog to lie on its side — and all hell breaks loose. JonBee turns and snaps and squirms and spins and jumps and lunges and struggles. His muzzle falls off. He bites Cesar. He twists his body up into the air, in a cold, vicious fury. The struggle between the two goes on and on. Patrice covers her face. Cesar asks her to leave the room. He is standing up, leash extended. He looks like a wrangler, taming a particularly ornery rattlesnake. Sweat is streaming down his face. Finally, Cesar gets the dog to sit, then to lie down, and then, somehow, to lie on its side. JonBee slumps, defeated. Cesar massages JonBee’s stomach. “That’s all we wanted,” he says.
What happened between Cesar and JonBee? One explanation is that they had a fight, alpha male versus alpha male. But fights don’t come out of nowhere. JonBee was clearly reacting to something in Cesar. Before he fought, he sniffed and explored and watched Cesar — the last of which is most important, because everything we know about dogs suggests that, in a way that is true of almost no other animals, dogs are students of human movement.
The anthropologist Brian Hare has done experiments with dogs, for example, where he puts a piece of food under one of two cups, placed several feet apart. The dog knows that there is food to be had, but has no idea which of the cups holds the prize. Then Hare points at the right cup, taps on it, looks directly at it. What happens? The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees — an animal that shares 98.6 percent of our genes — the chimps couldn’t get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won’t.
“Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species,” Hare explained. “So if we were able to do a similar game, and it was a chimp or another primate giving a social cue, they might do better. But they are not good at using human cues when you are trying to cooperate with them. They don’t get it: ‘Why would you ever tell me where the food is?’ The key specialization of dogs, though, is that dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing something very human, which is sharing information about something that someone else might actually want.” Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “ Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”
A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward — even a quarter of an inch — means nonthreatening. It means you’ve relinquished what ethologists call an intention movement to proceed forward. Cock your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight on and he’ll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared, rather than slumped, can mean the difference between whether your dog obeys a command or ignores it. Breathing even and deeply — rather than holding your breath — can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation and igniting it. “I think they are looking at our eyes and where our eyes are looking, and what our eyes look like,” the ethologist Patricia McConnell, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says. “A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high arousal and aggression in a dog. I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go.”
In the book The Other End of the Leash, McConnell decodes one of the most common of all human-dog interactions — the meeting between two leashed animals on a walk. To us, it’s about one dog sizing up another. To her, it’s about two dogs sizing up each other after first sizing up their respective owners. The owners “are often anxious about how well the dogs will get along,” she writes, “and if you watch them instead of the dogs, you’ll often notice that the humans will hold their breath and round their eyes and mouths in an ‘on alert’ expression. Since these behaviors are expressions of offensive aggression in canine culture, I suspect that the humans are unwittingly signaling tension. If you exaggerate this by tightening the leash, as many owners do, you can actually cause the dogs to attack each other. Think of it: the dogs are in a tense social encounter, surrounded by support from their own pack, with the humans forming a tense, staring, breathless circle around them. I don’t know how many times I??
?ve seen dogs shift their eyes toward their owner’s frozen faces, and then launch growling at the other dog.”
When Cesar walked down the stairs of Patrice and Scott’s home, then, and crouched down in the backyard, JonBee looked at him, intently. And what he saw was someone who moved in a very particular way. Cesar is fluid. “He’s beautifully organized intraphysically,” Karen Bradley, who heads the graduate dance program at the University of Maryland, said when she first saw tapes of Cesar in action. “That lower-unit organization — I wonder whether he was a soccer player.” Movement experts like Bradley use something called Laban Movement Analysis to make sense of movement, describing, for instance, how people shift their weight, or how fluid and symmetrical they are when they move, or what kind of effort it involves. Is it direct or indirect — that is, what kind of attention does the movement convey? Is it quick or slow? Is it strong or light — that is, what is its intention? Is it bound or free — that is, how much precision is involved? If you want to emphasize a point, you might bring your hand down across your body in a single, smooth motion. But how you make that motion greatly affects how your point will be interpreted by your audience. Ideally, your hand would come down in an explosive, bound movement — that is, with accelerating force, ending abruptly and precisely — and your head and shoulders would descend simultaneously, so posture and gesture would be in harmony. Suppose, though, that your head and shoulders moved upward as your hand came down, or your hand came down in a free, implosive manner — that is, with a kind of a vague, decelerating force. Now your movement suggests that you are making a point on which we all agree, which is the opposite of your intention. Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions — who understand, for instance, that emphasis requires them to be bound and explosive. To Bradley, Cesar had beautiful phrasing.
