If you loom in an extremely threatening way over anyone, not just a dog, when they are in a vulnerable position, yes you should just let them bite you because you made a very stupid decisions.
The question presupposes that the dog is the antagonizer in this situation. The dog is in a position of defense, not attack.
“Should he just let the dog bite him?” is the wrong question. If someone showed a clip of a child playing with his bike, and a stray dog running up and assaulting him viciously, and he began to strike the dog to defend himself, then the question would be valid. What else should the child do, but to begin defending himself?
This is not the situation. Millan presents himself as a power-figure, one to be feared. He immediately presents a threat by positioning himself in a threatening position with his body language. The dog is on the defense, because he wants his food, and he fears it will be taken from him.
Then, Millan strikes. The dog’s fears are affirmed, and he snaps back in defense, and as a warning. But note that as he snaps, HE IS BACKING AWAY. The dog does NOT want this fight. He does NOT want to attack him. He JUST wants to eat in peace and he is backing away, but attempting to defend himself.
In short, if Millan doesn’t want to get bit, he should probably not antagonize a reactive dog.
BOOM
In this gif he genuinely seems to be provoking the fuck out of the dog, violently. He seems to be hitting the dog, and even if he’s just feinting… that’s awful.
I’ve watched Victoria Sitwell (also dogs) and Jackson Galaxy (cats). They both present themselves in the animal’s space to see what reaction they get. But I’ve never seen either of them come anywhere near hitting an animal. Honestly, what the hell is this asshole’s problem.
I’ve only seen Jackson but if the cat is aggressive he backs the fuck off. He does NOT strike a cat. For any reason. Even being attacked or scratched he thinks about how HE made the mistake and how to fix it.
<p>^^^ also this. He’s very good at not antagonizing aggressive cats at all, but when they ARE aggressive he would let a cat bite or scratch him before he so much as touched it, let alone hit it. </p><p> I spent a few minutes on google, to refamiliarize myself with Victoria, because it’s been a while since I watched “It’s Me or the Dog” – but immediately I found an article asking readers to compare these two specifically, and whoa Ceasar is terrible and should stop. </p><p> FYI, Victoria has never been bitten by a dog. Google’s pretty firm on that. And when dogs bite people in the family, she recognizes where the bad behavior is – their adult owners. Ceasar on the other hand appears to be operating on the pseudoscience (and outright myth) of “alpha males”. Victoria uses positive reinforcement, in the casual rather than the literal sense, like treats and figuring out what the dog needs emotionally from its owners; Ceasar intimidates dogs into compliance, which will just deepen the fear and insecurity being displayed by the dog in this gif. </p><p> Here’s <a href=“http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/its-me-or-dog/training-tips/child-dog-safety/”>a very brief post from an interview with her</a>, it looks like, on child-dog safety that illustrates her point of view.</p> <p>Meanwhile Ceasar is apparently a jackass who uses choke collars and shock collars. There’s no excuse for that, ever.</p>
FUCK Cesar Millan.
Wow this is so gross
Okay, so I’m not a dog expert, but I actually watched this episode and I remember it very vividly. You CANNOT JUDGE this situation by the gifs alone, so here’s some background:
The dog is the problem in the situation. She is “the antagonizer.”
The dog, Holly, was hyper protective of food and territory and would not let ANYONE near her food without lunging and snarling at them, and the family had a baby. You don’t have to approach this dog in an aggressive position, she will threaten you anyway. Caesar had spent a good amount of time trying to give and take food from the dog, but it led to this confrontation:
(BLOOD WARNING)
The dog snarls at Caesar so he jabs at the dog’s throat, mimicking warning nips that dogs use. He didn’t hit the dog like the gif suggests and the dog getting aggressive around food has been a continual problem that he’s trying to break her of. When Caesar stands for too long between her and the food bowl, and he’s NOT IN AN AGGRESSIVE POSITION, she lunges and BITES HIM AND DOESN’T LET GO. He fights her off, then stands over her, trying to get her to realize who is in control of the situation. He has a deep puncture wound bleeding and still doesn’t back down.
What this video doesn’t show is that he tells the family he cannot comfortably let them keep Holly while they have a baby, so they allow him to take her to his facility to rehabilitate her. She spends a month or so there, spending a lot of time around calm dogs and getting healthy amounts of exercise to burn off energy. Eventually she becomes friendly with the dogs but ultimately the family did give her up out of concern for their baby.
I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with Caesar’s methods, I go back and forth on them myself, but don’t ignore the entire truth of the situation. Slander only weakens your argument. If you want to argue against Caesar’s methods, then offer suggestions on how to deal with a dog that won’t let you near her food without threatening to attack.
