Talk about rabbit holes (the kind the dogs go running down). Twas just a tweet flying by
Let's Talk About Dogs! http://t.co/HnYM7THV21
— Brendan Murphy (@dendari) May 12, 2015
This, published on imgur, is way more than image sharing.
BePawsitive, self proclaimed dog lover writes:
This post showed up on the front page a few days ago. It shows Cesar Millan being bitten by a yellow lab on his show. This lab, Holly, had an issue with guarding food, and Cesar was brought in to fix it.
By and large, Cesar is not well respected among dog trainers and behaviorists. His methods and theory are extremely outdated and can be dangerous for dog and human alike. He has no legitimate training or certification.
My biggest problem with him is that for a supposed professional he can’t read dogs at all.
When commenters on this post pointed out Cesar’s poor methods and how avoidable this bite was they were mostly downvoted.
It’s too much to explain in 140 characters so I created this post to analyze what went wrong.
View the whole clip on youtube, if you like, but I’ll be breaking it down in gifs.
What unrolls is essentially a well written and illustrated blog post. It has over 140,000 views and over 2400 comments.
Jim Groom has already salted my interest with a review of the imgur GIF making tool — it simplifies the approach we have taught in ds106 by bypassing the download clip from youtube and trim in MPEGStream clip. That’s for a future post.
But I really like what BePawsitive has done to show the usefulness of GIFs to show a process, to focus on a key element of a video– we can see more clearly the dog’s reactions to this human mishandler. There are many great GIFsplanations here.
I slowed this one down a bit and labeled a couple signals so they’d be easier to spot.
Cesar is explaining something about her relaxation to the owner, gesturing close to her face. She’s still giving signals that he’s ignoring. She’s averting her eyes from him, and even gives a “whale eye” before the bite.
For some reason, Millan reaches out and places his hand on her nose. As he’s reaching her ears move back, but I’ll admit that it’s quick and less noticeable.
She snaps at him, and he backs away. Then, defying all logic, he immediately moves back toward her, and THAT is when she bites.
She stated “Leave me alone!” as clearly as she knows how, but he didn’t listen so she reacted.
I am not quite advocating imgur as a blog platform. It’s just interesting to see what it is doing. The story is impressive:
Imgur is the Internet’s visual storytelling community. Millions of people visit Imgur every day to explore, share and discuss the best visual stories the Internet has to offer. More than 60 billion images are viewed on Imgur each month, and Comscore ranks Imgur among the top 100 sites in the US.
From 2009 “Founder Alan Schaaf launches Imgur in his Ohio University dorm room as a simple, no-limits platform to shares images online.” to 2014 “Imgur raises $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz and reddit, its first external investment.”
And they say higher education is broken 😉
