Contemporary scholar Zhang Longxi (2005) tells the following story about two ancient Chinese philosophers:.1
Zhuangzi and his rival, Huizi, are strolling on the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi says, “Out there a shoal of white minnows are swimming freely and leisurely. That’s what the fish’s happiness is.” Huizi replies, “Well, you are not a fish, how do you know about fish’s happiness?” Zhuangzi says, “You are not me, how do you know that I do not know about fish’s happiness?” Huizi replies, “I am not you, so I certainly do not know about you. But you are certainly not a fish, and that makes the case complete that you do not know what fish’s happiness is.”
(p. 3)
Zhang explicates the anecdote as follows:
The crucial point Zhuangzi makes in this passage is to pursue Huizi’s dry logic vigorously…. Huizi never has a moment of doubt about what he knows, namely, that Zhuangzi is not a fish, ergo he does not know fish’s happiness. Throughout the conversation, Huizi’s negative knowledge, his conviction that there is a difference between Zhuangzi and a fish … is stated most positively and assuredly. His skeptical attitude toward knowledge thus rests on his unreflective confidence in his own negative knowledge of the difference of things. For Zhuangzi, however … the difference between man and fish is by no means a fact established a priori.
(pp. 4–5)
I cite this anecdote as my introduction to Cesar Millan because Millan also claims to know the mind of an animal and to locate his knowledge in his experience of its movement. Zhuangzi sees the minnows moving free and easily, and he concludes that they are happy. Millan claims to know dogs’ minds by means of their bodily movements. Those minds he calls their energies, a term that refers to what we might call frames of mind.
Millan’s capacity to read energies of dogs is related to, but not identical with, a classic ability that all humans have—the ability to recognize a match between the look of movement and the feeling of movement. I raise my arm, and you know how that feels even though you have not raised yours; you relate the look of what you see to a particular feeling you have had of that movement. This is called kinesthetic-visual matching or KVM. Descriptions of classic KVM do not specify whether the knowledge of movement one has while watching the sight of movement entails reexperiencing imaginatively the feeling of movement or instead the grasping intellectually of the connection between the two modalities. Whichever it is, I will argue here that Millan’s exceptional gift to interact with dogs arises from something similar to the first interpretation: He is able to feel in himself the movements he sees dogs make as they make them. To distinguish this from KVM, I am calling this KVT, or kinesthetic-visual transfer. I will also examine whether Millan’s discourse of energy presumes that dogs themselves experience KVT. I think that it does.
Cesar Millan: Background
But first a synopsis of the story Millan tells about his life with dogs. Millan was born in the town of Culiacan, Mexico, and spent much of his early childhood on his grandfather’s farm about an hour from his hometown. There he lived among free-roaming dogs who trekked about in loosely formed packs of five to seven animals. In 1990, at the age of twenty-one, he entered the United States illegally with the hope of becoming a professional dog trainer like those he imagined behind the scenes in the television shows Lassie and Rin Tin Tin. When he arrived in San Diego he worked as a dog groomer and then moved to Hollywood, where he was employed as a kennel boy at an upscale dog-training establishment. Recognized for an ability to manage difficult dogs, he was nonetheless unhappy with conventional training methods and left his job to accept employment washing limousines. From his employer at the limousine rental company, Millan learned the basics of running a business, and he soon started his own school for dogs, the Pacific Point Canine Academy. Also from his boss, who would say to influential friends, “I’ve got a Mexican who’s good with dogs,” Millan acquired a prestigious clientele; eventually he was sought out by celebrities and rescue groups, and he founded the Dog Psychology Center in the warehouse district of south Los Angeles, where he kept a pack of rehabilitated dogs. In 2002 the Los Angeles Times published a feature article about him, which led to offers of a television show. The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan began on the National Geographic Channel in 2004 and at this writing is in its seventh season with an estimated ten to fifteen million viewers.