New information, please read ^^
Hello, friend. Unfortunately, as you said, you’re not a dog expert and everything you wrote is completely and utterly wrong.For context, I’ve been training dogs for a decade, and I literally wrote the paper on why this dude’s practices and theory are not only abusive but completely unsupported by all modern canine behavior and cognition research. I don’t normally get into these things about him because it’s stressful, but this one I just can’t let go.
We’re going to cover some stuff here.
Most importantly:
Resource guarding occurs when an animal feels unsafe with another animal or a person near it’s food/bone. This is often because they have learned that they get hurt or that they will be deprived of it if it is taken away, and have generalized to every situation. This is not the dog being an asshole or being aggressive.
Resource guarding is fixed by teaching the dog to trust you to interact with it’s possession. The dog learns that it is safe to give up the item, because it will either be returned or it will get something better in exchange. This requires trust and a slow approach, not violence and threats.
Animals who are scared or in pain will shut down. An animal that has been hit to teach it to stop a behavior does not change the behavior willingly – it is trying to avoid further punishment and will not respond until it is pushed to the point where it feels so unsafe it must bite – a dog’s last resort.
Okay, let’s start with what you wrote and just go over the stuff that isn’t right, before we get into an accurate breakdown.
“The dog snarls at Caesar so he jabs at the dog’s throat, mimicking warning nips that dogs use”
1. Dogs do not consider humans to be dogs. There is no point in trying to mimic how dogs interact with dogs because they know we are not dogs.
2. A neck jab with a hand is very, very different than light pressure from a mouth with teeth so it’s a stupid analogy and pretty much just bullshit.
3. By reaching towards the dog, he’s entering her space and by guarding her food she is telling him directly that she does not feel safe with him entering her space. This is not appropriate nor is it how you get a resource guarding dog to trust you.
“He didn’t hit the dog like the gif suggests”
4. I don’t know what video you’re watching, but apparently it’s not the one you linked. That is forceful contact with his hand on the dog’s neck, AKA a hit.
“When Caesar stands for too long between her and the food bowl, and he’s NOT IN AN AGGRESSIVE POSITION, she lunges and BITES HIM AND DOESN’T LET GO.”
5. His posture is aggressive. He continues to move into her space – which she has already demonstrated is stressful for her – and uses his posture and size to loom over her from a crouch. His posture is stereotypically aggressive – balanced forward, leaning over, arms and hands wide in a threatening posture, and he’s staring at her.
6. It is completely reasonable for the dog to bite him at this point. She already tried to warn him (very politely, in dog language) that she was uncomfortable, with many avoidance behaviors before she started eaten. He encroached on her space and she responded with a snap – not a bite, because she didn’t make contact, which is very purposeful. Dogs have very good mouth control and do not make contact unless they intend to. In response, he hit her (more threats) and then encroached on her space. This is a stressed, unhappy animal who is being threatened by a guy who has escalated to physical contact and refuses to leave her space. Any dog would bite at this point and you cannot fault an animal that is pushed to the end of it’s rope to defend itself for feeling unsafe and physically threatened.
“He has a deep puncture wound bleeding and still doesn’t back down.”
7. There are only two reasons a good animal trainer gets bit. A) they didn’t have the skill to do what they tried to do B) they weren’t paying enough attention. Trainers who get bit frequently are not good trainers, no matter how much they brag. You do not need to push an animal to the point of defending itself to modify it’s behavior, and if you consistently do so, you should not be working with animals.
8. If a dog bites, it’s because it literally believes it has no other options to remove the threat or stressor. If a dog is so stressed that it bites, you leave it the fuck alone so it can calm down. That’s the fight or flight response. An animal that is in a state of arousal from defending itself literally can’t think straight – try reasoning with a toddler having a meltdown, it’s about the same thing. Instead he keeps pushing her and making it worse.
“I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with Caesar’s methods, I go back and forth on them myself, but don’t ignore the entire truth of the situation. Slander only weakens your argument. If you want to argue against Caesar’s methods, then offer suggestions on how to deal with a dog that won’t let you near her food without threatening to attack.”
9. Go read The Damage of Dog Whispering for the entire truth. It does not contain slander, but instead, reasoned arguments for why he is awful.
10. A dog that is resource guarding by growling/snarling is not threatening to attack. It is saying ‘I am uncomfortable and feel unsafe and do not want this to escalate to a bite, but I will do so in order to protect myself if you push this’.
Jeez, okay. Painful breakdown done. Next: what are we actually looking at? I’m sacrificing my own sanity to re-watch this enough times to break it down, ugh. Here’s a link to someone who does a decent slow-motion breakdown, and although I can’t find the person’s credentials it’s pretty accurate even though it misses some stuff. .I’m going to use that video for the breakdown because it’s slowed down, so the timecode will not match a full-speed video of the incident.
