I saw the episode with Shadow not too long ago, and if I'm not mistaken, Shadow had already bitten people. There was also video of his owners having to do the same thing to keep from getting bitten, before Cesar went to their house. Shadow had to wear a muzzle. The owners had been told by more than one person to put him down. When Cesar was walking him he almost bit him, that's why he was holding the leash up high like that (in the video). Shadow ripped his sleeve all to pieces and he had a gash on his arm from Shadow's tooth. But Cesar did not react. He did not get upset. He stayed calm, and eventually Shadow gave up and became calm himself. If you are walking a dog and the dog tries to bite you, what else could you possibly do, besides hold the leash up high and as far away as you could reach? (I have asked that question before but no one answered it.)
Of course if you are aggressive and mean it will not have a good effect on your dog, but Cesar is not
aggressive (at least in my opinion). He does not act in anger. I think that is one way how he is misunderstood. (He IS dominant.) He even takes dogs to acupuncturists to help them. It is obvious to me that he cares deeply for all animals, and his dogs love him. I think though, if you try to use his techniques without his training YOU (about using energy correctly), you will probably do it wrong and possibly get a bad result. Animals DO read energy. That is pretty much how they communicate. The biggest part of Cesar's technique is using energy properly to communicate what he wants.
In the 2nd link you posted, I pretty much agree with everything they said. Cesar does do the alpha roll, but it is on bad cases where dogs are in a "red zone." I personally would never attempt it myself.
I don't have time to look at the other link. It's very late. I'll check it out tomorrow.
I want to reiterate, I understand why some trainers don't like him, and I understand how/why he is, (IMO), misunderstood. So far I do not share that opinion. But I am keeping my mind open. I never want to see any animal hurt, not even an aggressive one that has killed someone. So far I have only seen him helping dogs. If you look at pieces of video out of context of what was actually happening at the time, things look much different than they actually were.
I would really like to see some statistics on how the animals are doing a year later: how many (if any) have been put down, how many are doing well, how many are still the same. Do you know of anything like that? I know he did a reunion episode to celebrate some milestone with the show (100 episodes maybe?) and tons of people he had helped showed up with their dogs to show their support and how well their dogs were doing. So apparently his techniques do work very well with many dogs.