In the television show and in his two books, Millan rejects the label dog trainer and calls himself a dog rehabilitator. He dismisses dog training as human psychology rather than dog psychology: “Dog training is created by humans; everything you do from the dog training world is human psychology: sit, stay, down, good boy. Show me a dog that teaches another dog that way.” For Millan, training does not give access to a dog’s mind: “Just because a dog knows how to obey doesn’t mean she’s balanced. When you train a dog, … you get access only to conditioning. And conditioning doesn’t mean anything in the dog world” (Millan and Peltier 2006:225). For Millan, training does nothing to address the psychological states that produce problem behavior in dogs, such as fear, anxiety, nervousness, dominance, aggression. Millan’s goal is to return dogs to a state of mind he calls “balance,” which he describes as the mental state toward which a dog’s natural instinct tends if its needs are met. Calling balance variously “the deepest form of resting mode,” or what humans would call a meditative mode (p. 213), mental stability, a mind free of issues, Millan defines it as a calm-submissive state appropriate to a dog who is a follower in a dog pack. That state can be nurtured by humans, according to Millan, by giving the dog exercise, specifically a walk that recapitulates the ancestral migrations of dog packs; by enforcing rules, boundaries, and limitations through a human version of pack leadership; and by providing affection as a reward only for calm-submissive pack behavior.
Millan has attracted fierce criticism. Where his supporters see leadership, his detractors see heavy-handed dominance. Where his admirers see intervention for psychologically troubled dogs, his critics see old-style aversion training. What Millan calls calm submission, his opponents label learned helplessness. Academics especially have located his methods within the paradigm articulated by Yi-Fu Tuan in his seminal 1984 book, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets.2 Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (2009) writes that Millan’s dog training is based on a slave-master dichotomy that mythologizes the relationship between humans and dogs “into a narrowly conceptualized dominance paradigm through which the non-human animals are presented as commodities that conform to the human animal’s desires” (p. 137). She represents Millan himself as a willing participant in a neocolonialist agenda offering bourgeois America a performance of the American dream in tandem with a new colonized other: “The dominance paradigm Millan sells includes himself: he can acceptably be the alpha male of the dog pack because he is like a dog, and therefore, is himself subject to culture’s dominion over nature, the developed and colonial United States’ dominion over the backward and developing Mexico” (p. 155). While some people may have this disparaging view, many more are awed by Millan’s gift at communicating across the human-animal divide.
How he does that has been the subject of investigation and speculation. In his 2006 essay in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell examined what he calls Millan’s “movements of mastery.”3 He began by suggesting that “everything we know about dogs suggests that in a way that is true of almost no other animals, dogs are students of human movement” (p. 52). Gladwell watched tapes of Millan with two movement specialists and reported on their findings: “Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions—who understand, for instance, that emphasis requires them to be bound and explosive. To Bradley [Karen Bradley, graduate director of dance at the University of Maryland] Cesar had beautiful phrasing…. ‘He’s dancing,’ Bradley said. ‘Look at that. It’s gorgeous. It’s such a gorgeous little dance’” (p. 53). Suzi Tortora, a New York dance-movement psychotherapist who uses dance to communicate with autistic children agreed: “The phrasing is so lovely. It’s predictable. To a dog that is all over the place, he’s bringing a rhythm” (as cited in Gladwell 2006:55). Gladwell concluded that these analysts confirmed his own impressions that Millan used “extraordinary energy and intelligence and personal force … on behalf of the helpless” (p. 56). The gift of movement these dance consultants see in Millan relates well to Millan’s idea of energy in movement. As I suggested earlier, his idea of energy can be explained as a version of what is called kinesthetic-visual matching.