Breakdown:
0:10 He stares at the dog as he puts food down. He is already in her space, too close physically, and leaning into her with all of his posture. Forward body posture and weight is a very aggressive signal – it says “I am ready to leap into your space at any moment”.
0:12 She blinks multiple times and looks away. These are appeasement signals from an unsure dog – she’s uncomfortable and trying to diffuse the tensions he’s creating (by setting up a situation in which he knows she’ll have issues).
0:14 She purposefully moves her head so her nose is pointed away from his. Head orientation is very important to dogs for diffusing tension – you’ll notice a group of dogs in any photo will all have their faces pointed in slightly different directions. Turning her head away is another attempt at diffusing what’s going on.
0:16 There is a cut in the video here. She likely did not immediately start to eat, but the video jumps to where her head is already in the bowl and we have no idea how she got there. CM’s videos do this a lot – utilize editing to mislead and misrepresent.
0:22 He moves towards her and she immediately speeds up eating. This is a key sign of unease – the animal feels it must wolf it’s food in order to eat as much as it can before it’s taken away.
0:27 As the video says, you can see his hand subtly moving towards the side of Holly’s head as he moves forward. It’s not a huge movement, but it’s enough to be a threat to a dog that’s already on edge. This is because it’s moving into her peripheral vision and getting closer to her blind spot – she can’t watch him and his hand at the same time, which is stressful when he’s continuing to encroach on her space with a threatening posture.
0:35 It’s hard to tell what happens here because CM’s body is in the way, but it looks like she snarls at him and shows teeth as his hand moves. This is what he’s using to decide she needs to be hit. Snarling and showing teeth are higher on the scale of defensive warnings than a growl – they’re an escalation when it’s clear that other, more polite body language like growls and appeasement signals haven’t worked. She is telling him very clearly that if he continues to push her, she’ll defend herself – and he chooses to hit her instead of backing off.
0:45 CM hits Holly in the neck with the side of his hand – it looks like his fingers go under her neck and his thumb hits the side, which means he effectively hits her throat with the full force of his palm. He makes contact hard enough to knock the dog inches to the side – you cannot justify that not being ‘hitting the dog’.
0:47 Holly immediately reacts defensively. Her teeth are showing and she makes noise, but she is startled and defensive – not attacking him. Notice how her entire body posture is away from him, and her weight is backwards too. All this dog wants to do is get out from under the dude who ignored all her warnings about feeling unsafe and then hit her right after she expressed exactly how not cool the situation was. Her mouth opens and closes in a snap but it is not directed towards his hand – it’s in line with her body as she moves backwards away from him. Her face is tight, her ears are back and flat against her head – all classic signs of stress.
0:52 She backs multiple steps away from him. He steps into her. This is no longer about the food bowl – now, she’s scared of and reacting to CM himself. We’ve left the realm of resource guarding and now the dog is just threatened and cornered from all sides (remember, there are multiple camera men surrounding her, as we see from the separate angles of her face shown later in the video).
0:57 Holly turns away from him as he advances on her. You can see his left hand starting to reach out towards her as his body blocks the camera. Everything about this is a threat – his posture, his moving forward, his reaching out to her right after he just hit her.
1:02 She’s moved multiple steps away at this point, he’s moved forward and is getting into her space with both arms. She’s started to get backed up against the fence – it looked like she was trying to go around him and get clear of where she’d be stuck, except he cut her off. She turns to see his hands and bares her teeth in a snarl – now she’s really feeling threatened and making no secret of it.
1:05 He continues moving forward once her teeth are bared, but stands up in order to scare her away. Her body immediately changes – it’s suddenly backwards, away from CM again: his threatening stature and change in movement works.
1:08 Even thought the dog is backing away and cowering with bared teeth (terrified) CM continues to move towards her while standing. His arms are spread again in a threat posture that keeps her feeling like she’s cornered between the wall, the fence, and the cameraman.
1:11 He’s literally learning over a dog that is crouching away from him, ready to defend itself, and staring her in the face. Threat threat threat threat. She can’t move. She’s stuck and he’s being an asshole by keeping an animal that keeps trying to get away from him cornered. She’s giving off every signal a dog can give that she will defend herself – ears back, posture back, body stiff, both sets of teeth bared (snarls usually only involve moving the top lip).
1:27 The camera zooms in on her face. Hopefully this was a digital zoom, but if it was the cameraman getting closer, this adds to her stress by cornering her and sticking a camera in her face.
1:31 This looks like a lip lick – a well known sign of nerves and stress – where the tongue doesn’t leave the mouth because she’s displaying a defensive grimace at the same time. Lip licks are an appeasement signal, saying ‘please back off’ – she’s trying to calm everything down while still needing to be able to defend herself.
1:37 As the video notes, actual lick lips this time and blinking – Holly is moving away from the defensive grimace since CM hasn’t escalated the situation by sheathing her teeth and trying to diffuse everything.
