the puppy wizard

JUNE 5 - JUNE 11, 1998
Heel!
Yanking Matthew Margolis' chain
by Judith Lewis

"'VEAL LOIN.' 'What?' 'FOR DINNER WE HAVE VEAL LOIN!'"
By way of ****ogy, Matthew Margolis, author, TV personality
and self-anointed "dog trainer to the stars," is explaining why
boarding a dog in his Monterey Park kennel for training is a
wise idea.

Or at least that's the question that was put to him before he
launched this routine, which features Margolis as both bullying
restaurateur and helpless patron, alternating roles by varying
his pitch.

"'What would you like for dinner, sir?' 'Well, fish!' 'NOPE!
VEAL LOIN!' 'But I don't like veal.' 'VEAL IS GOOD.'"

Like most questions put to Margolis, this one does not
have a straightforward answer. But it does have a point:
Like a restaurant with a varied menu, Margolis' National
Institute of Dog Training is an all-purpose operation. "Of
the four ways to train a dog - in-home, in-kennel, classes,
books and videos, we do three," he says.

And in the world of professional dog training, it is the best
all-purpose operation. "We are," he says, invoking another
food metaphor, "the creme de la creme." Disagree with him,
and he will remind you that he has the eternal gratitude of
Whoopi Goldberg.

"'Well, the restaurant next door says, "I have fish, I have
chicken, and I have meat!"' 'THEN YOU DON'T WANNA
GO THERE BECAUSE IF THEY COOK THREE THINGS
THEY'RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT! You cook one thing, that's what you
do!

You go to Fatburger, they just do burgers!' 'Cheeseburgers?'
'Nope, just BURGERS! NO CHEESE!'"

Co-author (with Mordecai Siegal) of Good Dog, Bad Dog
(1973), When Good Dogs Do Bad Things (1987) and his
1995 autobiography, Woof!: The Funny and Fabulous Trials
and Tribulations of 25 Years as a Dog Trainer, Margolis
makes regular appearances on Good Morning America to
advise viewers on how to pick child-safe puppies; ABC's
20/20 featured him recently as an expert on aggressive dogs.

His 1995 PBS special, Woof! It's a Dog's Life, was turned
into a series, Woof! Woof!, by WGBH in Boston. His institute
sees several hundred dogs a year, including Cher's, Madonna's,
and the two golden retrievers that belonged to the late Jimmy
Stewart and his wife, Gloria. "I think of myself as the IBM and
the Intel of the dog world," he boasts.

"I've read and studied and trained thousands of dogs.
People send their dogs across the country to me."

But not everyone is convinced. In Los Angeles, at least,
if you throw a stone into a pack of dog trainers it's hard
to hit one who won't eagerly divulge his disdain. "People
are insecure," Margolis complains. "They want to knock
the competition rather than say, 'He does good work, and
he does good work.' AT&T, GTE, MCI - I don't think they
knock each other. I don't understand it."

Woof!, to both Siegal's and Margolis' credit, is a remarkably
candid account of the events in the 56-year-old Queens-bred
dog trainer's career, including how he abandoned his fleeting
dream of becoming an actor when the celebrated New York
agent Stark Hesseltine caught him lying on his resume.

In his mid-20s and at loose ends, Margolis took an aptitude
test in which one of the questions was: "Would you like to train
dogs for the blind?" He realized in that moment that training
dogs "was a wonderful, valuable thing that I could learn to do
as well as anybody," and he ran to a pay phone to call Captain
Arthur J. Haggerty's School for Dogs, where he studied for six
weeks before starting up the National Institute of Dog Training
in his Manhattan kitchen.

Among his first clients was a Latino family with a mean dog named
Macho, a dog with "four hairy legs as thick as baseball
bats." He charged $200 or $300 to train most dogs back then,
but quoted Macho's owners $1,200, hoping to wriggle out of the
assignment without losing face.

To his ostensible dismay, they accepted, and Margolis had
found himself a profession.