What Millan Means by “Energy”
Millan explains all his interactions with dogs in terms of energy and attributes his successes at rehabilitating them to understanding their energy and taking on the kind of energy necessary for a pack leader. When Millan talks about energy, he closely relates mind and body. Sometimes he uses the term to name the physiological state of a dog or a human at any particular moment; sometimes he talks about energy by compounding words, as when he refers to “emotional-mood-energy signals” (Millan and Peltier 2007:226). More than different levels of exertion, energy makes internal states manifest in movement: emotions, but also attitudes, bodily chemistry, even an entire mental demeanor or personality. Energy is the look of another’s inner life at that particular moment made visible and communicable through complex movement.
Millan describes himself as having searched for an explanation for the communicative energy he sees in dogs. He says of his experience at the Hollywood kennel, “Unconsciously, I was beginning to apply the dog psychology I had learned from years of observing dogs on my grandfather’s farm. I was interacting with the dogs the way they interacted with one another…. I couldn’t have explained in words what I was doing at the time…. Everything just came instinctually to me” (Millan and Peltier 2006:47). Millan claims he found the language for what he knew intuitively in books: “I began a program of self-education, reading everything I could get my hands on about dog psychology and animal behavior…. I was finding ways to articulate the things I intuitively understood” (p. 53).
Although Millan traces his idea of energy back to popular books of dog psychology and human self-help literature, he describes something quite different from what one finds there. The books of dog behavior that he cites compartmentalize dogs’ mental faculties in very conventional ways. Millan does seem to borrow his term energy from motivational speaker Wayne Dyer, as he admits. For Dyer (1989), energy is a spiritual system, a universal life force: Human beings “are part of the life force that is onesong…. We fit into and harmonize with the entire energy system called the universe” (p. 162). Dyer (1992) coaches humans to activate their energy: “What is needed is a shift from the inert energy of wanting to the active energy of doing and intention” (p. 76).
Dyer’s spiritualism is missing from Millan’s discourse of energy, at least with respect to dogs, although Dyer’s motivational rhetoric does sometimes play out in Millan’s interaction with human clients. One important idea in both writers is the link between energy and mental states: “Virtually everything about the physical you is a result of … how your thoughts become energized into action” (Dyer 1992:76). When Millan parodies dogs’ manner for humans, he always does so to convey states of mind, and he clearly believes that different mental states translate into different kinds of energy, itself translated into macro and micro movement. One cannot effectively convince a dog that one is the pack leader without the right mental states, says Millan, which transpose into a manner of being in the body. Thus, for example, Millan successfully instructed a young girl with cerebral palsy to walk her dog in the manner of a pack leader, suggesting a distinction between gross bodily movements and a manner of translating mental states into body energy.
Both Millan and Dyer also say that energy enables universal communication between beings. Millan claims that energy is a language that everyone has: “Isn’t there a language we can learn that means the same thing to every creature? … I’m happy to report that the universal language … already exists…. It’s a language all animals speak without even knowing it, including the human animal…. Even human beings are born fluent in this universal tongue, but we tend to forget…. This truly universal, interspecies language is called energy” (Millan and Peltier 2006:61). As described, Millan’s approach seems to securlarize Dyer’s spiritualistic energy. However, as it plays out in his relations with dogs, it brings to mind a capacity cognitive theorists call kinesthetic-visual matching. Like KVM, Millan’s idea of energy seems an intuitive capacity to relate the sight of movement and the feeling of movement.
As stated earlier, KVM is a capacity to associate the feelings of movement of one’s own body with the look of movements made by someone at a distance, “something visually over there,” such as one’s image in a mirror or another being engaged in imitative movements.”4 The “matching” that occurs in KVM entails a cognitive understanding of a relationship between movement and vision, the power to put two very different modalities together. I am able to imitate your movements not just because I can copy the look of them, but because I can connect that look with my knowledge of how it feels to make those movements. KVM does not, as I understand it, necessarily entail a capacity to feel in oneself the movements one observes as one observes them. Rather, KVM is a cerebral understanding of a relationship between vision and movement, a grasp that what one sees is isomorphic with the experiences of movement one has had in one’s own body. What I will describe links sight and movement in a different way than this interpretation of KVM.