2:34 She’s even looking away from his face/hands at this point, really trying to make it clear she’s trying to de-escalate things. That’s big – it means she’s starting to feel a little safer because you don’t look away from stuff that could hurt you.
2:42+ The video notes lots of appeasement signals and they’re all correct in the surrounding seconds: looking for positive eye contact without staring, soft face, blinking, look-aways (pointed breaks of eye contact with a head turn), etc. She then lays down. That’s not submission – that’s just giving up because he’s not going to fucking move.
The video then notes in an interlude that he’s confronted her before, which is why an escalation like this occurs. Holly has already learned that he’s not safe around food, that he’s going to purposefully set up uncomfortable situations and then push her boundaries and not listen to her body language. That’s why things escalated so fast – because she’s had to deal with this before, and knows it ends with him not being safe for her when food is around. He’s doing exactly what makes resource guarding worse by setting up situations in which food creates unsafe situations and she has to gobble it before he tries to fuck with her.
3:20 He mentions relaxation, which the video calls out as being stress correctly right afterwards. You can see her face is still taught, her eyes tight and blinking, and her ears stiff. This is a stressed dog who is trying to be as non-confrontational as possible.
3:40 She looks away and when she turns back, his hand is in her space and close to her face. It’s coincidentally the hand he hit her with earlier.
3:41 He puts his hand on her face as he stands up over her and she snaps at him. This is just plain stupid of him – he should know those are stress signals, and that he shouldn’t get back into the space of an animal he just threatened. Especially because he tries to pet her on the face, which is a super intimate thing most animals only allow with people they really trust. (RE: what I said earlier, he’s not paying attention to her body language or he doesn’t recognize what it means).
3:43 He removes his hand and stands up looming over the dog, moving closer to her as she lifts her lips to show she feels unsafe. At this point, she’s still in a down: a very vulnerable position. She can’t move away from him easily because she’s laying on her legs, which makes it much harder for her to protect herself by any other method than using her teeth, and she knows this.
3:44 She launches up from the down (which is the only direction she can easily move without being massively vulnerable to him) and latches onto the hand he just removed from her face. This is totally reasonable because he’s made it clear he’s not going to listen to her or back off even when she backs off and does everything she can to diffuse the situation he’s forcing her into. (This is a dog who was trying really fucking hard to not bite him, but he pushed her too far).
It’s hard to say why she didn’t let go, but my guess is that she was just pushed too far at this point – or that she figured the hand was what was dangerous since he kept touching/hitting her with it, and that biting it was the only way to remove that threat.
3:47 He then kicks her multiple times in the chest trying to get her to let go. Granted, it’s important to get your hand back in this situation, but there are a lot of other options that don’t involve kicking the dog. I know it’s a hard call but I still don’t approve because it never should have gotten to this fucking point.
3:49 CM pries her off of his hand and immediately stands up over Holly. She immediately goes into a defensive crouch and shows a defensive grimace again. Notice she’s still cornered between him and the camera man – she can’t escape the threat they’re posing easily, without giving one of them her back.
3:52 CM still won’t fucking let up. He stands up fully and walks into her space again as she continues to display that she’ll defend herself again if she needs to.
3:58 He gets right up in her space, and being cornered, she goes back to lip licking and appeasement signals but you can see how stressed she is by how stiff her lips are and how flat back her ears are. Her eyes are tight and all the muscles in her body are stiff.
“I didn’t see that coming.”
This is the point where every professional animal person who made it through the video yells, throws something at the computer, and probably gets a beer because you idiot.I’m not exaggerating when I say that watching this video makes every dog professional I know – trainers, researchers, hobbyists – viscerally and physically ill. Everything CM did in this video is egregious and unprofessional and incredibly dangerous and stupid.
See, here’s the thing. A professional who really wanted to treat resource guarding (rather than bully the dog) wouldn’t even set a scenario up where the dog had to guard food. That literally sets the dog up for failure. And as soon as any signs of guarding started, the person would back the fuck off and reassess the situation. When you’re working on resource guarding protocols, if the dog starts guarding, you’re pushing too hard and too fast and need to take smaller baby steps with your protocol. It’s not a one-time fix, either. Resource guarding protocols take months and months of slow work to implement. There’s no magic eraser for the fear in a dog’s mind of people threatening it while it eats or taking it’s food – you have to earn that trust, tiny step by tiny step. And even then it only applies to one person at first, and you have to teach the dog to generalize that trust to lots of people, which may never be successful. Using CM’s method on a dog might traumatize it into never being able to unlearn guarding because it’s not just getting pushed out of it’s comfort zone, it’s getting randomly attacked no matter what it does to try to end the situation.
