Dog Whisperer Season 4 Volume 1 DVD Review–A Huge Surprise
I’ll kick it off today with a bit of a revelation–I had never actually seen much Dog Whisperer before the folks out at Screen Media sent me a copy of Season Four’s first volume.
And I was definitely surprised by what I saw.
This is the story of Cesar Millan, a man who knows a lot about dogs. In fact, he knows so much about dogs that it almost seems like he can communicate with them. And so, he travels the highways and byways of America, helping people bridge the gap between them and their dogs.
And frankly, if you haven’t seen Dog Whisperer, you’ll be surprised how quickly Millan manages to alter dogs’ behavior. Admittedly, there’s some editing tricks going on here, but still–what this man can do in only a handful of hours is unbelievably quick and downright amazing.
He’ll be tackling all sorts of dogs–dogs missing legs, wild dogs with no trust of humanity, frightened dogs–and all sorts of owners, too. He’ll take on plenty of wildly dysfunctional personalities in both dogs and humans alike. Watching Cesar is both entertaining and wildly informative; I think I learned more about dogs watching an hour of Cesar than anything I had read in the last year about dogs.
Dog Whisperer Season 4 Volume 1 will offer up seventeen half hour episodes, and you’ll get to follow Cesar Millan around as he tackles all these troubles. It’s a very fun watch, and due to the episodic nature of the whole thing, you can take it a little bit at a time, or set up your own all-day marathon.
The Screenhead Ten Scale likes what it sees here, and as such gives the Dog Whisperer’s fourth season a seven out of ten for being entertaining, even if you’re not much of a dog person.
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Most people think there are “editing tricks,” but the only trick is compressing a day filled with set-up and other minutiae into a segment’s length, and even then, the elapsed time is often displayed. For more information on the back story on how the series is produced, see the bonus material in the DVD sets of previous seasons, and read the books.
Other highly competent trainers can produce these same results, and not in hours, but in the same *minutes* as Mr. Millan does. Mr. Millan is simply a highly competent, somewhat classical trainer who happens to have beater the others to an entertaining television program. His training theory and techniques are not “new” or even novel. There are more similarities than differences among Mr. Millan, Ian Dunbar, Victoria Stilwell, Tamar Geller, etc. However, you will be hard-pressed to find someone who has actually studied all of them and is in a position of knowledge to compare them. That doesn’t stop lots of unknowledgeable people from bloviating, though.
That said, I don’t see any other trainers showing videos of similar accomplishments. Still, I have faith that they can do the same.
Even your neighborhood pet store trainer can perform seeming wonders.
A final note on Dog Whisperer. Although the disclaimer is repeated ad nauseum through the series, it bear repeating for the people who don’t “get it.”
Dog Whisperer is NOT a how-to-train-your-dog instructional program. It is an entertainment program that demonstrates the results that can be obtained when people who are at their wit’s end HIRE highly competent dog trainers and who take the time to themselves learn from them.
Thank you, Dog Trainer–a little professional perspective is always welcome.