There he is, talking to Patrice and Scott. He has his hands in front of him, in what Laban analysts call the sagittal plane — that is, the area directly in front of and behind the torso. He then leans forward for emphasis. But as he does, he lowers his hands to waist level, and draws them toward his body, to counterbalance the intrusion of his posture. And, when he leans backward again, the hands rise up, to fill the empty space. It’s not the kind of thing you’d ever notice. But, when it’s pointed out, its emotional meaning is unmistakable. It is respectful and reassuring. It communicates without being intrusive. Bradley was watching Cesar with the sound off, and there was one sequence she returned to again and again, in which Cesar was talking to a family, and his right hand swung down in a graceful arc across his chest. “He’s dancing,” Bradley said. “Look at that. It’s gorgeous. It’s such a gorgeous little dance.
“The thing is, his phrases are of mixed length,” she went on. “Some of them are long. Some of them are very short. Some of them are explosive phrases, loaded up in the beginning and then trailing off. Some of them are impactive — building up, and then coming to a sense of impact at the end. What they are is appropriate to the task. That’s what I mean by versatile.”
Movement analysts tend to like watching, say, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan; they had great phrasing. George W. Bush does not. During this year’s State of the Union address, Bush spent the entire speech swaying metronomically, straight down through his lower torso, a movement underscored, unfortunately, by the presence of a large vertical banner behind him. “Each shift ended with this focus that channels toward a particular place in the audience,” Bradley said. She mimed, perfectly, the Bush gaze — the squinty, fixated look he reserves for moments of great solemnity — and gently swayed back and forth. “It’s a little primitive, a little regressed.” The combination of the look, the sway, and the gaze was, to her mind, distinctly adolescent. When people say of Bush that he seems eternally boyish, this is in part what they’re referring to. He moves like a boy, which is fine, except that, unlike such movement masters as Reagan and Clinton, he can’t stop moving like a boy when the occasion demands a more grown-up response.
“Mostly what we see in the normal population is undifferentiated phrasing,” Bradley said. “And then you have people who are clearly preferential in their phrases, like my husband. He’s Mr. Horizontal. When he’s talking in a meeting, he’s back. He’s open. He just goes into this, this same long thing” — she leaned back, and spread her arms out wide and slowed her speech — “and it doesn’t change very much. He works with people who understand him, fortunately.” She laughed. “When we meet someone like this” — she nodded at Cesar, on the television screen — “what do we do? We give them their own TV series. Seriously. We reward them. We are drawn to them, because we can trust that we can get the message. It’s not going to be hidden. It contributes to a feeling of authenticity.”
4.
Back to JonBee, from the beginning — only this time with the sound off. Cesar walks down the stairs. It’s not the same Cesar who whistled and brought forty-seven dogs to attention. This occasion calls for subtlety. “Did you see the way he walks? He drops his hands. They’re close to his side.” The analyst this time was Suzi Tortora, the author of The Dancing Dialogue. Tortora is a New York dance-movement psychotherapist, a tall, lithe woman with long dark hair and beautiful phrasing. She was in her office on lower Broadway, a large, empty, paneled room. “He’s very vertical,” Tortora said. “His legs are right under his torso. He’s not taking up any space. And he slows down his gait. He’s telling the dog, ‘I’m here by myself. I’m not going to rush. I haven’t introduced myself yet. Here I am. You can feel me.’ ” Cesar crouches down next to JonBee. His body is perfectly symmetrical, the center of gravity low. He looks stable, as though you couldn’t knock him over, which conveys a sense of calm.