Here’s an interesting fact about Holly: We only know what CM has said about her. Nobody really knows what happened to her after she left the Dog Psychology center except for some rumors about how she was ‘given up for the safety of the kid’. That’s because everyone on his show is forced to sign strict non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from ever speaking publicly about their experience working with him or the behavior of their dogs after filming ends.
I’m not going to get into how you should develop protocols for working with a resource-guarding dog here because I don’t want to risk someone trying to use it without knowing what they’re doing. Resource guarding, while not aggression, is still serious and can be dangerous if someone who doesn’t know enough to stay safe tries to handle in on their own. If you have a dog that is a resource-guarder, you must contact a trainer for help working with your dog. Do not attempt to do behavior modification yourself. (I suggest you look for a trainer who is a member of the IAABC, but whomever you pick must use only positive reinforcement and must have experience with reactive dogs and dogs that guard. If you feel anything is off or they ask you to use punishment or do antyhing you find uncomfortable, walk away). However, if you want to know the theory behind it, look up counter-conditioning protocols for fearful and reactive dogs – it’s built from the same principles.
My last feelings on this?
There is an entire website – beyondcesarmillan.com – dedicated to compiling testimonials from animal professionals in varied fields against CM’s methods and theories. Everyone from veterinary behaviorists to animal trainers to wolf and dog researchers around the world told Nat Geo they should never have aired his show in the first place because it was so wrong and so dangerous.
No TV Show on air about dog training should need a disclaimer that says ‘don’t try this at home, it’s too dangerous’.
aviculture is the reason the sexual maturity of most macaws is bumped back as severely as it is. aviculture is the reason a 36″ x 48″ x 60″ cage is considered the “minimum” rather than “outright inhumane.” aviculture is the reason “get a baby for your first bird!” is such a popular statement, and it’s the reason adoption is considered “risky” or otherwise not worth it. aviculture is the reason that the opportunity to exercise through flight is seen as “optional” rather than a basic need every capable parrot should have. aviculture encourages and profits off of neglect if not gross abuse on a mass scale and it doesn’t matter if the breeder in question is industrial for pet store supply or a just a full time private breeder. they all support the same bad practises because those bad practises make an impossible to keep bird seem “easier” and that means they get more customers.
it is not possible to ethically, morally, etc. make a full-time living by breeding animals who when left to their own devices are very slow breeders even at their most “”successful.”” that’s why the only domesticated parrot, the english budgerigar, has a markedly shorter lifespan than its wild counterpart. similarly it does not matter how happy or well cared for that baby parrot is when behind her is the common and industry-accepted practises of splitting mated pairs, depriving pairs of enrichment so they have nothing better to do but mate (or get extremely aggressive with each other and/or kill one another, as is common with cacatuids for example), and creating tasty new hybrids regardless of the health risks those hybrids run (e.g. military crosses and their markedly smaller livers).
even the best breeder will cut many corners to make a profit and even the hypothetical not-interested-in-profit breeder is still actively and shamelessly flooding the already-inundated market with more parrots than there are homes to care for them. that’s why bird shelters are always overstocked and understaffed.
parrots, objectively, do poorly as common pets. you have to build your life around them to manage them well and that is in no way shape or form an exaggeration. ones that are properly cared for are in the extreme minority because people will buy these birds for the novelty of it and they’re goaded on by misinformation that’s leagues more popular than the actual standards by which they should be cared for. i don’t see it as fair to the birds themselves to point at a well kept cockatoo and say “don’t generalise! this is the face of parrotkeeping!” when the real face of it is a ratty, shaky, half-plucked bird who is no more than nine and yet doomed to live the rest of her 50+ years in the shelter she was dropped off to.
This is his Jokers first day on the job, and he’s being such a good boy.
Donald W. Cook is a Los Angeles attorney with decades of experience bringing lawsuits over police dog bites — and mostly losing. He blames what he calls “The Rin Tin Tin Effect” — juries think of police dogs as noble, and have trouble visualizing how violent they can be during an arrest.
“[Police] use terms like ‘apprehend’ and ‘restrain,’ to try to portray it as a very antiseptic event,” Cook says. “But you look at the video and the dog is chewing away on his leg and mutilating him.”
Cook says the proliferation of smart phones and body cameras is capturing a reality that used to be lost on juries. “If it’s a good video,” he says, “it makes a case much easier to prevail on.”
The new generation of videos is capturing scenes of K9 arrests that are bloodier and more violent than imagined by the public. An NPR examination of police videos shows some officers using biting dogs against people who show minimal threat to officers, and a degree of violence that would be unacceptable if inflicted directly by the officers.
…
In fact, in many videos, the release of a dog appears to escalate the violence of an arrest.
“You just look at the dog as the source of pain and you do everything you can to address that pain,” says Seth Stoughton. He’s a former police officer, now an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. “Those shouted commands — you’ll deal with that later, when the pain stops.”