Margolis has promoted himself as an expert in dog aggression
ever since, an identity that has vaulted him beyond mere dog
trainer into the Beverly Hills life of moderate celebrity. On The
David Susskind Show a few months after the publication of his
first book, he subdued a liquor-store owner's violent German
shepherd in a matter of minutes. He later performed a similar
feat on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, after he bragged to Bob
Dolce, Carson's talent coordinator, "that I could take any dog
and make it obedient within one or two minutes."

Leaving aside his skills as a trainer - and the worst of his
enemies would concede that Margolis has a remarkable
way with dogs - it is his emphasis on the potential
viciousness of the random canine that puts Margolis at
the head of the local dog-trainer pack:

He uses fear as a marketing tool.

"One percent of all emergency room visits in this country are
dog-bite related," Margolis has said, on TV and off, to me and
to anyone who asks, to which he sometimes adds, "Kids get
bitten more than anybody over 12, and boys twice as much
as girls.

As a responsible pet owner, don't you wanna go,
'You know what? There's a possibility here.'"

Toward the end of our first interview, he reminds me that
National Dog Bite Week is coming up June 9.

LISA McREE: Matthew, there are so many choices when
you go to a shelter. I know if you're picking a puppy, it's
fairly easy to find one you like, and you start from scratch.

But how do you know when you pick an adult dog that
it'll get along with your family?

MATTHEW MARGOLIS: Well, you don't, Lisa, and the key is
to give personality testing . . . You do a hand-shy test, you do
a boy test, you do a pain-tolerance test.

So we got Joey over here. Come here, Joey. Come on,
buddy. And we're going to actually give him a series of tests.
I've never seen him before. We're going to find out if he's
the right dog for any kind of family.

-Good Morning America, March 2, 1998

Every Saturday at NIDT's Monterey Park kennel, a facility
that houses 100 dogs and employs 35 people, Margolis
holds open house. Dog owners with pets at "doggy camp"
stop in to visit; potential clients come by to have their dogs
evaluated and, almost invariably, to be told their animals
need to stay for a few months.

On the second Saturday in April, I arrive to find Margolis
mid-pitch. "What if that dog bit somebody?" he's asking
an older couple with a black dog that looks like a Lab mix.

"You'd say, 'That never happened before!' Wouldn't you say
that? 'It never happened before.' And there it happened. Right?
And then what've you got? A lawsuit. Right? Do you want a
lawsuit?

Of course you don't." (He'd a used nearly the same words with
me when I brought my 8-year-old Cairn terrier for Margolis to
assess at his West L.A. sales office. "I'm talking to you as a
client now," he reminded me twice, "not as a journalist.")

Not one to dress for the trenches, Margolis' jeans are neatly
pressed, his sneakers sparkling white. He's a small man who
gives an impression of wealth, but also of weariness: His
graying brown hair looks thinner, his face more careworn than
it does on TV; his brow seems perpetually contorted in
consternation.

Under the canopy in NIDT's driveway, Margolis is trying to
persuade an 8-month-old chocolate-colored Shar-Pei puppy, Misha,
to come to heel with repeated sharp jerks on her leash.

Trembling in every muscle, the dog yelps and wriggles, throwing
her head violently from side to side in an effort to escape the
metal correction collar, commonly known as a choke chain.

Meanwhile, Margolis lectures Misha's owners, a neatly dressed
couple in their 30s who drove up in an alarm-equipped sport
utility vehicle, on the tenets of love, praise and affection.
"Most
of my trainers," he assures them, "are female."

A few minutes ago, Misha might have been more compliant.
She arrived at the kennel eager to solicit anyone's affection,
and deemed Margolis as worthy of her love as anyone. As he
squealed in his trademark falsetto - "Ooooh, what a nice little
doggy! Oooh, Uncle Matty's proud!" - she climbed gingerly onto
his lap, wagged her little brown tail and licked his face. But
suddenly Margolis stood up. "Okay!" he announced. "Let's find
out what you really have here."

