whispering

I’m immediately attracted when I see the show title—Dog Whisperer. He is Cesar Millan and I have my doubts. Television is smoke and mirrors. And Nicholas Sparks’s The Horse Whisperer, a horseshit romance, put me off the whispering business. Whispering reeks of New Age charlatanry, anathema in these parts. But Cesar is the real deal.

I buy What the Dog Saw, a book of essays by Malcolm Gladwell, online and on spec. I’ve not heard of Malcolm before but these collected essays of ‘the hidden extraordinary’ all appear in The New Yorker, recommended reading from Daphne. I discover that the essay that gives the book its title is about Cesar Millan.

I’ve always believed I have an instinct for dogs. My expatriate friend Robré left Oz to chase his guru to the USA. We shared a house and dogs before he decamped. Years later he stays overnight before winging it back to the States and comments that my dogs, Miss Meg and the JRT, are exactly as he expected: friendly, sensible and not imposing themselves in any way.

I am the pack leader long before I ever hear the term. I never read a book about training or living with dogs, but my ears prick up at any discussion of the relationship of dogs and humans. Watching one episode of Dog Whisperer, and now reading about him, teaches me the theory underlying my practice.

For ten years Jezza the JRT pulls my arm horizontal as he strains the leash when we walk. He ‘goes’ other dogs we encounter along the way. The remedy is so simple, and I’ve intuited it all along but haven’t done it. I halve the leash and keep him strictly at my side, even fractionally behind me. And overnight a headstrong terrier becomes a spaniel.

“Check this out,” I say to my good woman the next time we walk Jezza together.

“What have you done to him?’ she asks, astonished.

“Reasserted my role as pack leader.”

Malcolm Gladwell describes how dogs are unique in watching humans and learning how to react to the signals, coded or otherwise, we give them. Chimps don’t or can’t do this. Cesar Millan, Mexican émigré, known as a child as el Perrero, the dog boy, has the perfect body language for dogs, upright and assertive, but not aggressive. He says nothing but lets the dog see him and come to him.

Perfect canine empathy: what the dog saw.

   

Rock on.