3. Order: The Persistence of the Pack

I don’t remember when alpha theory was debunked. For most of us amateur dog enthusiasts (loving and dedicated owners who follow training tips closely but are not themselves professional trainers) it didn’t explode like some epic singular event. Instead, as new trainers with new terminology came on the scene, we found out, bit by bit, that we could stop trying to be the “pack leader” we’d been hearing about for so long. What we are only now coming to realize is that the alpha paradigm has been scientifically discredited for decades. It lived on—and continues to live in the minds of many owners—thanks not to science but entertainment. Alpha theory wasn’t introduced in the 2000s—the theory of the dominance hierarchy had been around since the 1940s, in research about wolves—but that’s when it became a staple of every dog owner’s vocabulary and conceptual scheme, thanks to The Dog Whisperer.

From 2004 to 2012, Cesar Millan’s show brought dog training before American audiences like no other program, before or since. It became National Geographic channel’s number one show during its first season and was broadcast in over eighty countries worldwide. Millan went on to write three New York Times bestsellers and produce an empire of products, including a magazine for dog owners, a live lecture series, training tools, and a line dog food sold in most major grocery stores.

Millan’s was a training grounded in dominance, but we didn’t know that. We didn’t have a name for it, because there was no alternative that was as popular. For most American viewers, it was just brilliant dog training coupled with the revolutionary claim that, with time, dedication, work, and listening to the dog’s animal needs, even the most difficult case could be rehabilitated (as opposed to the available alternative, euthanasia). Audiences were transfixed by Millan’s whispering techniques, by how quickly he could relax a dog or communicate with a dog and evoke the desired behavioral changes. And to many viewers who were already accustomed to the idea that dogs are naturally aggressive and dangerous and thus needed to be disciplined by being dominated, Millan introduced a revolutionary new perspective: that scary dog is actually just scared.

Today, we tend to forget how innovative the idea was for its time. Basic, crucial concepts like: (1) don’t engage with a dog you are meeting for the first time (Millan’s mantra “no talk, no touch, no eye contact”) but let them come to you instead; (2) an aggressive dog is really an insecure dog; (3) entering into a training relationship is not about teaching this or that particular behavior, but about improving your bond and your dog’s confidence; (4) dog training is more about humans than it is about dogs—it’s the humans who must be taught how to live with dogs, not vice versa; (5) communication with dogs relies on energy and unspoken cues rather than words and commands—all of these continue to underpin “post-pack” positive reinforcement training today, when dominance-based training is definitely on the outs. Millan didn’t invent these concepts but he did introduce them into mainstream culture.

He has also been a vocal advocate of the “pit bull”—a term I’ll use here in the way it’s popularly used to refer to American pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, and more recently, all the pit mixes populating U.S. shelters. Millan’s own celebrity dogs, first Daddy and later Junior, were American pit bull terriers, and their explicitly stated role on the show was to assist Millan in training by providing “calm assertive energy” to troubled dogs, teaching them dog manners and what Millan came to call “the pack code.” But more than that, Millan’s whole enterprise rests on the idea that there is no such thing as a dog that can’t be rehabilitated, an idea to which the pit bull breeds pose the biggest challenge in the American public imagination. Contemporary breed bans do not distinguish between them, and, as Dayan explains, the American pit bull terrier as a breed is on its way out, with the most favored bloodlines being actively destroyed before our eyes.1 The war on pit bulls, from housing bans to euthanasia automatically prescribed for any dog that’s suspected to come from a fighting background, is a direct refutation of the beliefs of Millan and many other trainers that any dog can be rehabilitated with enough time, effort, and education. It begins with the founding assumption that aggression can be bred into and out of dogs, a belief that pit bull advocates are working hard to expose as false.

Thus, Millan’s contributions to dog life and to training culture have been considerable, and much greater than his many critics like to admit. At the same time that he popularized ideas still espoused today, however, he also popularized the notion of the pack leader, which had in fact been discredited as a model of domestic dog behavior since at least the 1970s.