I am suggesting that while Millan obviously possess the basic human ability to connect the sight of bodily movement with an understanding of similar movements in himself (“classic” KVM), he also brings something else into play. That something else is a capacity that enhances or operates as a version of KVM. Like KVM, it may be explained by intuition or instinct and may be developed through experience within a particular kind of sight-movement context. I argue that that “something else” is a capacity I would call KVT or kinesthetic-visual transfer. I suggest that KVT is not just an understanding of a vision-kinesthetic relationship but an experience of it—reaction, sensation in oneself of the feeling of movement while observing movement in another. When Zhuangzi looks at the fish, he seems to feel what it is like to swim freely and leisurely, although not executing those movements himself. In fact, many words in English confound the difference between three components of a visual-kinesthetic experience: the look of movement to an observer, the feeling of it in the one executing the movement, and the feeling of it reproduced in the observer. If I describe fish as “moving freely and leisurely,” am I describing how they look to me? how I think they must feel when they move in that way? how they make me feel? All three, I would say.
To my mind, a special or enhanced capacity for visual-kinesthetic transfer with respect to dogs explains Millan’s exceptional abilities at imitating them, an ability not explainable by traditional KVM, however much experience one has with a particular kind of look-movement interaction. When Millan removes food from a dangerous dog who guards its bowl obsessively (as in Fincke 2004), he does so by slowly moving in and then placing himself between the bowl and the possessive dog, the way that dominant dogs do. While this seems simple, and while his goal is to teach other people how to do it, I expect that very few people could reproduce the movements as he does, that is, as if by second (or even first) nature. That ability seems to depend on remembering how it felt within himself when he watched those movements in dogs. Also, when Millan imitates dogs’ manner for a human audience, his face and upper body become startlingly and comically doglike. As anyone who watches comedians regularly will attest, effective parody of others’ movements is extraordinarily rare. I am arguing that such exceptional abilities require a capacity to feel in oneself the movements being made by others—in Millan’s case, the sensation of movements that dogs have as they make them. This visual-kinesthetic transfer is what can explain Millan’s idea of the flow of energy from dogs to himself and from himself to dogs. This is not something made possible solely by an intellectual grasp of a sight-movement connection, or classic KVM, no matter how much experience one has had with it.
Millan’s discourse of energy, just as Zhuangzi’s insistence that “the difference between a man and fish is by no means a fact established a priori,” is about connectedness between beings. If I feel how it feels to move as you do, I am likely to feel myself as not particularly separate from you. In spite of the fact that Millan insists that humans must never confuse dogs with humans, his connectedness to dogs is the compelling subtext of every episode of his television show, The Dog Whisperer. Although this is performed rather than stated, Millan does once say, “To say that I ‘love’ dogs doesn’t even come close to describing my feelings and affinity for them” (Millan and Peltier 2006:22). The transfer of feelings of movement through sight might well be a powerful bonding mechanism within a social group; Milan’s unique ability is to experience that with another species.
Do Dogs Have KVT?
Millan repeatedly says that dogs read the energy of others all of the time and do so more accurately than do humans. No doubt he believes that dogs read each other and read him. But the question is, “how do they do it.” Most people assume that dogs interpret gestures and behaviors that they see in others, that is, that they learn that certain movements in others have associated behavioral effects. Using the term kinesthetic empathy, Shapiro (1997) argues that dogs are adept at reading movements in terms of intentions. Others believe that dogs interpret not just bodily gestures but expressions, even smells. These capabilities seem not the same thing as what I am calling kinesthetic-visual transfer because they are cognitive acts, not experiences.