And yet suspects who kick and try to shake the dog off are often accused of resisting arrest.
i don’t care what this dog in particular is being trained to do. furthering the idea that police dogs are somehow cute or good directly contributes to injustice and the perceived acceptability of police violence
My aunt rescues and rehabilitates german shepherds, and the vast majority are failed police dogs. The rehab process for these dogs is intense. They are trained to be hyper vigilant and to resort to violence. They are often is worse condition than formerly abused animals.
I spent a summer training one of these balls of anxiety. She was too fast and strong for my aunt to train her, so I did it. The biggest hurdle was getting her out of the mindset that biting someone gets her a treat. I had to let her bite my arm, forcible break the hold, and kennel her all without giving her a response because these dogs are trained to equate someone screaming at them as Go Time.
By letting her attack me and showing her that I was stronger than her and then not allowing her to play with the other dogs was what finally got her to stop attacking whenever she heard a loud noise or was surprised or just felt like it.
She still had to be homed in a gun-free, pet-free, child-free home because of the sheer anxiety she was bred for. These dogs are not cute, they are horribly mistreated.
My mom did the exact opposite of what the person above is talking about, she was involved in training the dogs not to restrain themselves when attacking. She was 18 – 21 and they had her wear this thick glove and then provoke the dogs onto biting her arm. She said they didn’t naturally want to be very aggressive towards a 100 pound, 5’3" girl, which is the size my mother was at the time. She has scars on her arm from getting time to bite so hard it broke the protective gloves.
I remember thinking that was cool as a kid. Now I just find it horrifying that they were teaching dogs to use brutal force against…. children. My mother may have been a young adult at the time but most people are 100 pounds and 5’3" as teenagers, not adults
What are short, skinny teens even doing that warrants the use of dogs? Can a grown man with a gun really not subdue someone that size on their own??
It’s animal abuse used to further police brutality
✔ they have far stronger senses than you and the world is super stimulating
They are NOT being:
❌ stubborn
❌ malicious
❌ “dominating”
Things you can do to enforce leash etiquette:
✔ utilise treats and life rewards
✔ tire your dog out prior to their walk by playing tug, fetch, etc.
✔ utilise mini-commands (sit at road, “this way”, etc)
✔ freeze or U-turn when your dog pulls
Rather than:
❌ choke chains/prong collars
❌ yelling/shouting
❌ yanking the leash
❌ “dragging” the dog (collar grabs, pushing down their butt to sit, pinning them between your legs, etc.)
We all want good leash etiquette, but there is no good reason to actively punish your dog for being excited about an exciting environment. Your own impatience and frustration (with a dog who is still learning) is not an excuse.
Choke chains are fine when used appropriately. They are meant to simulate when an alpha nips at the neck to keep their packmates in line. A quick, short jerk of the chain on a dog trained to understand the meaning is perfectly fine and doesn’t hurt the animal at all.
When using a choke chain, it should not be ACTUALLY choking the animal. It should lay slack around the neck until a small tug is necessary to get the animal in line.
A pronged chain is ONLY appropriate on an animal that has extremely thick fur or skin that a choke chain is ineffective on due to being unable to penetrate the fur for the animal to receive the appropriate message.
For more information please talk to your vet or a PROFESSIONAL dog trainer who has the appropriate certification. The key to leash training is teaching the dog that it’s more fun to be next to you instead of pulling out front.
Not all training methods work for every animal, just as humans all learn differently. Not all dogs respond to treats, some respond better to toys or affection. If you are not experienced in training, look for a breed that is more beginner friendly. Some breeds tend to be more stubborn or independent thinking, such as huskies and corgis.
I’d like to address a few thing in this comment:
The first is the “alpha” comment. The alpha dominance system has been repeatedly, scientifically, quantifiably debunked. Dominance DOES exist in isolated resource protection scenarios but not as a rigid social hierarchy. The original captive-wolf study has been picked to pieces, the author of The Wolf (which popularised the theory) has been trying to get his own book off the shelves, and wolf/dog social systems are far better understood by modern behavioural science these days. So we can immediately dismiss this comment.
Choke chains are a positive punishment training method. We apply something the dog dislikes in response to an undesirable behaviour.
I will never say to you or my clients that choke chains don’t work; they do, when used correctly. Hell, I used one for years. They result in a dog who walks beside you because they fear the repercussions, not because they actively choose to. They also offer instant gratification for a frustrated owner.
But the physiological and behavioural risks are tremendous. Physiologically, we can deal with anything from minor sprains, to esophogeal and tracheal damage, to neurological issues. Because you are applying force and pressure to the neck, of all places.