Millan’s methods—no, his very existence—have given professional trainers something to talk about, if only to position themselves against it. His approach could be called balanced training, because it uses a combination of corrections or aversive techniques and positive reinforcement. But even other fellow balanced trainers openly reject his approach, precisely because Millan is a dominance theory–based practitioner. While all trainers agree that owners must set boundaries in order for dogs to be happy and healthy—this is perhaps the most basic assumption underlining the need for training in the first place—Millan insists that the most basic expression of a boundary is that the dog is not the “leader.” It is a framework that equates setting boundaries with correction and “consequences,” another word for punishment, however broadly conceived.

These distinctions are important. Today’s balanced training techniques don’t rely on a pack-leader framework. And balanced training’s newest competitor, called “pure positive,” holds that no corrections should be used, only positive reinforcement. It has its own celebrity trainer, Victoria Stillwell, who had a multiseason show called It’s Me or the Dog. Pure positive instills boundaries using a noncorrective method called boundary games. Though the approaches understand themselves to be in opposition, they agree on one important thing: owners can create boundaries without relying on an outdated concept of their own dominance or of trying to curtail their dog’s imagined quest for dominance.

The notion of the pack as it is commonly understood today is grounded in “alpha theory,” introduced by Swiss zoologist Rudolf Schenkel in 1947 in his landmark study “Expression Studies on Wolves.” Based on his study of captive, unrelated wolves, Schenkel concluded that packs consist of individuals who fight for dominance, and such fights result in the strongest individual, the alpha, leading the pack. His findings—true, but only of captive, unrelated wolves—were erroneously extrapolated onto wild wolves and then onto dogs and finally dog–human interaction. By the time Barry Lopez published his gorgeous popular scientific work Of Wolves and Men in 1976, he was already referring to “alpha” as a term that “evolved to describe captive animals” and “is still misleading.”2

Later wolf researchers, most notably David Mech, consistently confirmed that the alpha paradigm does not apply to wolves in the wild, who live in families and are led by breeding pairs, not individuals. The breeding pair mates for life and are the oldest individuals in the group, the ones who never leave. They are not “dominant” in any of the usual meanings—they are simply the parents. Furthermore, as Mech and others have shown, behaviors of dominance and submission appear among individuals on a regular basis—they are behaviors, not inherent character traits. And they have nothing to do with aggression or submission to aggression. They are healthy, normal negotiations of access to resources, in the service of a well-functioning family ensemble.3

Wolves are endlessly fascinating—so much so that no one seemed to notice that none of this had anything to do with dogs. Applied to dogs, the alpha idea is even less appropriate, and applied to humans—understanding themselves to be the alphas dominating their own dogs—it’s just plain dangerous, some trainers argue. Almost half a century later, the shift has yet to happen in the popular imagination.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Millan’s approach. Perhaps the most important reason Millan receives so much flak from other trainers is that his training is hard to describe as a unified vision at all. He appears to many trainers as internally inconsistent, giving owners a great deal of confusing information that, rather than empowering them, keeps them trapped in the “whisperer” fantasy that Millan possesses a unique gift. Indeed, when it comes to the training on The Dog Whisperer, there were a lot of mixed messages, ones for which trainers and savvy owners have been calling him out for years. Millan routinely appeared to dominate insubordinate large dogs with methods he continuously urged us not to try at home, from cornering a scared, reactive dog, to simulating a bite with his hand, jabbing his fingers into a dog to correct, to lightly kicking a dog in order to interrupt fixation, to grabbing a dog by the throat (like the mom would do, he always said) and pushing it down on the ground to “force submission.” He used corrective collars and allowed for controversial use of them, such as picking a slip-collared dog up by the leash in order to completely immobilize it. The video that most of his detractors use to illustrate that Millan is clueless about what he is doing is the famous “Cesar Millan Hangs Shadow”4 video. Millan kicks a husky while walking him, who then reacts by trying to bite Millan. What follows is a long and stomach-turning sequence in which Millan picks up the dog by its slip lead to curtail what he calls his “dominant” behavior, effectively hanging Shadow, who by now is showing signs of asphyxiation. Ultimately Millan “dominates” Shadow by forcing the choking, slightly spasmodic dog to the ground. Millan even points out Shadow’s erection, while the dogs lies still on the ground, claiming that this is further proof of Shadow’s dominant behavior, while his critics insist that the erection is actually a sign of asphyxiation.