In Millan’s discourse of energy, dogs understand others in a way less clumsy than cognitive interpretation; their understanding seems more holistic, dramatic, and immediate. Millan states, “All animals communicate using energy, constantly. Energy is beingness. Energy is who you are…. That’s how your dog sees you. Your energy at that present moment defines who you are” for them (Millan and Peltier 2006:97). He goes on: “In terms of your energy, dogs know you thoroughly at every moment they are in your presence: I can’t emphasize enough that dogs pick up every energy signal we send them. They are reading our emotions every minute of the day” (p. 123). If true, this is different from interpreting body language, from understanding external signs as indicative of internal states. More visceral and comprehensive, it entails a kind of reexperiencing of others’ system-states, a “picking up” of others’ mental conditions in a way more literal than metaphorical.
Dogs’ ability to respond to energy has evolutionary importance for the stability of the dog pack, says Millan. Dogs comprehend energy because they value stable energy within a pack. And such stable energy is only possible through the pack leader. Millan says, “all animals can evaluate and discern what balanced energy feels like” (Millan and Pelteir 2007:217, my emphasis). Thus when he describes dogs “sensing” the energy of others, he seems to mean receiving an impression that impacts their own sense experience:
If you watch the news clips from Hurricane Katrina, when the abandoned dogs of New Orleans started coming out of their homes, they automatically began to take up with one another and form packs,.…. In one photo of such a pack, I noticed a big old Rottweiler, a German shepherd, and some other big dogs. But they were being led by a beagle! Why did they choose to follow the beagle? Because the beagle had a better sense of direction … and she obviously had leadership energy. Animals know that if another animal shows the determination and takes the leadership role firmly, they should go with her. They don’t say, “Look, You’re a beagle. I’m a Rottweiler. I don’t follow beagles…. The Rottweiler sensed that the beagle was in a calm-assertive state, and that’s all she was looking for in a leader.
(p. 166, my emphasis)
Millan never explicitly describes the mechanism for how dogs understand the energy of others beyond the idea of “sensing.” But his accounts are associated with processing complex movement in a holistic way:
In the wild, different animal species intermingle effortlessly. Take the African savannah or a jungle, for instance. At a watering hole in a jungle, you might see … many different species sharing the same space. How do they all get along so smoothly? … All these animals are communicating with the same relaxed, balanced, non-confrontational energy. Every animal knows that all the other animals are just hanging out, doing their own thing—drinking water, foraging for food, relaxing, grooming one another. Everybody’s feeling mellow and no one’s attacking anyone else. Unlike us, they don’t have to ask one another how they’re feeling. The energy they are projecting tells them everything they need to know.
(Millan and Peltier 2006:62)
Millan’s scene at the waterhole describes animal actions that require specific and intricate kinds of motions—drinking, foraging, grooming. Movement is the look of interiority: “everyone’s feeling mellow.” And how does that look of movement transfer to others? Surely Millan does not mean that the animals are calculating intentions in terms of visible exertion levels or behaviors. Millan says that each animal projects its energy to others; by this he seems to mean that animals feel or experience the intertwined mental-physical states of others as transmitted by their movements.
Millan often describes energy as something that is instantly transferred from one animal to another, and one can almost see that transfer while watching the interactions between Millan’s dogs on many episodes of his television show. Millan maintains a dog pack of over forty rehabilitated dogs. He often brings a new dog into the pack temporarily as part of its rehabilitation. It is a heart-stopping sight to see forty dogs converge on a new dog, and Millan states repeatedly that the new dog must be in a calm-submissive state or its undesirable energy will have a disastrous ripple effect through the pack. That such energy is transferred so quickly from animal to animal, and that the dogs experience it so intensely, makes one think not of a process of “understanding” but rather of an electric current of feeling passing from one dog to another.
The most compelling evidence for me of the dogs’ capacity for visual-kinesthetic transfer is that they can read Millan as they would another dog. The foundation of Millan’s rehabilitation program is to convince dogs that humans are the pack leader. This means more than bossing the dogs around. It has to do with an ability to use his body to transfer to the dogs the feeling of authority as coming from him, to give them that sight-kinesthetic experience of a state called I-am-in-charge. It also entails conveying and maintaining within followers a feeling of calmness and security transferred from the movement-manner of the leader of the pack to the followers.