JonBee was investigating Cesar, squirming nervously. When JonBee got too jumpy, Cesar would correct him, with a tug on the leash. Because Cesar was talking and the correction was so subtle, it was easy to miss. Stop. Rewind. Play. “Do you see how rhythmic it is?” Tortora said. “He pulls. He waits. He pulls. He waits. He pulls. He waits. The phrasing is so lovely. It’s predictable. To a dog that is all over the place, he’s bringing a rhythm. But it isn’t a panicked rhythm. It has a moderate tempo to it. There was room to wander. And it’s not attack, attack. It wasn’t long and sustained. It was quick and light. I would bet that with dogs like this, where people are so afraid of them being aggressive and so defensive around them, there is a lot of aggressive strength directed at them. There is no aggression here. He’s using strength without it being aggressive.”
Cesar moves into the living room. The fight begins. “Look how he involves the dog,” Tortora said. “He’s letting the dog lead. He’s giving the dog room.” This was not a Secret Service agent wrestling an assailant to the ground. Cesar had his body vertical, and his hand high above JonBee holding the leash, and, as JonBee turned and snapped and squirmed and spun and jumped and lunged and struggled, Cesar seemed to be moving along with him, providing a loose structure for his aggression. It may have looked like a fight, but Cesar wasn’t fighting. And what was JonBee doing? Child psychologists talk about the idea of regulation. If you expose healthy babies, repeatedly, to a very loud noise, eventually they will be able to fall asleep. They’ll become habituated to the noise: the first time the noise is disruptive, but, by the second or third time, they’ve learned to handle the disruption, and block it out. They’ve regulated themselves. Children throwing tantrums are said to be in a state of dysregulation. They’ve been knocked off kilter in some way, and cannot bring themselves back to baseline. JonBee was dysregulated. He wasn’t fighting; he was throwing a tantrum. And Cesar was the understanding parent. When JonBee paused, to catch his breath, Cesar paused with him. When JonBee bit Cesar, Cesar brought his finger to his mouth, instinctively, but in a smooth and fluid and calm motion that betrayed no anxiety. “Timing is a big part of Cesar’s repertoire,” Tortora went on. “His movements right now aren’t complex. T
here aren’t a lot of efforts together at one time. His range of movement qualities is limited. Look at how he’s narrowing. Now he’s enclosing.” As JonBee calmed down, Cesar began caressing him. His touch was firm but not aggressive; not so strong as to be abusive and not so light as to be insubstantial and irritating. Using the language of movement — the plainest and most transparent of all languages — Cesar was telling JonBee that he was safe. Now JonBee was lying on his side, mouth relaxed, tongue out. “Look at that, look at the dog’s face,” Tortora said. This was not defeat; this was relief.
Later, when Cesar tried to show Scott how to placate JonBee, Scott couldn’t do it, and Cesar made him stop. “You’re still nervous,” Cesar told him. “You are still unsure. That’s how you become a target.” It isn’t as easy as it sounds to calm a dog. “There, there” in a soothing voice, accompanied by a nice belly scratch, wasn’t enough for JonBee, because he was reading gesture and posture and symmetry and the precise meaning of touch. He was looking for clarity and consistency. Scott didn’t have it. “Look at the tension and aggression in his face,” Tortora said, when the camera turned to Scott. It was true. Scott had a long and craggy face, with high, wide cheekbones and pronounced lips, and his movements were taut and twitchy. “There’s a bombardment of actions, quickness combined with tension, a quality in how he is using his eyes and focus — a darting,” Tortora said. “He gesticulates in a way that is complex. There is a lot going on. So many different qualities of movement happening at the same time. It leads those who watch him to get distracted.” Scott is a character actor, with a list of credits going back thirty years. The tension and aggression in his manner made him interesting and complicated — which works for Hollywood but doesn’t work for a troubled dog. Scott said he loved JonBee, but the quality of his movement did not match his emotions.