The Dog Whisperer always began with a disclaimer—“do not try this at home”—but since it was all about empowering owners to defend their space, hold their ground, assert their authority over dogs that were not listening, it was hard to take the disclaimer seriously. And while many of the lessons were active—and indeed, as Millan repeated over and over, dangerous to try without the assistance of a trainer—some of them were simply about what to stop doing. His favorite was to tell people to stop treating their dogs like children and indulging their tantrums. This was clearly a message not just to the show’s guests, but to viewers as well.

Millan has on many occasions discouraged owners from doing something that many of us immediately do instinctively when we know our dogs are anxious or scared. We touch them, massage them to relax them, or pick them up off the ground, for their own safety or that of others. This, Millan claims, should be avoided because it simply encourages the dog’s bad behavior. But this recommendation depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of how anxiety works, the kind of behavior it is. Fear or anxiety is not an operant or chosen behavior. It’s a respondent behavior, immediate and unconscious, which means there is no such thing as either rewarding or punishing it. Or rather, regardless of how often I punish my dog for being afraid, it won’t stop the next time she is afraid. In fact, calming down a fearful, reactive dog is a good idea, because the reactivity is less likely to continue to escalate. Many trainers argue for classically conditioning dogs in situations in which they are anxious by, precisely, rewarding them in the presence of the trigger. Comforting touch or a treat in that situation is not a “reward” in the true sense but an abrupt shift in feelings and associations from negative to positive. This is precisely how crate training works, for example. And Millan does plenty of classical conditioning on his show, as well.

Since so much of his product was based on the idea that dogs misbehave because they are anxious, Millan also routinely mischaracterized them as being relaxed when they were not, usually minutes into the training session, as proof that his methods worked. While classic markers of anxiety, such as panting, abound in every episode, Millan points to the dog and says look: he or she is finally relaxed, because we’ve set a boundary.

Much of Millan’s advice is, as even he sometimes points out, counterintuitive. But in many cases, that’s simply a sign that it’s wrong. Still, my goal here is not to challenge Millan but rather to understand the hold his show has on the public. He continues to be the undisputed champion of mainstream TV about dogs. In 2020, National Geographic briefly revived The Dog Whisperer with an episode titled “The Year of the Dog”—an appropriate comment on the role that dogs played during the Covid lockdown. And in 2021 National Geographic premiered his new series, called Better Human, Better Dog, based on an introductory sequence that posits Covid for why the dog whisperer had to be reanimated: the shelters are empty, which means that more people than ever need help with their dogs.

On his TikTok channel, Millan even made an “Alors on Danse” TikTok,5 participating in the massively popular trend in which a person sways gently to a clip of music while the text above them refers to something they feel massively triumphant about, usually in response to naysayers. Millan’s reads “when your new show comes out on National Geographic today.” And while his infectious smile indicates that the whole thing is light and a joke, there’s no getting around how much criticism Millan receives on TikTok, so that this can easily be read as a response: haters gonna hate, but I’m back and I’m still the king.

Many people today continue to use the language of the pack, the alpha, and dominance—with little idea of what it means or how to use it correctly with respect to dogs. In every dog-problems or dog-behavior group I belong to on Facebook, I see people responding to posts about behavioral issues with “you’ve got to make the rules! You’re the alpha!” “Your chihuahua needs to know who’s boss!” as well as rampant misuse of the concept of dominance and submission. Alpha theory may be over, but it continues to enjoy great success with audiences. What was—and what continues to be—the draw of this way of understanding dogs, and of shaping dog–human ensembles?

This is a different question from What is the draw of Cesar Millan?, a question we can ask about any celebrity, and which people have managed to answer only by gesturing toward mystique and the “it factor.” But how much of the success of his enterprise is attributable to his “it factor” and how much to the appeal of the pack narrative? After all, the “pack code” is a term he invented and defined as “loyalty, honesty, and integrity,” qualities that humans look for in their human-to-human relationships, and ones that are in particularly short supply in conditions of social scarcity and global precarity.

Millan has always been fond of saying, “I rehabilitate dogs, I train people.” This was in fact one of his great contributions to owner culture, the idea that it is humans who are mishandling the relationship. But his training of people is equally confusing. While he explicitly asks owners to not treat their dogs like their children, because dogs are dogs, not people, he relies on the pack structure model for the dog–human ensemble, coaching humans to behave like actual dog moms.