But the behavioural implications are potentially worse. Aside from the fact that choke chain usage almost always results in reliance (i.e. the dog won’t walk nicely without it), let’s deal with the common scenario of a dog who walks on a choke chain, spots another dog, and pulls to say hello. The choke chain corrects the behaviour. The dog quickly learns that other dogs = pain/discomfort, which increases reactivity to other dogs.
Any responsible trainer will tell you that check chains were, at one point, understood to be the default training method for leash etiquette. But the overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary means that we must move on.
Yes, dogs learn in different ways but I have never in my life met a dog that does not respond to positive reinforcement training. Nor a chicken, horse, lorikeet, cockatoo, macaw, cat, betta fish, possum – or any other animal I’ve ever trained. I’d personally much rather have a dog who works for me because they want to than because they’re afraid of the consequences.
Perhaps that’s better illustrated in the fact that in all your “different learning methods” examples you described positive reinforcement rewards.
I’d like to wrap up this rebuttal with one of your own quotes:
“The key to leash training is teaching the dog that it’s more fun to be next to you instead of pulling out front.”
Oh, and as for this point:
“For more information please talk to … a PROFESSIONAL dog trainer”
Mate, I am one.
You can train bugs with positive reinforcement and enough patience. Bugs.
When the uber driver looks sketchy as fuck but the entire squad too wasted to care
I’m sorry, but this is NOT cute. This is from a photographer who puts reptiles and insects in freezers until they’re too cold to move, then poses them with fishing line. An unfortunately very common practice that’s behind a lot of “cute” reptile and insect photos.
(first tiger jumps in) *laughing* Vanya, what is this? Van’ … Van’, get out of the boot, Van’. (second tiger approaches) Mishka … let’s go. Mish, let’s go. Mishka! Mish, let’s go. Come on, sit. Sit. (third tiger comes in) Bonya, you too are here! Ok let’s go guys. Let’s go! *starts singing* x
Just Russian Things
Big cat stuff can often be sketchy even if the content looks cute, so I clicked on the source for the video and this guy apparently runs a sanctuary for rescue tigers and other big cats near Moscow. His YouTube bio is in Russian, but here’s what it says according to Google Translate:
So you can feel happy knowing that these big dumb cats are loved and being looked after.
Yeah, you’re gonna need to do a little more research than that.
Mikhail Zaretsky is (or was, I can’t find a more recent english language source) the tiger trainer for the Nikulin Circus (source). He currently posts videos on youtube about taking his tigers to boarding schools for kids to pet and climb on (source), and how his tigers and lions live together happily (source). Over on instagram, he likes to post videos of himself handling leashed tigers (source) and sometimes riding them (source). (He also tags all of his instagram posts with #bengaltiger, but that’s confusing rather than problematic.)
I’ve been over this before: There is no way to safely, healthily keep an adult tiger full contact in a human residence. You either declaw, defang, or drug the tiger (which he’s been accused of doing), or the human is going to end up dead.
And if he is planning a reserve, he should know better than to transport tigers in an SUV. Or to keep them on leash. Or to let them interact with schoolkids. Or to let them paw at his face. Or to cohabilitate different species. Or to overfeed his tigers–when I first saw this video, I thought they were from the fur trade, that’s how fat they are.
So yeah, keeping big cats in close contact with humans is still a really bad idea.
Edit: This site (source) repeats that he’s running a sanctuary, but I can’t tell if they have a second source outside of his social media, and they bring up that literally no one has vetted this. Big cat “sanctuaries” are notoriously sketchy and prone to existing just because the owner wants to keep big cat pets. Which seems to be what’s happening here.
I watched WITHOUT sound at first and can I just say, big mistake.
Guys, this is really horrible? It’s not a water bird having fun; it’s an owl being mistreated. Owls aren’t meant to get wet because their feathers don’t have the same kind of waterproof coating as other birds. They don’t readily dry and if they so much as fly in the rain they can struggle to keep warm, go mouldy and die. This animal can’t stop itself from spinning or resist in any way because it’s legs are restrained and its feathers are waterlogged. Owls are meant to be wild animals and they shouldn’t be treated like this or kept as pets.
Owls can die very easily of the cold after being dunked in water, and it’s most likely the poor thing got sick after this vile video was shot. When I say I hate how internet culture treats animals, I specifically mean examples like this!
Where shock collars are freely available there seems to be this persistent belief that if you can just be tough/fierce/scary/strong/alpha enough then the animal will ‘submit’ and have perfect behavior. This isn’t the case, and it’s super confusing for an animal to be surrounded by strong ‘DONT DO THAT’ messages without any positive ‘Do This’ messages, it can only guess at what you want.
Sometimes they stop trying and they exhibit learned helplessness, where they essentially do nothing because they don’t understand how to void the punishment. In a human this might look like depression, but people might mistake this behavior as being ‘a good/obedient dog’ instead. This is because the animal stopped showing the behaviour the human didn’t like, but it is not a good state for the dog to be in.
