Paris Hilton: Pet Poodle in the Pound

One of these is an out-of-control pervert; the other is just an old man.


The story dominating the news is that Paris Hilton is cracking up because the poor thing has to spend a few weeks in jail.

Her inititial four-day stint in the County jail reportedly had her breaking out in hives and in self-pitying crying jags. Yesterday, after being dragged back into court to serve the remainder of her already-reduced jail sentence for repeatedly driving on a revoked driver's license (revoked because she repeatedly drove drunk and failed to take a court-required alcohol-and-drug intervention course), she screamed out to her mother in court: Mommy, it isn't fair!

Am I the only one that is reminded of one of those pampered Hollywood pooches that dog trainer Cesar Millan is always being asked to fix?

Ms. Hilton is like a toy poodle runnning wild in the neighborhood. She craps on everyone's lawn, digs up the flowers, ignores commands, occassionally bites people, and sets other dogs to barking. It helps not at all that she is unspayed and promiscuous.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this young bitch, but its owner has raised it all wrong. As a young pup this dog learned to jump up on the table and grab whatever it wanted from the main plate. It was allowed to sleep on the bed and crap on the rug as well. When it barked at the door, no one ever told it to shut up, and after it began biting the occassional visitor, people were told to walk slowly and keep their hands close by their side. If it wants to sit on the couch, you need to sit in the chair. Don't even think about removing her food bowl.

Initially, when this little dog was seen running wild in the neighborhood, people merely smiled. We've all had a dog get loose once or twice. Your dog pissed on the rug? Let me tell you about mine.

What might have generated a sympathetic head bob the first time around, however, is a great deal less amusing on the 10th iteration.

And it's especially not amusing if it's drunk driving. There is a place in this world for dog catchers and dog pounds.

The pampered poodle at the dog pound is in for a world of shock. For one thing, it's a small dog that has been tossed into a wire cage next to a lot of very big animals. Even though the big dogs in the next cage cannot quite reach it through the wire, there is a very real sense that it would not take much for very bad things to happen. Not much at all.

Instead of soft couches, perfume and soap, this metal and concrete cage smells of urine, dog shit, vomit and death.

At meal time the folks at the pound do not cook and cut up up little steaks and serve them in a bowl of cream -- they scoop dry kibble out of 50-pound bags, and water comes from a lick spigot with a drain cut into the floor.

At the dog pound, Paris the pampered poodle will not get a nice warm fleece bed to curl up in --she's going to get the wire tray or concrete slab, the same as everyone else. The toilet will be in the open and no one will scoop up her dooty after she has finished. Jeweled leather collars and cute bandanas are now allowed; she will wear the same flat nylon collar with numbered slide tag as everyone else. It will not be new.

Worse than all the auster physical amenities is the fact that the folks in jail do not seem to give a damn about Paris the pampered poodle. This is a dog used to attention and used to having her every demand catered to. This dog has never had to deal with frustration and therefore has almost no capacity to cope.

Nor will acting out get her too much attention. At the pound, you can bark and howl, wag your tail or jump against the fence, play bow and even present your rear end up for any willing dog to mount, but no one is going to pay the slightest bit of attention to you if you are in a solitary cage. And believe me, if you are small pampered poodle at the dog pound, you want to be in a solitary cage.

Equally distressing to the pampered poodle is that some of the keepers at the pound seem to have issues themselves. Instead of smiling and saying submissive things, they stride into the cage and dominate the space with their presence. They think nothing of putting a choke chain on a dog and leading it on a short leash to wherever the it is they want it to go. And you better go -- this is not a request. Don't make them use the catch pole.

Paris the dog and Paris the human are different in one regard. If Paris the dog had exhibited the kind of behavior she did yesterday, she would probably have gotten a black tag placed on her cage. The black tag is the one that says that after a three day waiting period, the dog will be walked to the back room and given the Final Shot. After all, the world is full of good dogs without emotional problems; who needs to waste time on another pampered poodle who bites the hand that feeds it?

Paris, of course, is not going to be given the Final Shot; she is going to be let out. Unfortunately, when she is let out she will still be the same maladjusted young bitch she was when she went in a few weeks earlier.

