How to Raise the Perfect Dog

by Cesar Millan

  Also by CESAR MILLAN with Melissa Jo Peltier

  Cesar’s Way:

  The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding & Correcting Common Dog Problems

  Be the Pack Leader:

  Use Cesar’s Way to Transform Your Dog… and Your Life

  A Member of the Family:

  Cesar Millan’s Guide to a Lifetime of Fulfillment with Your Dog

  Cesar’s Way Deck:

  50 Tips for Training and Understanding Your Dog

  Cesar’s Way Journal:

  A Resource and Record Book for Dog Owners

  Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan:

  The Ultimate Episode Guide by Jim Milio and Melissa Jo Peltier

  Cesar Millan The Dog Whisperer 2008 Desk and Wall Calendars

  Puppyhood Deck

  Since this book is about puppies, I’m dedicating it to my incredible sons, Andre and Calvin. Nurturing my own “pups” as they’ve grown; watching them begin to express their unique, inner essences and attempt to achieve their individual goals—these have been the greatest experiences of my life and have made me a much better, wiser person. I’m grateful I’ve been able to pass on my love of Mother Nature to them—a gift given to me by my grandfather—and I hope they will continue to convey this legacy to the rest of the world and, someday, to their own children.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 MEET THE PUPPIES

  Junior, Blizzard, Angel, and Mr. President

  Chapter 2 PERFECT MATCH

  Choosing the Perfect Puppy

  Chapter 3 MOTHER KNOWS BEST

  Learning from the Pros

  Chapter 4 PUPPY COMES HOME

  Easing the Transition from Litter to Family

  Chapter 5 YOUR HEALTHY PUPPY

  Health Care Basics

  Chapter 6 CONNECTING, COMMUNICATING, AND CONDITIONING:

  How Your Dog Learns

  Chapter 7 THE SOCIAL PUPPY

  Getting Along with Both Dogs and Humans

  Chapter 8 PROBLEM-FREE PUPPIES

  Chapter 9 SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

  Adolescent Challenges

  Chapter 10 EPILOGUE

  The Puppies Grow Up

  Appendix: Resource Guide

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A collection of dedicated canine professionals made invaluable contributions to the writing of this book. Both my coauthor and myself wish to extend our boundless thanks to my friend Martin Deeley, Director of the International Association for Canine Professionals and an internationally renowned trainer, specializing in retrievers and gun dogs. Martin selflessly made his wide range of knowledge—as well as his trademark dry wit—available to us 24/7. Hollywood animal trainer Clint Rowe also graciously shared wisdom from his more than three decades of working with dogs of all breeds and ages. We’re proud to continue our professional and personal affiliation with him.

  We are also in debt to the many fine veterinarians who remain stalwart supporters of our efforts, especially Charles Rinehimer, VMD, professor of veterinary technology at Northampton Community College (who has worked with us on three books now), and Paula Terifaj, DVM, of the Founders Veterinary Clinic in Brea, California, who also contributed greatly to A Member of the Family. Dr. Rick Garcia and his mobile veterinary hospital, Paws ‘n Claws, were always available to answer questions and to provide thorough health care to all the puppies and dogs in my pack.

  A top-notch breeder is hard to find, but in the writing of this book, we met and worked with several of them, particularly Brooke Walker of Covina, California, who provided us with our wonderful miniature schnauzer, Angel; and Diana and Doug Foster of Thinschmidt German Shepherds and Assertive K-9 Training in Corona, California. My old friend Jose Navarro came through with flying colors in producing our fine English bulldog, Mr. President, and of course I will always be grateful to Azael Espino, who gave me my perfect pit bull, Junior. Thanks also to Southern California Labrador Rescue, for bringing us Blizzard and for all the selfless work they do.

  I’m proud to have begun a close association with Chris De Rose, Kim Sill, and the rest of the dedicated team at Last Chance for Animals. Their courageous work is already improving the way people treat the other creatures with which we share our planet. Thanks also to Stephanie Shain and the Humane Society of the United States for their campaign to end the cruelty of puppy mills.