Some assholes have been putting nails in cheese and treats in dog parks in Chicago and Massachusetts. Also adding antifreeze to water bowls.
Please watch out for your dogs. And if you find out the address of someone doing this, give me the address and tell no one. I will disembowel them.
Antifreeze is fucking deadly as shit. Whilst my mom worked in the vets office the neighbor of a cat owner had become sick of his neighbors tom spraying by his house so he left antifreeze out for the cat. Animals are weirdly attracted to the smell and will drink it.
The cat was given to the vets and for 2 days it’s insides were slowly dissolved by the acids and it bled from his nose, mouth and even eyes.
On the second day, the vet not being able to help and refusing to let the cat suffer any longer put the cat down. The neighbor who did not deny his crimes didn’t even offer to pay the woman’s vet bill.
SO THE BIGGEST FUCKING SIGNAL BOOST TO THIS POST.
Fuck who ever is doing this. They can fucking burn.
my friend had a cat and it drank antifreeze that was puddled in the driveway and one day they were knitting and it just vomited up all of its internal organs and fell over dead on her lap.
The perpetrators of all of this will burn in Hell.
A neighbor of mine threw a ball of hamburger full of rat poison pellets over our fence for my son’s dog. He survived, barely, but has had nerve damage ever since.
Okay, listen up, if your pet drinks antifreeze, do you know what the cure is? Alcohol. That’s right. To save your furry little friend you have to get them drunk out of their faces. Antifreeze is an inhibitor and stops your enzymes from working, but luckily alcohol stops that from happening. I learned this from my A Level Biology lessons, but here’s a source anyway http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/2617997.stm
Shit this is important SIGNAL BOOST THIS THANK YOU ALICE
BOOST. FUCKING BOOST.
They did this recently in a town near me. They put nails in hot dogs and threw them into backyards as well as some rat poison. A lot of the neighbor dogs died…
@drferox please I would like to know if this is true and safe to do.
No.
No.
No.
Do not give your pets alcohol if you suspect they have had antifreeze.
Take them to a vet clinic for assessment ASAP. Alcohol is only helpful if given very shortly after ingestion, and will actually make the toxicity worse if given too late.
Alright. that’s it. I cannot fucking take it it anymore. Excuse my errors but I am PISSED.
I’ve seen this .gif on my dash several times, often accompanied by “omg so funny/i can’t stop laughing/turnt up/he’s having fun/etc. “ I’m sure a lot of people don’t realize that they are literally laughing at an extreme case of animal abuse. Birds have a very, very sensitive and delicate respiratory system. It’s so sensitive, in fact, that the smoke from simply cooking food around them can kill them. Ever heard of the canary in a coal mine? This was practiced because birds react much more quickly to toxins in the air, and it would kill the canary before the toxins harmed the more resistant humans, alerting them to danger. Now, many mammals are sensitive to smoke. It’s true that you should never smoke around any pets, however, it will not immediately endanger a cat or dog from a single instance of exposure like it can a bird. That’s right, all it takes is ONE instance to give a bird lung cancer, infections, or possibly instant death.
THIS .GIF IS NOT FUNNY, IT IS AN IMAGE OF EXTREME IGNORANCE AND CRUELTY. Would you laugh at a puppy being fed a pound of chocolate, or a kitten drinking bleach? I don’t think so.
“Oh but the bird obviously likes it!”, yeah, I’m sure the puppy would be happily wagging away as it ate the chocolate, too. That’s because it feels good, tastes good, and because they trust their owners. Birds can have the intelligence equivalent to a four year old human child, so they learn to depend on and trust their owners. Lots of things taste and feel good that can kill humans, too!! You would eat a mushroom if it tasted good and you weren’t aware that is was deadly! Especially if your parents or friends handed it to you with an assurance of safety.
An animal can’t decide or vocalize it’s desire to use drugs, so why force it upon them?
Here is a small selection of notes I’ve seen on this post, as well as asks I’ve received. Notice the cries of “social justice warrior!“ (what?? how is that social justice? I don’t know.) Also, every. Single. Response. I’ve gotten to my polite, reasonable asks has been negative and accusatory.
(go through the notes. and if you don’t believe me, do a quick google search on the effects of smoke on birds. do it)
ANIMAL ABUSE IS UNFORGIVABLE. IF YOU WILLINGLY ENCOURAGE, TURN A BLIND EYE TO, LAUGH AT, OR PERPETRATE ANIMAL ABUSE- YOU ARE A PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT AND DESERVE NO SYMPATHY OR RESPECT. YOU ARE LITERAL TRASH.
**(it’s hard to tell if that is shisha or weed being smoked from the hookah, regardless, both are strong enough to intoxicate a small animal ,and both are packed full of toxins.)
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