When let out she will immediately be surrounded by the same people who helped make her so dysfunctional in the first place; her enabling mother, her alcohol and drug-addicted friends, and a raft of syncophant lawyers and assistants. In her social circle Paris will have no trouble all finding a half dozen mewing morons to tell her she was really a victim in all this because they treated her so much worse just because she was a well-bred toy poodle. My God, where are the dog catchers when all those black rottweilers are running about?

The idea that Cesar Millan should be called. is an idea that will occur to no one, yet I have little doubt that Cesar could set Paris right in short order. Cesar has worked with a lot of willfull bitches before, and has a track record of success.

Cesar Millan would not try to talk to Paris. He would not try to "understand" Paris. Instead, he would put a slip collar on her and take her on a long run every morning.

Cesar would stop all free-feeding. If Paris wants to eat, Paris will have to work, and that means physical work doing something normal like chasing a ball or doing yard work or painting the outside of a house.

Above all, Cesar will let Paris understand that she is not the top dog; she is just a small dog in a large pack, and with her small size and complete lack of ulility the best she can hope for is not to end up two rungs below the stupidest waitress at The Waffle House.

When not being worked or excercised, Cesar will mostly ignore Paris provided the dog behaves reasonably well. When Paris does get attention it will be when Cesar has time for it, and only on Cesar's terms. Attention and play is what you get after excercise and after doing good work and following directions. It is a reward, not an unearned right.

Time will tell what happens to Paris Hilton the human. In truth, I'm not sure why anyone cares. This girl is not any prettier than the peroxide-blondes we sneered at in high school and her morals are not as good. Based on her judgement calls, she is a mental defective. Both she and her friends are a traveling circus of alcholic dysfunction and unnecessary drama.

As for her mother, she is more of the same.

Which brings me to a concluding throught. To paraphrase the late Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Isn't three generations of idiots enough?

While Paris Hilton is incarcerated, is it possible she could be spayed?

Two related articles from this blog:

• A Balanced Trainer for Unbalanced Dogs


• Gassed by Noxious Fumes

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A Balanced Trainer for Unbalanced Dogs

Asking me my thoughts about dog training is a bit like asking a rodeo clown to bring in the herd: I might know my way around a cow, but I might not be quite what you need for this job.

And so, it was with some confusion that I got a call from my mother asking me what I thought of the article on Cesar Millan (the so-called "Dog Whisperer") in this morning's New York Times.

I had not see it.

A bit later, I got an email from Reid Farmer asking, "Who's gonna jump on this one?"

Well hell, I guess I will. If deep knowledge and expertise are required to type, there would not be too many typing classes.

So here goes. What does this New York Times piece criticizing Cesar Millan and "The Dog Whisperer" TV show actually say?

Here's the meat of it:

"Essentially, National Geographic and Cesar Millan have cleverly repackaged and promoted a simplistic view of the dog's social structure and constructed around it a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to dog training. In Mr. Millan's world, dog behavioral problems result from a failure of the human to be the pack leader, to dominate the dog (a wolf by any other name) completely.

"While Mr. Millan rejects hitting and yelling at dogs during training, his confrontational methods include physical and psychological intimidation, like finger jabs, choke collars, extended sessions on a treadmill and what is called flooding, or overwhelming the animal with the thing it fears. Compared with some training devices still in use whips and cattle prods, for example these are mild, but combined with a lack of positive reinforcement or rewards, they place Mr. Millan firmly in a long tradition of punitive dog trainers."

Aha! Now I get it. Millan is a "bad and backward" punitive dog trainer! The author of The New York Times piece slyly manages to work in whips and cattle prods to suggest Millan is one of those types of trainers.

But wait a minute! What Mr. Millan actually does is simply use an ordinary choke chain as it should be used, a firm voice and a firm hand to get a dogs attention. There are no beatings of dogs here. This is the National Geographic Channel, for God's sake!

The over-educated yuppies who watch this channel do not have a problem being too coercive. Their problem is that they think of their dogs as human children and they are willing to have themselves and their children bitten rather than try to communicate with the dog as a dog.