Snapping a piece of paper against his thigh, he began stalking
Misha with a menacing glare. Bewildered, Misha backed away.
He raised a hand as if to strike her over the head; she cowered
in a dramatic display of terror.

"See how scared she is?" Margolis says. "She needs socialization,
see? Socialization in the kennel. That's
the only way to deal with this shyness."

The owners nod and smile weakly. "We've never seen
her act like that before," they say.

"That's what everybody says," Margolis says, and turns
the conversation from shyness to biting. "It only has to
happen once.

See that dog over there, Ulli?" He points to his own
protection-trained German shepherd. "He's my dog.
If I told you he only growled once, would you feel comfortable?

You always want to remove yourself. It doesn't mean
she's a bad dog, it means she's got problems. Most
dogs have problems. It's social problems - shyness,
aggressiveness - that's the problem."

Margolis gives Misha a break and runs a few demonstrations.
He borrows Jewel, a 10-month-old Dalmatian puppy, from her
visiting family to show what four weeks at NIDT can do. Jewel,
who'd already been performing beautifully with director of
training Sherry Davis, jumps happily over Ulli's back as the
big shepherd holds his down-stay.


"And I've never worked with her before!" Margolis announces.
Jewel goes back to her owners, and Margolis begins the process
of winning Misha back, first by sitting on the ground and
whining like a lost puppy. (The sound attracts dogs by working
on an ancestral force: A whimpering dog means an injured dog,
and an injured dog means leftover food.)

But Misha has freaked beyond his estimation, and he's
finally forced to go against his no-food principles. He
retrieves a biscuit from a treat box and lures Misha toward
him. She takes it. A few more squeals, a little scratching
behind the ears - and eventually the puppy puts her paws
cautiously back on Margolis' right leg.

"Now you wanna see something?" he says. "I don't know if
she'll do it or not, but let's try." He scoots away from the
dog, but her paws remain in his lap. Margolis smiles broadly.
Her owners are suitably impressed.

Margolis recommends Misha for seven to 16 weeks of
socialization, at $395 a week. "Now, you have to be ready
to make that kind of investment," he says.

"I mean, we can take a look at her in six weeks and maybe
do the rest at home."

"Oh," says the man of the couple. "We wanna leave that
up to you."

A few days before I met Margolis, a state humane officer
named Barbara Fabricant had de-scribed for me a scenario
by which I could "trap" him. "Get one of your friends to dress
up really nice and send her over there with a pit bull in a
Mercedes, dripping with jewelry," she advised.

"I'll tell you what he does to these people. The dog is in the
car. He goes over and bangs on the windows, screams and yells
and goes into all kinds of gyrations. The dog thinks someone
is trying to attack his owner's car, so he barks and growls.

Matthew will go, 'You have a lethal weapon here!' When people
hear how much it's going to cost to put the dog in the kennel
for training and tell him it's out of the question, he'll say,
'Well then, you should put this dog down.'"

But there was never a need for a setup. All I had to do was
hang around the kennel for a few hours on a Saturday morning
before a woman drove up in a silver Honda Prelude with two
dogs, one of them recently adopted from a shelter.

Sure enough, Sherry Davis asked her to leave the dogs in the
car, and subsequently approached the car to knock on the
windows. As if on cue, the dogs went crazy, jumping from front
seat to back, snarling and yapping as dogs will do when
they're feeling territorial.

The woman signed the pair up for 12 weeks of socialization.
Never mind that her only concern was about the new dog
chewing up her sofa.

Six years ago, Gail Katz was the woman in the nice car. "He
saw me coming a mile away," she says of Margolis. "My
husband's a surgeon, and I drove up in a Volvo 760."