  As always, we thank our literary agent, Scott Miller of Trident Media Group; Julia Pastore, Shaye Areheart, Kira Walton, and Tara Gilbride at Random House; Steve Schiffman, Steve Burns, Michael Cascio, Char Serwa, Mike Beller, Chris Albert, and Russell Howard at the National Geographic Channel; and Fred Fierst, Esq. Cesar and Ilusion are incredibly grateful to John Steele, Michael Gottsagen, and the entire team at IMG—especially IMG’s remarkable “Mr. Big”—for your continued encouragement and support.

  For my pack, “Team Millan,” I am especially grateful: Kathleen Daniels, Jennifer Dominguez, Carol Hickson-Altalef, Erick Millan, Rosalva Penuelas, Allegra Pickett, Delmi Salinas, and Susan Whalen. Nobody beats our “Super TV Crew”: Nicholas Bunker, Brian Duggan, SueAnn Finke, Miles Ghormley, Todd Henderson, Chris Komives, Christina Lublin, Rich Mercer, Rita Montanez, and Neal Tyler. Also at MPH and CMI, thanks to Bonnie Peterson, George Gomez, Juliana Weiss-Roessler, Nicholas Ellingsworth, Todd Carney, Christine Lochman, Kay Bachner Sumner, and Sheila Possner Emery … and especially Crystal Reel, for her outstanding research, fact-checking, and unfailing can-do attitude. My wife and I are grateful to Stacey Candella, for her dedication to our Cesar and Ilusion Millan Foundation and its mission, and to Adriana Barnes and family for their hard work on the new Dog Psychology Center. I want to acknowledge my neighbors Tim and Diane Archer for being patient and supportive with all our Dog Whisperer endeavors. And a special thank you to Frank and Juanita Trejo for all your love and encouragement.

  Thank you to my wife, Ilusion, for her endless patience with me, especially with all the challenges that came with raising our puppy pack. And, of course, thanks to the one who keeps the puppies balanced, Mr. Daddy—the greatest nanny in the world!

  MELISSA JO PELTIER wishes to thank: my MPH partners, Jim Milio and Mark Hufnail, for their unwavering support—“Three out, three back.” Thank you, Cornelia Dillon, for helping me through one of the toughest times of my life. As always, props to my dear friend and cheerleader, Victoria Adams; my lovely stepdaughter, Caitlin Gray; and my husband, John Gray, who is the best life partner any girl could hope for.

  Cesar and Ilusion, I’m so grateful you allowed me the honor of participating in your dream once again.

  Finally, thanks to my one-of-a-kind dad, Euclid J. Peltier, for passing on your boundless energy, tireless work ethic, childlike sense of wonder, passion for learning, and indomitable life force. I love you very much.

  INTRODUCTION

  Several months ago, I walked into our Cesar Millan, Inc., offices and noticed our staff crowded around one computer screen, making “ooh” and “aah” noises. I nudged my way in to see what all the fuss was about. There in front of me, in a slightly blurry video, was a litter of six adorable Shiba Inu puppies—three male and three female—in a padded dog bed, playfully crawling over one another. When I learned that this was actually a live video feed in real time, I was fascinated—and impressed. Apparently the breeders—a San Francisco couple—had set up a video camera to serve as a kind of “baby monitor” so they could keep an eye on their charges at all times. The employees at the Internet company that set up the live feed fell in love with the puppies and began sending links to other friends. The link went “viral,” and suddenly millions of people i
n more than forty countries were glued to their computer screens, watching the homegrown phenomenon that became known as the puppycam. During a time of national economic stress, viewers claimed that watching the Shiba Inu puppies calmed them down, distracted them from their worries, and had an overall positive effect on their mental health.

  The puppycam experience inspired several of our Dog Whisperer staff members to set up their own webcams to start monitoring their dogs and puppies at home. Once the Shiba Inu puppies had grown up and moved on, there was always some new puppy adventure unfolding on one of our office computers.

