Lee Mannix presented a seminar today to the rescue group I volunteer with. The following are my own recollections, gleanings and impressions and definitely do not represent my foster, my training beliefs and methodologies, or those of any group that I’m affiliated with.
The seminar was mainly aimed at people who are involved with or leading a rescue or shelter. There were representatives from a number of area shelters, mostly Brazos Valley or Houston-area groups. As such, it focused mainly on places where the rescues can make a big behavioral difference: Intake, fostering, and placement. Lee usually presents seminars that are ten days in length — what we got today is a drop in the bucket compared to the usual full education and in-depth examples that he usually provides. I’m going to cover in broad terms the topics we discussed and a note or two about anything I liked or thought was poignant. There’s no way in how that I can cover everything that we talked about. I also had to leave briefly to help deal with one of the rescue’s puppies, who received a small snakebite to the lip that swelled up something fierce over the course of the day… With all those grains of salt presented…
Lee’s stock in trade is common sense. (I’m referring to him as Lee here, by the way, because as he put it, “Mr. Mannix is my daddy.”) It’s the things you don’t want to hear. It’s the things your dog really doesn’t want to hear, because he had a great deal going before Lee came along. It’s the things that only, frankly, a drunk irishman who likes to brawl would say to your face. If you liked the movie “Boondock Saints”, you would like Lee’s speaking and training style. lIf you’re curious, yes, Lee is apparently newly divorced. Word has it that his dog house has heat, cold Shiner Bock, and satellite TV.
On the political spectrum, he stands right smack dab in the middle between “Beat the dog till it’s dead, and then you’ll have a dog that is perfectly obedient.” … and “give your dog anything you want like it’s a child in the California school system.” He’s mainly concerned with results and doing no lasting harm in the process of getting there. In case you’re curious, he’s extremely critical of Caesar Milan and has specific reasons why he’s critical. (That’s an entirely different blog post.) All in all, I’m comfortable with his stance, which seems soundly placed in the middle of “common sense” and “last time I did that, I got bit.” He has the scars to prove the bites, too, which I think makes some people uncomfortable. Frankly, I have some of the same telltale V-shaped scars on my arms, and I only handle my two and whatever strays I’ve come across.
The first points that he made were that if a dog has a medical issue or a nutritional issue, you’re not going to get anywhere behaviorally. The dog’s life has to be sound in those two areas before you can even begin to diagnose or address or evaluate a behavioral issue. The take-away for shelters and owners in the audience is that when you’re faced with an issue, look in those two places before you spend a lot of resources on training.
Self-congratulatory note: I had arrived at the same conclusion, and Lee’s #1 and #2 on his list of foods — Innova and Wellness Simple Solutions — are what my kids get. We spent about twenty or thirty minutes talking food. Lee cited some recent studies that show soy products as one of the drivers of aggression in young human men, and some other studies that showed correlations between other ingredients and behavior issues. I had arrived at the medical issue point myself after working with Eo and Henry at different points in their treatment. Before we got Henry’s diet and digestive issues solved, he didn’t make any improvement. Eo currently is only dependably well-behaved when she’s on painkillers above and beyond her normal NSAID.
After we discussed those items, we started to touch on some of the ways to start examining and correcting behavior issues. One of the things that Lee said that I’m having a hard time with is the idea that an animal like a dog would more naturally want to be alone than as part of a pack, and that for this reason all siblings should be separated. I agree that siblings can develop in unhealthy ways, but I think that dogs naturally seek out companions that complement their strengths and weaknesses. The problem with going against Lee’s point of view is that he has an answer. His counterpoint is that of course humans and dogs form groups that balance their strengths and weaknesses… but aren’t the things we’re trying to train into or out of our dogs places where they’re weak? Argh. Now you know why I’m single and have dogs: It’s hard living with someone who’s always quickly and loudly right.
On Breedism, Lee pointed out that the most vicious dog in the state of Texas is the Chihuahua. Nationally, Golden Retrievers are the most often put down for serious bites. I’ll note my previous point about Jacques Chirac’s vicious Maltipoo. Lee predicted that he would begin to see an excessive number of Labradoodles within the next several years. He did acknowledge that some breeds or lineages of breeds had a predisposition to be aggressive in a fashion that accelerated quickly. Frankly, this is common sense. It’s worth repeating common sense to people who rescue in areas that have significant dog fighting populations, because you get, frankly, biased easily against the breeds that are most used and forget that some of the common household breeds can bite too.
One of the interesting parts of the day was the demos where he looked at four dogs with varying degrees of issues. He demonstrated a technique for making friends with a chihuaha that would guard aggressively. One of the things he was very sure to do was to make sure the dog was not hurt — it has several spinal injuries and bad hocks. This is internally consistent with Lee’s “do no harm” philosophy (and his critiques of the way Caesar Milan operates). Back on the other paw, Lee critiqued Caesar Milan for not showing a training progression all the way through (including the failures) to anyone during either seminars, training classes, or television programs. Lee got into things with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who would growl in an attempt to get it’s way in certain situations, and when his first attempts failed to create a change, he declined to press it further. Again — it made sense, but it was kind of a pot telling the kettle it was a touch warm in the room…
Overall, the only criticism that I can muster is that Lee seems to move too fast sometimes. By move too fast, I mean that he’s too quick to apply Occam’s Machete to the forest of information, and might be prone to throwing the puppy out with the poo, to butcher another cliche. I wonder how often he has to back up A LOT and try another approach. I suppose I’m prone to recognizing this because I’ve recently tried so hard to avoid this same behavior in myself. I can’t really condone or criticize it in someone else, especially someone else who seems to be about as well-adjusted as your average irishman can get…
All that being said, I’ll probably have more to report in the future. I plan to take some of Henry’s anxiety issues to him. For the record, Eo bit Henry again tonight but I’m 99% certain it was her medical problems. Yesterday, I felt her shoulders crunch as if they were beginning to degenerate too; more on that later this week after some X-rays. In the meantime, we’ll continue to manage it the way we have been, by not letting her and Henry share the same space.