Her new German shepherd puppy, Leybourne's Prin-cess Ariel,
had already had a hard life. At 5 weeks of age, she'd been
taken from her mother, who was recovering from an infection.
Within days, she came down with parvovirus, a deadly
communicable disease found in dogs under a year old. She
survived only with
a blood transfusion donated by her mother, Cinderella.

five-hour car ride, [the vet] took a pint of blood from her
jugular vein without having to muzzle or sedate her. She just
sat there and let him do it."

Ari completely recovered at 8 weeks, and by 3 and a half
months had grown big enough to cause trouble. Katz had never
owned a German shepherd before. "She frightened me to death,"
Katz says.

"I was afraid she would hurt my 2-year-old son. She was
nipping at my hands, and I would scream and she would nip
more. It turns out she thought my screaming was fun."

On a friend's recommendation, Katz signed up for home training
with NIDT trainer Nikki Litwin at $999 for eight weekly
lessons. But at the end of the eight weeks, Ari was still
nipping, and Katz was nervous. "I wanted someone who is an
authority on dogs," she wrote to Fabricant, "to tell me that
Ari was not dangerous."

In November of 1991, Katz brought Ari to Margolis for
evaluation. "He put on a good show for us. He held her down,
looked into her eyes and elicited her best fear response." Ari
scratched and fought, but never attempted to bite. Katz wrote
that she "turned away in tears."

Margolis diagnosed the dog as dangerously fear-aggressive, and
told Katz, who also had a 6-year-old daughter at home at the
time, that if she was not willing to pay to have the dog
trained at his kennel for four months at $6,300, the dog would
hurt her children, and that she should have the dog put to
sleep.

"He told me she wasn't a bad dog, that she was a good dog with
'major' problems. But he told me I couldn't give her to a
shelter, because she might be adopted, and then she'd be a
danger to someone else's child."

When Katz told him that was too much money, he offered her
one month and 20 home visits for $4,300.

Katz wrote NIDT a check for $2,320 as a deposit and drove
home, "debating whether to bring her to the Humane Society to
be put to sleep so she wouldn't hurt anyone. But I didn't."
Instead, when she got home, she contacted Bob Penny, an animal
handler who currently serves as chairman of the temperament
committee of the German Shepherd Dog Club of America.

"Bob Penny came right over and took a look at her, played with
her, and said, 'There's nothing wrong with this dog.'" He told
Katz to call the bank and stop payment on the check, even
though Margolis told her she had 48 hours to decide.

But even though she'd written the check just two hours
before, Bank of America informed her that the check
had already been cashed.

"I threw such a fit," Katz says, "that they actually took the
money out of his account and put it back in mine.

"I was crying buckets in his office and he let me do that,
knowing he was full of shit," says Katz. "I know Nancy Glass,
who did this show, American Journal. I wanted her to get it on
film. I wanted to set him up. But I could never get it all
coordinated."

"It's very annoying to me that you're making me defensive,"
Margolis responds when I ask him why he recommended that
Ari be put to sleep. "I didn't say that to Gail Katz. I said
the dog is genetically messed up. I thought the dog had a
genetic problem, and I was concerned about her children. I
didn't think that dog would be safe with kids."

I tell Margolis that Ari, who will be 7 in August, has since
been trained to obey on hand signals, and has grown up with
the children and never hurt anyone. "Look," he says, "they
called me with a problem, didn't they?

Obviously they had a concern. She brought the dog to me. I
don't solicit those people. If a dog is growling, whatever the
reason is, can you guarantee that it will never happen again?

Never. At the expense of somebody getting hurt, you don't do
that. A lot of people are in denial about that."

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who's quoted on the back of Woof!
as one of Margolis' fans, knows too well about the dog that
only bites once.

She bought that dog from Margolis. "I wrote that quote back
in the days when I thought things were going well," she tells
me on a four-minute news break from her radio show. "And I
regret it every day of my life."