There is great resistance to giving dogs anything like a capacity for KVM. If dogs are afforded KVM, this would mean that they have an intellectual understanding that the movements they see in others are isomorphic with the experiences of movement in their own bodies. For cognitive theorists, dogs and most other nonhuman animals do not possess KVM in relationship to anything but the feel and look of their own bodies. The reason that they are not afforded KVM is that the capacity is closely associated with mirror self-recognition and imitation, and dogs show little or no ability for either. The argument goes that if they had KVM they would engage in more imitative behavior and give more explicit evidence of mirror self-recognition. Further, KVM is considered the “gateway” capacity to many sophisticated cognitive abilities. This includes perspective taking, that is, “recognition that a perspective different from one’s own exists and is experienced by others” (Mitchell 1997:33). And perspective taking is thought to be the path to empathy.
However, if Millan’s discourse of energy gives to dogs something like what I have called kinesthetic-visual transfer, then it also gives them not exactly empathy but a kind of identification with others. It does not necessarily afford dogs the same perspective that humans have, that is, that others are separate from themselves yet operating from invisible internal states. However, it does give them a particular kind of relating. If dogs have a capacity to feel in themselves the movements they see in others, then they likely can experience identification, one that blurs the boundary between self and other. This kind of collapse might entail a more intense empathy than an intellectual understanding that others are not oneself but have comparable mental states. Additionally, this blurring may explain why dogs might not be interested in imitation. Imitation depends on experiencing the salience of “difference”; imitative actions bridge perceived gaps between self and other. If dogs have KVT, they may experience no such gaps.
When I reach for the leash to take my dogs on a walk, they jump up excitedly, tails wagging furiously, bodies dancing in circles. These movements express their eager anticipation of a walk, as every human knows. Millan would add that my dogs are also reading my energy, perhaps within the context of a complex network of my inner states. If so, they probably know that I have decidedly lower levels of enthusiasm for this walk than they do. Although they appear to care only about their own feelings, who knows? If my demeanor sends to them feelings of “I’d rather be reading a book,” maybe they are trying to transfer to me their feelings of “won’t this be great.” How interesting to think dogs might not only experience the transfer of feelings through movement but be able to send back movement-messages.
References
Dyer, W. W. 1989. You’ll See It When You Believe It. New York: Morrow.
——. 1992. Real Magic: Creating Miracles in Everyday Life. New York: HarperCollins.
Fincke, S. A., dir. 2004. “Lucy and Lizzie.” Written by M. J. Peltier. In S. A. Fincke, producer, The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, October 18. Los Angeles: MPH Entertainment.
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Gladwell, M. 2006. “What the Dog Saw: Cesar Millan and the Movements of Mastery.” New Yorker 82, no. 14 (May 26): 47–57.
Jackson-Schebetta, L. 2009. “Mythologies and Commodifications of Dominion in The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7, no. 1: 137–159.
Millan, C., and M. J. Peltier. 2006. Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems. New York: Harmony.
——. 2007. Be the Pack Leader. New York: Harmony.
Mitchell, R. W. 1997. “Kinesthetic-Visual Matching and the Self-Concept as Explanations of Mirror-Self-Recognition.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 27, no. 1: 17–39.
——. 2002. “Kinesthetic-Visual Matching, Imitation, and Self-Recognition.” In M. Bekoff, C. Allen, and G. M. Burghardt, eds., The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, pp. 345–351. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Shapiro, K. J. 1997. “A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Nonhuman Animals.” In R. W. Mitchell, N. S. Thompson, and H. L. Miles, eds., Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, pp. 277–295. Albany: SUNY Press.
Tuan, Y-F. 1984. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Zhang, L. 2005. Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.