And to gain even more insight into a canine state of mind, you need to understand what I call Natural Dog Laws. If you are going to control your dogs and be their Pack Leader, you must understand who they are and what they need as dogs in their natural state.
So what are the Natural Dog Laws? At their core, they are the end results of thousands of years of evolution on wild dogs. They are fundamental truths that must be understood for dogs to live in harmony with humans. These powerful forces still continue to shape how modern dogs think and behave. These are the laws that Mother Nature has placed upon the species. If you ignore them, you will be working against Mother Nature, and she is a powerful force to fight. The five laws are:
1. Dogs are instinctual. Humans are intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.
2. Energy is everything.
3. Dogs are first animals, then species, then breed, and then name.
4. A dog’s senses form his reality.
5. Dogs are social pack animals with a leader and followers.
We will examine each of these laws and their effects on dogs’ memory, behavior, and intellect. Once you understand these five laws, you can then begin to apply the Core Principles and Pack Leader Techniques discussed in Nine Simple Principles for a Balanced Dog and Practical Techniques for Every Pack Leader. Put these things together, and you have the essential tools for achieving your goal—a calm, submissive dog that respects, trusts, and loves you.
In my experience, most humans focus only on the outcome: “Why won’t my dog do what I say?” Some focus only on techniques—the right or wrong way to walk a dog, for instance. But without understanding the Natural Dog Laws, you will have difficulty achieving any positive outcome, no matter what technique you use. Once you’ve mastered the Natural Dog Laws, you’ll be amazed at how simple it is to successfully apply the training techniques discussed later in the book.
FIRST NATURAL DOG LAW:
Dogs Are Instinctual. Humans Are Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual.
One of the most frequent problems I deal with in humans is that they think their dogs are just like them. Take a look at how much people tend to humanize our dogs. We throw them birthday parties, dress them up in costumes, push them in baby carriages, and hold conversations with them as if they were our confidants.
People (at least some of them) enjoy these things. So why wouldn’t their dogs? What many people don’t realize is that these kinds of activities aren’t fulfilling for the dog. They’re fulfilling for the people. They are using the dogs for their own emotional yearnings and needs.
Another common mistake that many people make is ascribing human emotions to their dogs. How often have you heard a dog owner say, “Poor pooch, he’s sad because …” and then he constructs an elaborate story for explaining the dog’s discomfort? “He’s sad because I yelled at him,” or “He’s sad because someone mistreated him.” Typically, we use human-based emotional explanations for a dog’s outward sadness or depression. Although dogs do possess emotions, the emotions are not as complex as a human’s. Dogs do, however, sense the emotions coming from humans. They feel our emotions as energy, and energy to dogs is either positive or negative. Dogs read negative energy as weakness and then react accordingly.
Because we’re constantly explaining dog problems in human terms, our relationships with our dogs suffer. What we fail to see time and again is that the solution we would use for a human is totally wrong for solving a dog’s issues. For example, when a human sees a scared or nervous dog, he or she will first offer comfort and then try to console the frightened animal. This action can have the opposite result of reassuring the dog and making him feel more secure. The comfort and affection can actually reinforce the dog’s negative behavior because it rewards it. The problem can get worse because unstable behavior has been reinforced.
Of course, this would never, ever happen in the animal world. In the animal world, an unstable pack member would be ignored by the rest of the pack. If the instability persisted or got to the point where it endangered the pack, the animal would be rejected. When a dog sees unstable energy, his instincts are almost the polar opposite of a human’s first impulse.
To understand our dogs, we must always remember they are instinctual creatures. They don’t think like we think, and their emotions are not like ours.
The following are some human behaviors that indicate when you are humanizing your dogs and ignoring their instincts.