Schlessinger says she paid Margolis "somewhere on the order
of $15,000 to $17,000" to train her first German shepherd
puppy, Lazor. But after several months in Margolis' hands,
"the dog was becoming more and more uncontrollable." In lieu
of a refund, Schlessinger traded Lazor for a fully trained
protection dog imported from Germany, which Margolis would
provide and promised to train for three months.

"The minute the dog was off the plane he said, 'Come and get
your dog,'" Schlessinger remembers. "I said, 'I thought you
were going to work with her.' He said, 'She's already great,
come and get her.' I said okay. I named her Esta, you know,
like the Esta bunny."

By all accounts, Schlessinger lived up to her commitment to
work with the dog, develop a relationship, drill her in
obedience. "I'm very diligent," Schlessinger says, "as you
might imagine. I worked very hard with her."

(Margolis agrees. "She was out there with the dog every day
for an hour.") But she could do nothing to control Esta. The
shepherd was "ferociously dog-aggressive," according to
Schlessinger. "She wanted to attack every dog she saw,
including the Pekingese across the street. One day I was
walking her, and a guy 25 feet away from me was walking
a Dalmatian.

You know how they are, just lumps of spots. The guy's dog
did not even look at me, but Esta went to kill the dog
anyway." When Schlessinger tried to restrain her, Esta turned
her jaw on her handler's thigh. "Luckily, I was wearing jeans,
so her teeth didn't get through the denim. But I had a
black-and-blue thigh for a week.

"I called [Margolis] and I was unglued," Schlessinger says.
"I was scared of her; I thought she was going to end up
attacking me."

Margolis took the dog back, but he did not apologize or admit
any wrongdoing, nor did he refund any money, according to
Schlessinger.

Margolis isn't so sure. "I don't know the file, but I don't
think that's true," he told me. "I don't know. I'd have to
check." But he does admit that Esta "wasn't the right dog for
her.

You try to match the dog with the person. You try to think,
what's the lifestyle, what's the personality? It was always
'protection, protection' with her. She seemed very concerned
about protection."

In some ways, it makes sense that Schlessinger turned to
Margolis, whose advertising slogan was once "Love, Affection,
Obedience, Protection." In other ways, it's puzzling: The only
negative press Margolis had ever received involved a
protection dog he sold to the actor John Candy for $19,000 - a
dog that Candy alleged suffered from chronic diarrhea.

Candy and Margolis settled out of court, and a few months
later Margolis sold the dog again, for $17,000. (The new owner
is perfectly satisfied.)

The word protection has been dropped from Margolis' publicity
campaigns -one of the current slogans reads, "The 11th
Commandment: Never Hit Your Dog" - but Margolis still gives
the impression that protection dogs are part of his business.

On a kennel visit, I tell Margolis about meeting Jean-Claude
Balu, a Fontana-based trainer who titles dogs in Schutzhund,
a dog sport closely related to protection-dog training. Balu
let me wear the sleeve and "take a bite" from his Belgian
Malinois, Faust, who recently placed 14th in the World
Schutzhund Championship in Slovakia.

Margolis is unimpressed. "We do that kind of stuff here," he
claims. "Ulli's a Schutzhund III."

But Margolis, by his own admission, didn't train Ulli. In
fact, he doesn't do protection training at all - which hasn't
stopped him from sitting on the three-man board that licenses
protection-dog trainers for the city of Los Angeles. (The Los
Angeles Department of Animal Regulation established the
licensing program in early 1980 after animal-rights activists
exposed guard-dog suppliers with nine-page rap sheets.)

When I ask Margolis about the board, he can't remember what
it's called but defends it anyway. "It's called the Sentry Dog
.. . . the Sentry Dog . . . I've forgotten what it's called."
(For the record, it's the Sentry Dog Licensing Board.)

"A lot of people say it's bogus," I tell him.

"Bogus? Who says it's bogus?"

"Jean-Claude Balu for one. Mike Herstik, too."

"Who?"

"Mike Herstik," I repeat, referring to a local protection-dog
trainer who, in fact, once worked for Margolis on contract.