Whatever a dog is, it is NOT a human child.

But, of course, this is news to a lot of folks that watch the National Geographic channel, Animal Planet, and public television. These are nice people who love their pets. Most of them have sat on the couch so long watching nature shows they think real-life lion kills in the Serengeti are narrated, sotto voce, by the same voice that announces par scores on the Golfing Channel.

But no matter how nice or over-educated you are, a dog is not a child. This is a particularly uncomfortable and threatening truth for women who have managed to displace their maternal instincts to the family pet. This is a point Millan does not address directly (please, not too much honesty Millan!) but he does suggest women often have a harder time asserting dominance over their "fur babies." He is right. Why does saying this obvious thing send Mark Derr clucking away like a hen? Anyone who works with dogs has seen the maternal displacement problem in action, and anyone who has seen the "Dog Whisperer" TV show has seen the problem repeated out again and again. The Daisy Fuentes episode was particularly memorable for some reason ....

The simple but harsh truth is that the psycho-demographic watching the National Geographic channel tend to be people with two types of common "dog problems": They think their dog is their child, and their dog is over-fed and fat.

The dog is, quite simply, being "loved to death."

Cesar has antidotes for both problems. He is the right wrench for this nut.

If Mark Derr, the author of the New York Times editorial, wants to put together a TV show about dog training his way, he is free to do it. But it will not be a show that makes it on air unless it is entertaining. And dramatic. And has a charistmatic human figure as the lead.

Can Mr. Derr supply that? I doubt it. Cesar Millan can.

What National Geographic has done, as far as I can tell, is nothing more than film a charismatic and smart dog trainer at work and then cut up the tape so that it makes for good television. What's wrong with that? Was the boring stuff left on the cutting room floor? Of course. Who wants to see two hours of click-and-treat? Not me!

Derr seems to take issue with Cesar Millan's admonition that dogs do best with "exercise, discipline, and affection," and he seems to disagree with Mr. Millan's definition of discipline as meaning "rules, boundaries, and limitations."

Derr is being stupid. No serious dog man would argue with Millan on these points. The only thing you should say after Milan's statements on these issues is "Of course." Or perhaps, if you are being a bit chatty, "It is also true for children."

Next point.

Derr goes on to criticize Millan because Millan talks of dogs as being primarily pack animals with an innate desire to have a leader. Derr says wolves are not what Millan says they are because he read a study once that says differently.

Hmmm. . . .

I would agree that a dog is not a wolf (I say exactly that in my own book on working terriers -- see Chapter One), but I would NOT say a dog is not a pack animal.

A dog IS a pack animal.

On this matter, I speak from experience -- experience that Mr. Derr may not have. You see, I have been attacked by a pack of feral dogs. I assure you it is not something you forget.

At the time I was attacked I had been walking solo in the woods for eight weeks. I smelled rank, and with a 60-pound pack on my back, and a rain fly over my pack, I am not sure the mixed pack of large farms dogs recognized me as a human.

I smelled wild, and these were deer-killing dogs that had decided to put me on the menu. I was lucky to "sort it out" the way I did. My pants were ripped through at the crotch by an attacking dog who managed (by miracle) to only find wool before he was batted off into a ditch. Yes, one dog died. There are no regrets here.

So when Derr says dogs are not pack animals he can take a hike (pun intended). I know better, and what I know I did not read in a book.

Derr correctly notes that some aggressive dogs have underlying genetic problems predisposing them to being aggressive.

Yes, that is true. But guess what? So too do humans. We lock up a lot of humans, but we assimilate, educate and train most of them to "do the right thing". A genetic load for a little aggression is not necessarily destiny. It should be a lot easier to deal with dogs than humans. Dogs do not have beer, whiskey and PCP to warp their minds.

Huge numbers of dogs are written off, not because the dog is a genetic failure, but because the owner is ignorant (and sometimes stupid) and has done a poor job of socializing, training and leading a perfectly fine animal as it needs to be lead.