CESAR’S 5 MOST COMMON WAYS PEOPLE HUMANIZE DOGS
Humanizing dogs can disrupt your dog’s balance and lead to behavior issues over time. People humanize dogs in a lot of ways, but these bad habits are the most common:
1. Allowing a dog to act like a human (that is, eating at the dinner table, sleeping in a human bed)
2. Attributing human feelings and emotions to a dog’s actions, body language, or facial expressions
3. Dressing dogs up in costumes that serve no protective or identification purposes
4. Expecting dogs to understand and interpret human language
5. Applying human solutions to dog problems (that is, comforting an anxious dog, or greeting an overexcited dog with enthusiasm)
SECOND NATURAL DOG LAW:
Energy Is Everything.
There has been a lot of scientific study of the effects of genetics, breeding, and evolution on dog behavior. However, there isn’t enough recognition or understanding of how human energy directly affects a dog’s behavior. So what exactly is energy? Energy is what I call beingness; it is who and what you are in every moment. Dogs use constant energy to communicate. Dogs don’t recognize each other by name, but by the energy they project and the activities they share. They know humans in the same way.
As humans, we too are communicating with energy—whether or not we realize it. On the surface, our primary form of communication is language. We use our words to express ourselves. But dogs don’t have words. A dog will express what’s on his mind through the position of his ears and eyes and how he holds his tail or head and how he moves. These are important clues that, if not understood by humans, can lead to misunderstanding or, even worse, behavior problems. And though humans may attempt to persuade, explain, and rationalize with words all day long, we must recognize that we are projecting energy signals, the strongest messages we send to our dogs.
Many people have trouble grasping the “energy as communication” concept. I have found that this law is the hardest for humans to understand. A few years ago, I was asked to meet with a group of dog behaviorists in London to explain how energy can influence and even predict dog behavior. After an hour of conversation, I could tell there was still confusion in the room. “What do you mean by energy? How do I recognize it?”
A dog’s mind works by watching our body postures and getting information about the environment through his senses—primarily smell, sight, and sound. Dogs are able to do amazing things with these “superpowers”—just think of Seeing Eye dogs and search and rescue dogs.
While I sat in this room full of learned and educated behaviorists, I asked them, “Doesn’t it stand to reason that if a dog can detect bombs, drugs, or find lost humans, might this same dog be able to understand and sense our moods, emotions, and energy?”
In fact, two years prior, I had visited a cancer research center in northern California, where dogs were able to diagnose lung cancer with a 77 percent accuracy rate just by catching a whiff of a patient’s breath. Surely, if a dog’s sense of smell is so acute, couldn’t she also potentially sense our states of mind? I believe that most dogs can.
When I think about these questions of energy, it brings to mind one of the most important experiences in my life, when I relied on my dog Daddy’s instincts and energy to make an important decision for our pack.
When Daddy, my first right-hand dog, was nearing the end of his life, I began looking for a new pack member that Daddy would be able to teach and integrate into my pack. Daddy had shared my life and work since he was four months old. Working with me, Daddy became used to being around dogs of all sizes. This exposure and his natural balanced energy made him a perfect candidate for rehabilitating other dogs, particularly those with dog aggression issues. Daddy’s calm, submissive energy was contagious. I trusted him implicitly. And it was vital to me that I seek out another dog to carry on his legacy.
My friend had a pit bull who had just had a litter of puppies, and Daddy and I went to meet them. I watched carefully how the puppies interacted with their mother and with each other.
One puppy in particular caught my eye. It was obvious he was the pick of the litter—strong, handsome, and with beautiful markings. I brought my pick over to Daddy and, to my surprise, Daddy growled at him. I then selected another puppy that I liked. He was all white and had a wide head, but Daddy totally ignored him.
Then I saw another puppy. He was the closest to his mother and had a gorgeous, solid blue coat. I picked him up and set him down near Daddy. Daddy approached the pup, and the two dogs went nose to nose. Then Daddy wagged his tail, turned around, and—to my utter surprise—the puppy followed Daddy to the car and never looked back at his mother. That was the pup who became Junior. Daddy and Junior knew they were right for each other. It was pure instincts and energy.
In the months and years to follow, Daddy trained Junior. (The only thing I did was potty-train Junior, a chore Daddy chose not to participate in.)