"Did he go there? Did he get licensed?"

"Yeah. He gets one every year."

"'Bogus.' It's always about 'bogus.' What do they do to
legitimize the industry? I had to go through the test. At
least it says you've had 2,000 hours of dog training. You
check the references. At least you say, okay, you're a
legitimately responsible person, as opposed to some guy who
says, 'Yeah, hey, I train dogs, I'm a guard-dog trainer,' then
he trains the dog wrong and he bites somebody. What do you
have? They'd rather knock it. Why don't they improve it?"

But no one else - not state humane officer Barbara Fabricant,
not even Margolis' fellow board member Richard Karl - praises
the licensing process.

"I think it's okay," says Karl, who owns Hollywood Dog
Training in North Hollywood. "It could be improved. The
Department of Animal Regulation is short-staffed and
undermoneyed to be doing what they're doing.

"The truth of the matter is, we used to have more meetings,"
Karl says wearily. "Obviously nobody's been up for licensing
in a while."

"Why do these television programs keep having him on as an
expert when I keep sending them these letters?" Steve
Mendelsohn says over lunch at Solley's in the Valley, handing
me a folder full of do***ents - letters, press clippings, a
Buzz interview, a storyboard for an episode of Hard Copy
detailing how a reporter could catch Margolis in his act.

"I want Oprah to see these letters. I want to have a
head-to-head competition with Matthew on Oprah, using his own
dog."

Mendelsohn, a tall, imposing figure with a thick, black head
of hair and a beard to match, carries around press clippings
about other dog trainers, too, including the Los Angeles Times
report on Angela Chan, who was mauled by the German shepherd that
Howard Rodriguez of California K-9 sold her
for $14,000 - mauled on the premises of Rodriguez's facility,
during a session with a handler. (The case was settled out of
court, and both parties have agreed to silence.) But he reserves
the better part of his vitriol for Margolis, mostly because of a
German shepherd named Dino that Mendelsohn became fond
of over the few months in 1994 he worked for Margolis as a
protection-dog trainer.

He alleges that, after years of confining the dog to a kennel
and refusing to sell him for anything less than $5,000,
Margolis had Dino euthanized in April 1996. "I heard it took
two shots to put him down," he says. "This was a dog that did
not want to go."

Margolis doesn't deny that this happened, but he stops short
of admitting it, too. "What I feel - I don't want to respond
to that. I'm being put on the defensive without having clarity
about this conversation. To remember the exact facts about
this right off the top of my head is impossible. I'm not
saying there wasn't a Dino. But I don't have any of the facts.
It sounds like people have sour g****s about things."

But it's this tendency to recommend euthanization to worried
potential clients that fuels Mendelsohn's anti-Margolis
faction, which includes Kevin Ryan, a dog trainer who co-owns
the West Hollywood pet-supply store Animal Crackers, and
Barbara Fabricant.

A week after my lunch with Mendelsohn, I drive out to meet
Fabricant in the flat, forgotten San Fernando Valley suburb of
Winnetka, where she lives in a house lined with mirrors,
twinkling lights, climbing vines and portraits of various
yogis throughout history. "Here's what you can get him on,"
she says excitedly as she hands me a piece of faxed paper, the
text of California Senate Bill 1991, "Animal Cruelty." "What
would be great is if you could write a story that would get
him on Hard Copy. Do you think they might pick it up? Do you
know he charges $3,000 to housebreak a dog? How can he
housebreak a dog when the dog hardly sees the outside of the
[kennel]?"

Over the course of her 22-year career as a humane officer,
Fabricant has rescued thousands of animals from abusive
homes. She keeps a photo album of survivors: a pit bull that
had been tied to a tree all day while kids were sent to taunt
him with sticks; a shepherd mix that survived on a steady diet
of tortillas and was discovered near death from malnutrition.