Is there a place for Prozac in your dog's food? There is according to Mr. Derr. I would disagree. Most dogs need training. If a dog is so unremittingly aggressive that it needs to be medicated, it needs to be put down. There are too many fine dogs being put to sleep every day for want of a good home to waste food and space on keeping a genetic wreck alive and medicated with chemical clutches. Dogs are not humans! We are not talking about YOU. Get over it. The only REAL question is whether the dog is actually the problem. Cesar Millan says it is more likely the owner -- and he is probably right.

Mr. Derr's shock and dismay at mild coercion during dog training suggests he is a dog training fadist. We see these people in the world of dogs just as we see them in the world of food and fashion.

Some of the most extreme fadists are the "clicker training" folks. For a cult-like subset of this group, Karen Pryor's book, Don't Shoot the Dog is a virtual Bible, and clicker training their sole religion.

I am not against clicker training (quite the opposite!) and I am all for positive reinforcement. I will bet Cesar Millan is not against positive reinforcement either.

That said, pure positive reinforcement is NOT how dogs communicate to each other, is it?

It may come as a shock to some people to learn that Karen Pryor did not invent clicker training. It was invented by the late wife of legendary animal trainer Bob Bailey. Bailey was on an animal training list-serv that I was on. Both of us were quiet lurkers, but one day Bailey popped up to set one "pure positive" person right on his ass. Mr. Bailey wanted it known to the list that he himself was not a "clicker trainer." He used clickers, sure, but he also felt there was a place for mild coercion. He even thought there was a right time and place to "shoot the dog" when dealing with extremely dangerous animals. Not a peep was heard after that.

Back to Cesar Millan. One of Millan's core points is that people with dogs are confused about what they have at the other end of the leash.

Yes, a dog is not a wolf (even if both animals DO organize themselves on a pack model), but a dog is also not a CHILD.

A dog is a dog.

Millan's core training message is that we must communicate with dogs on their level and with their values, and not our own.

Yes, dogs value food and affection.

But dogs also understands teeth, power and dominance.

Mr. Millan's point is NOT that dogs need to be bitten or beaten to get them to behave. Mr. Millan is a very civilized trainer and not a violent man. His point is simply this: almost every dog has within it the capacity to be submissive to a true leader.

Puppies are submissive to larger dogs, and smaller dogs are submissive to larger dogs. In a pack, there is only one Alpha dog and one Beta dog, and there is a "pecking order" all the way down to the Omega.

This is NOT news to anyone with a few free-range dogs. The order I release my own dogs in the morning is determined by pack order. If I do it wrong, the dogs squabble. If I do it right, all is harmony. The same is true for feeding.

Is dominance and coercion the way you train a "sit-stay"? Well, actually, yes and no. It's not quite that simple. Click-and-reward is the core method of training a dog to do a trick, but a dog that has been over-fed is not very attentive is it? A dog that has been caged or crated and not given much excercise is a bit too bouncy to focus on you, isn't it? And if a dog is going to learn anything it needs a calm, assertive and not-too-verbal person who consistently does the same thing over and over again. In fact, this is exactly what Cesar Millan offers and when he teaches -- along with a good dose of "Your dog is not your child," and "this is a choke chain -- learn how to use it."

And so I come back to a question I had after reading Mr. Derr's piece. What was Mr. Derr's intention? Did he have a point?

In fact, I think he did. I think his point is that he hopes New York Times readers will read his own book. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not a good reason to slap someone around with poor thoughts and thin facts. I do not know much about Mark Derr, but he does not seem to know much about dog training. Even less than me, and I am a basket case.

And, for the record, I have read Mark Derr's book. It is a canine history book, and what I remember is that it was not terrible, but not great. The most memorable bit of information I got out of it is that Lewis and Clark ate a lot of dog meat on their expedition, and one of them (I can't remember which one) actually preferred dog flesh to elk or deer.

Interesting, but not quite as useful as knowing how to put a choke collar on a dog properly. Barbara Woodhouse taught that useful lesson to a generation of public televisions viewers some 30 years ago. Cesar Milan is now teaching it to a similar psycho-demographic on The National Geographic Channel. Some things will always be needed.

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