As it turned out, Daddy knew what was best for me. Junior has the perfect energy for the pack, and he was ideally suited for his mission of helping me rehabilitate dogs. I trusted Daddy and I relied on his instincts to pick his successor. If you want to relate to dogs, you must live in their world. It’s an instinctual world—not an intellectual or spiritual world. You enter this world by trusting your instincts.
The scientific community is just now starting to examine the effects of energy on behavior. Of course, most of what I know about dogs is based on a lifetime of working with them. So, it’s always rewarding for me when academics publish a new scientific study on dog behavior in which the studies confirm, or at least support, the beliefs and observations I’ve developed over a lifetime.
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| Daddy showed Junior the importance of a good nap. |
In February 2012, Current Biology published results from a research study conducted at the Cognitive Development Center of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, which indicates that dogs can respond to eye contact and nonverbal cues from humans in a similar manner as two-year-old human children. In the study, dogs were able to read nonverbal cues, especially when the humans used eye contact. Nicholas Dodman, the director of the Animal Behavior Clinic at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in North Grafton, Massachusetts, summarized some of the research by saying, “Dogs are looking for an expression of what the person is thinking.”
This study confirms what I have always believed, that dogs are more attuned to our energy and nonverbal behaviors than we might think. Dogs can read energy better than they can understand the tone and inflection in our voice. They understand our body language more than our human language.
THIRD NATURAL DOG LAW:
Dogs Are First Animal, Then Species, Then Breed, and Then Name.
Now that we have an understanding of energy, we can begin to put all the pieces together for a complete picture of the dog. But not all pieces are equal—we must put them in their proper order.
Dogs are first animal, then species, then breed, and finally they have a name. Humans often make the mistake of thinking of this backward, starting with their dog’s name and failing to identify them, at their core, as an animal.
HOW BEHAVIOR IS UNDERSTOOD AND EXPLAINED
In dog psychology, a dog is an animal first and foremost. It is not a human. When we relate to our dogs, especially when trying to correct an unwanted behavior, it’s important to think of them first as an animal (mammal), then as a species (dog, or Canis lupus familiaris), then as a unique breed (German shepherd, husky, and so on) with certain characteristics or skills, and last and least important, as their name (personality). To have a happy, balanced dog is to respect these qualities about them—in this order.
Let’s take each of these words and examine why they work in the order I’ve placed them.
When I think of animal, I think nature, the wilderness, and freedom. Animals live in the present, and life is simple. They live purely in the moment and know only their immediate needs. Animals are instinctual. They are not intellectual or spiritual. Their basic needs are shelter, food, water, and mating. So, in thinking about your dog, think about her the way a dog does. First, basic needs are foremost. Satisfying these needs is the strongest motivational factor in a dog’s life.
Next is species. Dogs were descended from wolves. This species is concerned with pack orientation, communicating and experiencing the world through senses, and understanding pack positioning and leadership. All dogs need to play a role in a pack. They need a job. They can be protectors, hunters, or searchers. Once you understand their instinctual needs as a species, you might begin to understand dogs’ frustration when they only get to walk a couple of blocks around their neighborhood a couple of times a week. Their frustration is innate, and they develop behavioral issues to compensate.
Third is breed. After humans domesticated dogs, they began to breed them to favor specific genetic traits and abilities. Breeds are mostly a human creation. In my formula, breed represents the characteristics that we have genetically altered or enhanced so that certain dogs perform certain tasks better than others. For instance, bloodhounds are incredible scent trackers; greyhounds are amazing sprinters; border collies are very intelligent; and German shepherds are good at guarding.
Today, these are almost all human-desired tasks, like herding, searching, and stalking. These different traits can affect a dog’s psychology and energy. Within breeds, there are different levels of energy—high-, medium-, and low-energy dogs that take to their breed-specific tasks with different levels of intensity.
There are definite differences in the intelligence and traits of various breeds, and there is also a lot of individual variation among dogs of the same breed. Although we are often quick to generalize among breeds, we must remember that breed alone doesn’t do a good job of explaining how dogs behave or how “trainable” they are, which is why it appears third on this list.