"We found her another home," Fabricant says proudly, "and
she turned into the most magnificent dog." In the album is
also a grisly photo of the infamous pug that was found skinned
alive in an 80-year-old woman's back yard. "It was a big media
thing, but the chances of finding out who did it were like
looking for a snowball in Hades. So of course they tried to
blame it all on coyotes.

But look at those straight lines," she says, pointing to the
cut-away portion of the dog's skin. "That was no coyote."

In another photo, dating back to the '70s, seven dogs lounge
in various positions around Fabricant's living room. "I just
lived with them," she says of the dogs she rescued. "I never
had to train them. They all just behaved." Her last two dogs,
a German shepherd and a border collie, passed away in early
March of this year. They were, respectively, 17 and 21 years
old.

"My son died last August," Fabricant confides. "Shot in the
head."

"Wow," I say, stunned. "It's really been a year of loss for
you."

"Yeah. But losing the dogs was the worst of it. My son, he was
in the Hell's Angels. You live by the sword, you die by the
sword."

By that logic, one could deem dogs more worth defending than
humans in general, and dog trainers in particular. "You could
walk out in the street right now and say you're a dog trainer
and start getting business. And no one would say you can't.
You see trainers using these metal choke chains who don't know
how to use them.

These trainers - these idiots - they yank the hell out of the
dog, and they end up with severe, irreparable throat damage."
But the public is to blame, too: "People think a trainer's
word is gospel," says Fabricant.

"They forget that 90 percent of them are just in it for the
money."

Steve Mendelsohn has a T-shirt that says, "The only thing two
dog trainers can agree on is what the third dog trainer's
doing wrong." Margolis' mentor, Captain Haggerty, says it a
little differently: "If one guy trains dogs on top of the
Empire State Building between 1 and 1:30 in the afternoon,
then he'll say that's the only place to train dogs. Let me say
the following: Matthew Margolis is not a god. I don't agree
with everything he says. But he's extremely successful, and
people hate him for that."

With all the controversy over Margolis' business dealings,
there's scarcely time for anyone to discuss whether he can
train a dog. Mendelsohn and Herstik say his training
techniques are from the '50s, that his "love, praise and
affection" training is in reality based on heavy-handed
correction.

Dan Tambourine of Training With Tambourine, which offers
in-home and in-kennel training as well as weekly obedience
classes at Urban Dog, says that Margolis' disdain for food
rewards amounts to abuse. "Most 'traditional' trainers," says
Tambourine - who refers frequently to the behavioral studies
of B.F. Skinner - "profess to be caring, loving trainers who
don't use punishment, but they're all liars. Not giving a food
treat is punishment. Not giving a dog a pet is punishment."
Haggerty defends his former student's dog-training abilities,
but not even he buys the "love, praise and affection"
advertising. "That's the salesman talking, not the dog trainer
talking. Margolis uses whatever works."

Whatever works didn't work, however, on Lori Depp's German
shepherds, Caesar and Boo, and by the end of her dealings with
Margolis, she, too, was writing letters to the Channel 2
Action Team hoping to inspire an expose.

The day she sprung the pair from Grace Konosky German Shepherd
Rescue, they were out of control. "If I'd have been
on skis," she says, "I'd have been to my car in two seconds."
After 14 weeks (at $9,700) in Margolis' kennel, they were
still out of control.

Six months ago, Boo dragged Depp halfway down the
block on her back, and if she wants to take either dog
to the vet, she has to pay someone to help her load the
dogs in the car.

"So if he's such a good trainer," I ask Haggerty, whose huge,
bald presence is an icon in the dog world, "how could a dog
spend 14 weeks in Margolis' kennel and come home untrained?"

"My initial off-the-top-of-my-head reaction is that the owner
is completely spastic, or the dog is a complete outlaw," he
says. "I can't believe he would spend 14 weeks with a dog and
not train it."

"The truth is that those dogs are beautifully trained,"
Margolis insists. According to him, it was Depp who failed by
not working her dogs at home.

"There's only so much a dog trainer can do," he says.