Cesar Millan visited Moose Jaw’s Mosaic Place Friday evening to deliver a seminar on how a dog owner can forge a happy and healthy relationship with their pet.
“I grew up with my father and my grandfather, and they both said, ‘Never work against Mother Nature,’” Millan told a crowd of several hundred people during his seminar. “What is a dog’s world? What do they want? They want harmony and balance.”
In his seminar, entitled Trust Your Instincts, Millan lectured about the importance of remaining calm and assertive with a dog, and presented his message with a series of clips, humour, and on-stage demonstrations using live animals.
Millan, who features in the highly successful television show Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, spent much of his lecture focusing on the impact of the dog owner’s personality and mentality — which he called the person’s “energy” — on their pet.
“In the modern world, you can get money, but you also collect (other things) along the way. For example, some people become full of guilt. Some people develop ego, but they’re making money,” he said.
“Some people will become sad because they know something is missing, but they’re making money. And some people get angry when they don’t know why — but they have a lot of money.”
Contrasting with all of the stress and burdens in human life, Millan said, is the instinctual world of the Dog.
“If you give a dog 100 dollars, he will pee on it or he will chew on it,” Millan said, “but he will never go and deposit it.”
“There is no knowledge behind instincts, it’s all reaction,” he said.
But because dogs are pack animals who “just don’t know how to be by themselves,” Millan said, they often learn how to act and react from the energy of their owner.
As such, many of the behavioural problems of a dog generally lie with their owner.
“Our instability affects the stability of our dogs,” he explained. “A dog can only be calm while we provide (calmness).”
Millan's Dog Whisperer wrapped up its final season in September. He will next appear on television in Leader of the Pack, scheduled to air in early 2013.
