“Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

Simple Tips for Living Happily with Your Dog

Human beings and dogs have coexisted interdependently for thousands of years. In developing countries and in primitive societies, dogs are not always treated with the degree of love and kindness we give them in the United States. However, dogs in those places don’t seem to have all the issues and neuroses that they have here, either. How can we share our love with our dogs without giving them “issues”? How can we be strong pack leaders without losing the compassion and humanity that made us want to bond with dogs in the first place?

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Cesar’s Fulfillment Formula for a Balanced and Healthy Dog

This book isn’t a “how-to” manual. As I mentioned in the introduction, I’m not here to teach you how to get your dog to recognize voice commands or hand signals; I’m not here to teach you how to properly make your dog “heel” or do tricks. There are plenty of guides and books related to dog training, and many qualified specialists out there who can do that. But although my primary mission is simply to help you understand your dog’s psychology better, I also have some practical advice to offer you. This advice applies to all dogs, no matter the breed, no matter the age or size, no matter the temperament, or whether the dog is dominant or submissive. This is my three-part formula for fulfilling your dog’s life. Be reminded—this isn’t a one-time fix for a troubled dog. Dogs aren’t appliances; you can’t simply send them out to be repaired once and that’s it. If you expect this formula to work, you have to practice it every day of your dog’s life.

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Dogs in the Red Zone

Dangerous Aggression

Imagine this—you come home to your upscale apartment building after doing a little grocery shopping. The elevator stops at your floor and the door slides open. The first, and last, things you see are two snarling 120-pound Presa Canario/mastiffs breaking away from their owner’s leash and charging straight toward you.

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Cesar’s Way: Issues

How We Screw Up Our Dogs

Almost all dogs are born naturally balanced. If they live as they do in nature—in stable packs—they spend their days in peace and fulfillment. If any dog in a pack becomes unstable, that dog will be forced to leave the pack or will be taken out by the other pack members. It sounds harsh, but it is nature’s way of ensuring that the pack survive and continue for future generations.

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Cesar's Way: Power of the Pack

There’s an aspect of your dog’s psychology that I only touched on in the Dog Psychology, but it couldn’t be a more important concept when it comes to understanding the relationship between you and the dogs in your life. This is the concept of the pack. Your dog’s pack mentality is one of the greatest natural forces involved in shaping his or her behavior.

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Dog Psychology

No Couch Required

In the If We Could Talk to the Animals, I define and discuss energy as a concept of communication between humans and animals. Whether you know it or not, you and your dog are communicating all the time through energy, with body language and scent thrown in for good measure. But how do you interpret the messages your dog is sending you? And how do you know you are projecting the right kind of energy back to her? It begins by understanding dog psychology—by going back to your dog’s inborn nature and trying to see the world through her eyes, not your own.

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If We Could Talk to the Animals

The Language of Energy

What is the communication style you use with your dog? Do you implore him to come to you, while he refuses, continuing to run down the street after a neighborhood squirrel? When your dog steals your favorite slipper, do you talk baby talk to him to try to get it back? Do you scream at the top of your lungs for your dog to get off the furniture, while he just sits there, staring at you as if you’re crazy? If any of these sounds like you, I know you’re aware that the techniques you’re using aren’t working. You understand that you can’t “reason” with a dog, but you simply don’t know any other way to communicate with him. I’m here to tell you that there’s a much

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Growing Up with Dogs

A View from the Other Side of the Border

We woke up before the sun, those summer mornings on the farm. There wasn’t any electricity, so once the sky turned dim in the evenings, there was little for us kids to do in the candlelight. While the adults talked softly into the night, my older sister and I would try to drift off to sleep in the stifling heat. We needed no alarm clocks; our wake-up call was that first sliver of backlit golden dust streaming through the unscreened open window. The first sounds to reach my ears would be the chickens—their insistent clucking in competition for the grain my grandfather was already spreading around the yard. If I lazed in bed long enough, I’d smell the coffee brewing on the stove and hear the swishing of the water in the ceramic buckets my grandmother carried up from the well. Before she came into the house, she would softly sprinkle some of the water onto the dirt road in front of the doorstep, so the cows wouldn’t suffocate us with the dust they churned up as they passed by on their morning parade to the river.

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