  Whatever your cultural background, the language you speak, your race, creed, or religion, you’d have to be made of stone not to be moved by the antics of puppies. Their apparent helplessness and adorable, clumsy attempts to explore a world that is new to them automatically awakens the nurturing instincts that nature has implanted deep in the genes of every male and female, child and grandparent. And as the testimonials from puppycam fans prove, loving puppies is good for us! Puppies bring us closer to our innocent, natural animal selves. They relieve our stress, improve our health, and remind us that true happiness exists only in the moment. Loving and raising a puppy can be one of the richest, most rewarding experiences of a person’s entire life. And once that puppy becomes a full-grown dog, the bond created during those first eight months—the stage that I call puppyhood—can solidify into the kind of relationship that will sustain you throughout your dog’s lifetime and beyond.

  However, the fact that our human hearts routinely melt into butter whenever we see a pup doesn’t automatically make us qualified to raise one. That’s why I’m writing this book.

  What is it about dogs that makes us believe the skills for raising them will come as effortlessly to us as raising our own human offspring? I don’t know many humans who believe they would automatically know how to raise a baby elephant, leopard, or dolphin, should one happen to fall into their laps! I’m sure most people instinctively know that you don’t raise a seal cub, a parrot chick, or a foal the same way you would a human child. Human beings have even learned hard lessons about trying to raise our closest cousins, the higher primates, as if they were hairier versions of ourselves. I recently read a heartbreaking book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, by Elizabeth Hess, about a 1970s-era experiment designed to teach a chimpanzee language in a social context, by taking him from his mother in infancy and rearing him as if he were a human boy, in the midst of an upscale Manhattan family. Though Nim did manage to learn excellent skills in American Sign Language and could communicate with it for the rest of his life, his animal nature soon overwhelmed the human members of his naive adoptive family, who were forced to abandon him. He lived out the rest of his sad life in a kind of no-man’s-land of foster homes and primate research facilities, never knowing if he was chimp, human, or something in between.

  One of my cardinal rules in life is that we must respect animals as the beings they are, rather than as the near-human companions we might wish them to be. To me, having a true bond with an animal means celebrating and honoring its animal nature first, before we start to co-opt it into being our friend, soul mate, or child.

  Although puppies may seem like wordless human babies to us, the truth is, puppies are dogs first. Raising a puppy to be a healthy, balanced dog is a very different process from successfully nurturing a baby to be a happy, confident young adult. As much as we may want them to be, puppies are not the dog equivalent of babies, especially by the time we usually take over as their caregivers. Whereas babies are essentially helpless creatures for many months, puppies come into this world as little survival machines, revealing their true animal natures almost immediately after they are born. A three-day-old puppy will already be striving to assert its dominance over its siblings by pushing them away from the mother’s nipple. By two to three weeks, that same puppy will be able to walk on its own and will work further to establish its place in the pack. By the time a reputable breeder feels the pup is ready to separate from its mother and littermates—at approximately two months of age—that puppy is already developmentally years ahead of a human baby at the same age. When we adopt a two-month-old puppy, it is far from helpless, although we often continue to view it that way, and treat it accordingly. In doing so, many dog owners unknowingly disregard or disrespect a puppy’s true nature: its “dogness.”

  By pampering our growing dogs as if they were helpless babies—carrying them like purses, indulging their every whim, allowing them the kinds of liberties we would never allow a growing child—we thwart their progress from the very start. We can unwittingly nurture fear, anxiety, aggression, or dominance. We can condemn our dogs to lives of instability and stress. By putting our own psychological fulfillment before the very real developmental needs of a growing dog, we may inadvertently create more behavioral issues.

  In my experience, it’s usually just lack of knowledge that drives well-meaning dog lovers to make these crucial mistakes. Every dog owner I’ve ever met has genuinely wanted only the best for his or her pet. In this book, I hope to offer some strategies to help owners learn to maintain the true canine identity of a dog before they make it into their “baby.”