Finally, your dog has a name. Your dog does not know or need to know the difference of whether you call him or her Sam, Fiona, or Fido. A name is a human creation that we condition our dog to learn. We use names to project personality on the dogs, but what “personality” is to a human doesn’t exist in dog psychology. It doesn’t exist in either the animal, species, or breed categories. Naming your Doberman pinscher “Rambo” will not make him aggressive, just as calling a Yorkshire terrier “Baby” won’t mean that she will be docile and happy to lie down all day like an infant.
Recognizing these four categories—in this order—and understanding their influences on behavior are a central part of having a happy, balanced dog.
FOURTH NATURAL DOG LAW:
A Dog’s Senses Form His Reality.
In The Canine State of Mind, we covered the fundamentals of how a dog’s brain and his inborn instincts shape his unique view of the world. We learned that a dog senses the world very differently than a human does, so the world a dog experiences is much different than what we experience. To understand a dog’s mind, we have to enter a different instinctual world, as it is formed by his senses.
Humans experience the world primarily through sight; they see a colorful, vibrant world. But dogs sense the world primarily through smell, followed by sight in shades of gray—like watching black-and-white TV. Because the sensory experiences of humans and canines are so distinct from each other, how could a dog and human ever experience the same world? What we see, we experience. What a dog smells, he experiences. Humans see each other first and begin to form opinions and likes based on what they see. Dogs smell a human, usually from distances greater than 50 yards away, and begin to develop an understanding of who that person is based on smell.
HIERARCHY OF SENSORY INPUTS TO THE BRAIN
These fundamental differences between the senses of a dog and a human help to explain one of the most irrational behaviors I’ve seen humans do when they see a dog for the first time. They immediately run up to a new dog and lean down to try to pet her. Humans do this because touch is their second strongest sense. But I guarantee you, if dogs could talk, they would be saying, “Human, get out of my face, I don’t know you yet.”
I was once asked to comment on a story about a Denver news anchor named Kyle Dyer that aired on the Today show. Kyle, a dog lover, was covering a story about a dramatic rescue by firemen of an Argentine mastiff who had fallen into an icy lake. During the news segment, Kyle had been petting and stroking the dog. As the interview ended, she leaned in close to the dog’s face to say goodbye. Unfortunately, the dog bit her while she was still on the air. After several surgeries to repair the damage to her lip and nose, Kyle returned to her job with a different sense of how to interact with an unfamiliar dog. She admitted on the Today show that it was likely she made a mistake: “Maybe I was too close; maybe he was unsettled.”
This mistake is repeated thousands of times a day because humans love to touch, but I have a simple, more respectful technique for meeting a dog for the first time. The “No Touch, No Talk, No Eye Contact” approach gives dogs a chance to smell you and get to know you first before they allow you to enter their personal space.
When using the “No Touch, No Talk, No Eye Contact” approach, first remember to keep your energy calm and assertive. Focus on the people around you and ignore the dog as she sniffs at your feet and legs. Keep your hands to yourself, and ignore the dog. Don’t look at the dog and don’t talk to her. Let her get to know you first. When she has the information she’s looking for, she will either walk away from you or enter into a calm, submissive state and move around to face you.
Before you turn your attention to the dog, be sure to ask the dog’s owner for permission to engage with the dog. At this point, look at the dog and speak to her. If she approaches, offer your closed fist, fingers up, for a sniff. If she is showing no signs of anxiety or aggression, then you can pet her, although it’s always a good idea to first touch a strange dog by scratching its chest or the side of its shoulder. Some dogs can perceive a touch from above on the head or neck as aggression. As you are getting to know each other, the safest touch is the smartest.
“No Touch, No Talk, No Eye Contact” can be used in a lot of situations. For instance, it’s effective for dealing with your own dogs when they are overexcited or anxious. If your dog starts to jump or spin excitedly when you return home, then “No Touch, No Talk, No Eye Contact” will teach him that you will not reward such excited behavior with your attention. If you are consistent and do not acknowledge your dog until he has reached a calm, submissive state, then you can minimize or eliminate the hyperactive greeting upon your return.
