If you listen to his tagline, Cesar DOESN'T train dogs.
He trains PEOPLE.
The writer of the NYT article has an enormous Manhattan cockroach up his fundment--probably because he's misapplying the techniques he's tried to learn from watching the show. (I'd bet REAL MONEY on that.) He's also probably a trainer who's losing his own real money because people are being successful working with their dogs using Cesar's techniques!
Whether Cesar's "pack theory" has anything to do with how a dog thinks is entirely beside the point. I'm quite sure that wolves, coyotes, dingos, and dogs have a whole other way of thinking, and that as a human being, I'm going to have a very limited understanding of that mode.
The point is, most people DON'T GET THAT. The vast majority of people--particularly dog owners--have the mistaken idea that the way animals think is similar to the way humans think, but at a very, very primitive level. Most humans think "oh, the dog is like a 3 year old" and the proceed to act as if their 7 year old terrier terror is a human toddler, instead of a middle aged dog!
The "pack leader" is a Human thought. So is Alpha. They're absolutely arbitrary, entirely artificial concepts that allow the human mind to delineate the very clear difference between DOG as being and HUMAN as being. The issues that Cesar deals with are clearly situations where Human mind/emotional constructs are not working for Dog. An interface concept--Pack Leader--is required to bridge that gap.
By teaching Human (who IS the problem, 98% of the time!
) that there IS a difference and giving them an interface or translation concept to work with Dog, it becomes possible for Human and Dog to become partners.
We don't understand how Dog is thinking--anymore than Dog understands how we're thinking. I suspect that Dog-kind is generally convinced that Humankind is completely off our rockers, and we need to be protected from ourselves--not to mention from Wolf-kind, Bear-kind and the rest of the animal kingdom!
As far as Cesar's "Exercise, Discipline, Affection" technique, that's ALSO about human concepts. It's not all that different from the favorite technique on BPO, the NILIF plan. Affection is just one of the rewards that has to be earned.
Cesar Milan isn't the only dog trainer around, but he's certainly the most successful HUMAN trainer I've ever seen. Animal behaviorists have their place, but are very often unnecessary if you just follow a consistent EDA or NILIF plan, in my opinion.