  One of the most important things to remember about puppyhood is that it is the shortest stage of a healthy dog’s life. A dog is a puppy from birth to eight months, then an adolescent from eight months to three years. With good nutrition and veterinary care, a modern dog’s life span can last from ten to twelve to sixteen years or more.1 I see far too many humans falling in love with a tiny puppy’s cuteness but eventually losing interest in—or, worse, coming to resent—the full-grown dog it is destined to become. This truly breaks my heart. I believe that when we bring a dog into our lives at any age, we take on a very important responsibility for that dog’s lifelong well-being. Owning a dog should be a joyful experience, not a stressful one. Sure, it takes focus and commitment in the early stages, but putting in that hard work up front will pay off in countless ways for years and years to come. The dogs in our lives teach us how to revel in the moment, not obsess over our pasts or our futures. Dogs show us that simple joys—rolling around on the floor, running through the park, splashing in the pool, stretching out on the grass under a warming sun—are still the very best life has to offer. And dogs help us experience a deeper kind of connection—not just with animals but with the other humans in our lives and with ourselves.

  If you are certain you want to commit to a dog for life, you truly have an incredible opportunity in front of you. This is truly your chance to create and mold the dog of your family’s dreams, as well as nurture another living being into fulfilling all that nature destined it to become. Pups are programmed by their DNA to absorb the rules, boundaries, and limitations of the societies they live in. If you clearly communicate your family’s rules to the puppy from day one, you can mold a companion that will respect, trust, and bond with you on a level that you never imagined possible. But, like children, dogs are constantly observing, exploring, and working to figure out how they fit into the world around them. If you consistently send them the wrong signals in the early days of your relationship, it will be a lot more difficult to rehabilitate them once those bad habits are ingrained.

  I’ve raised hundreds of dogs in my life, through many different developmental stages, but when I decided to write this book, I wanted to make sure I was actually going through the process of following several puppies from birth into young adulthood. Every dog I rehabilitate or adopt, every puppy I raise, helps me better understand the nature of dogs and how we humans can give them the best, most balanced life possible. I hope the individual journeys of the dogs that appear in this book will help bring down to earth some of the concepts we’ll be discussing.

  Can you really raise “the perfect dog”? I absolutely believe you can. That’s because I believe nature places the formula for perfection deep within every organism it creates. As human beings, we like to think we can improve upon
nature, and perhaps in some areas we can. But when it comes to raising dogs, nature had it right the first time. Let’s stop reinventing the wheel and start learning from life’s best teachers, the dogs themselves.

  1

  MEET THE PUPPIES

  Junior, Blizzard, Angel, and Mr. President

  Junior

  When I first imagined writing a book about raising the perfect dog, I wanted it to have a personal touch and a hands-on feeling. In my experience, it’s easier to teach using real-life examples. I have raised many dogs in my life, but I wanted to reacquaint myself with all the different stages of puppyhood while I was writing about them so that I would be totally in tune with the behaviors I was describing. To do this, I decided to raise four puppies of different breeds—a pit bull, a Labrador retriever, an English bulldog, and a miniature schnauzer—bringing them up in my home and with my pack using the principles of dog psychology. I want to illustrate to you, my readers, how raising puppies as naturally as possible will prevent problems and issues and will avoid the need for intervention in the future. My goal was not to rehabilitate dogs but to raise balanced dogs and show owners how to maintain the natural balance that Mother Nature has already given them. Therefore, I wanted to select dogs with a certain inborn energy level—what I call “medium-level energy,” which is the perfect energy level for even an inexperienced dog owner to deal with. We’ll talk more about selecting for energy in the next chapter, but keep this concept in the back of your mind as you join me in the adventure of meeting the puppies.

  JUNIOR, THE PIT BULL

  Daddy and his protege, Junior

  Although my pit bull, Junior, made his first print appearance in my last book, A Member of the Family, I still consider him to be the most significant of the four dogs whose puppyhoods I’ve chronicled here. When I began writing this book, Junior was a little over a year and a half old, smack in the heart of his canine adolescence, which lasts from about eight months to three years of age. Since the day I brought him home, Dog Whisperer cameras and my own records have recorded nearly every day of his progress, from clumsy toddler to the energetic, confident, yet serene teenager he is today. There are many wonderful lessons from Junior’s upbringing that I am thrilled to share with you here.