It is also important to teach visitors to your home to follow the “No Touch, No Talk, No Eye Contact” approach. It’s very common for people to say that they don’t mind when their friends’ dogs jump up on them, but in your house, you must be consistent with the rules. Your dog should not be allowed to jump up on you or your family members, so he must not be allowed to jump up on other humans. It can also give you peace of mind by avoiding situations that might escalate because someone does not know how to approach a dog properly.
FIFTH NATURAL DOG LAW:
Dogs Are Social Pack Animals With a Leader and Followers.
Understanding how dogs have evolved over thousands of years to become our lifelong companions is a big part of understanding how dogs behave. Mother Nature selected the dog to be the one species that would be culled from the wild and chosen to become man’s best friend. Dogs did this by figuring out ways to help humans. From helping us to hunt, herd, and protect to becoming symbols of wealth, status, and nobility, dogs became—and remained—humans’ favorite animal.
Evidence of fossil remains and genetic study support the belief that modern dogs are descended from a small subspecies of wolves that lived in the Near East approximately 20,000 years ago. The domestic dog has 78 chromosomes, the same number as the wolf. Dogs were probably first domesticated from several different breeds of wolf. Over the ages, these animals were bred with different types of wild wolves and wild dog hybrids, which changed their gene pool and led to the great genetic variations of today’s dogs.
The modern-day dog doesn’t look the least bit like his ancestral wolf. Human breeding has meant that, through evolution, dogs have smaller teeth and shorter jaws than wolves, resulting in a decreased ability to catch and kill prey. But dogs did inherit the social organization evident in wolf packs.
Wolf packs work as a group, with all individuals in the pack working toward the same goal. For the group to function at its best, pack society has always allowed different personalities to develop. Everyone has a part to play: One wolf might be the best hunter, while another might be the most strategic or best defender.
This “pack” mentality is evident not just in wolves and dogs. Humans also have some of the same social structures evidenced in packs, including role definition for various “pack” members and cooperative problem solving. It’s important that you play the role of Pack Leader in your home and project calm, assertive energy. If the Pack Leader role is absent, it will only be a matter of time before your dog or something else assumes that role.
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| Two distant cousins: A gray wolf and a Maltese pose for a “family” portrait. |
One afternoon, I was teaching a class in pack leadership to a group of 40 students at the DPC when one woman with a Jack Russell terrier caught my attention. Her dog was out of control and wanted to chase everything that moved in the classroom. The poor woman was so focused on maintaining control of her dog that she was missing the class instruction. I called her and her dog up to the front of the room. I then used a turtle we had at the center to illustrate my lesson in pack behavior. The dog tried to attack the turtle. The Jack Russell would not relent; time and again, he lunged after the poor slow-moving turtle who just wanted to get as far away as possible from this high-strung, aggressive dog. I then tied the dog’s leash around the turtle, and the turtle began to pull the dog forward. An amazing thing began to happen. The dog started to follow the turtle, and the turtle’s slow, deliberate energy seemed to transfer over to the dog, who seemed calmer and less agitated. The lesson for the class was that, in the absence of a strong Pack Leader, dogs will either become the pack leader themselves or allow other animals or people to become their leader for them.
Packs have roles, and they have an order. One of the most common causes of canine instability occurs when a human inadvertently changes the natural order of the pack. A person may take a low-energy, happy-go-lucky dog that is content being in the back of the pack and try to make him a pack leader or a guard dog, or give him some other role for which the dog is unsuited. How often have you heard the complaint that “A stranger could walk over my dog before he took notice or barked”? What these people fail to recognize is that their dog’s role is not to be the protector, and thus they unfairly push against instinct and natural order. The important takeaway is to know your dog and know his position in the pack.
All of these Natural Dog Laws form the very foundation of your life with a happy dog. Be mindful of instincts and energy. Understand your dog’s unique place in the world. Honor his senses. And respect your dog’s need for a pack. By recognizing and embracing these five simple laws, you will put yourself in the right frame of mind to see your dog for the amazing creature that he is. Now that you can recognize that, it’s time to find balance.
Cesar Millan
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