On becoming a pack leader

Above: my pack
I'm reading Cesar Millan's book about dog psychology, Be A Pack Leader, which I got for Christmas. (Is someone trying to tell me something, do you think?) Having watched some of his TV programmes I can see where he's going with this: all I have to do is convince my dogs that I'm the leader, and then they'll be happy, well-rounded, well-behaved animals who will walk obediently behind me and never again get overexcited when they meet other dogs outside; Pace will no longer snarl if you come near her when she's eating; Ghyll won't try to eat the mail as it comes in the letterbox; Pace will at last be prepared to make friends with the cats; they will both sit quietly and benignly when the phone rings or a customer turns up at the door. It seems to involve saying, "tch!" to them each time they overstep the mark, but sometimes they're making so much racket they'd never hear it. Obviously there's more to it, but I've only read Chapter 1 so far so I haven't reached the clever bits yet.

Cesar Millan is Mexican, living in California. The 'Cesar' bit sounds Mexican enough, but 'Millan'? Has he got Scots ancestry, d'you think? He certainly has a way with dogs, but of course what he's really doing is training people, and some of the people on his TV series are as thick as they come, treating their dogs like children - no, no - if you treated children like that they'd be out in the streets causing riots.

I'd really like it to work. Both dogs have caused so much chaos in their own individual and not at all endearing ways that taking them out for a walk in a place where there might be other dogs about now requires a good deal of courage on my part. Sometimes the mental effort involved is all too much. Mostly they're brilliant dogs, but . . . if only they were more like cats.

Above: dogs should be more like this