When I saw this picture and the accompanying article (“Junior gets his Service Dog certification!”) yesterday, I immediately understood what all the uproar was about.  Talk about a picture being worth the proverbial 10,000 words!

(Note that the offending page has now been taken down, but you can read a cached version here.  And, if that doesn’t work, click on the photo for a larger screen capture image of the article.)

My first reaction was “OK, can we stop the nonsense now?”  Because Cesar managed to capture in one photo and article so many bad things that I’ve been harping about for so long, and, after getting over my initial anger, I thought, hey, with the amount of visibility he has, maybe we’re gonna be able to finally fix some things.

Because one of two things will happen here.  One, he wakes up, admits the errors, educates himself and then the public about service dogs.  Or, two, he keeps right on the way he’s going and others will do those things for him.  Either way, millions of people  that those of us without that kind of following haven’t been able to reach will now see the problems.

Even if the article has been taken down, there are still many lessons to be gained from it.  Plus we have yet to see what, if anything, will be posted to replace it or his explanation will be (I can’t imagine how he can explain away that photo). And that’s what I intend to do over the next few days – bring up some of the main issues with short explanations of why each is a problem along with links to things I’ve written about those subjects in the past.

Lemme be very clear up front – I am NOT a Cesar-hater.  I’m not a fan, either – I used to watch him a few years ago and really just lost interest.  But whether you love him, hate him, or are somewhere in-between, it would be a HUGE mistake to focus on Cesar – he is not the issue here, and the problems go way beyond just him.

If you hate him, you’re likely to chalk this up to “Cesar being Cesar” – trust me, there are plenty of people who can’t stand him who do the same stuff when it comes to service dogs.  On the other hand, if you love him, you still gotta be smart enough to realize he messed up bigtime here and not make excuses for him (I’ve seen some of that already, too).

I really think Cesar has no idea what he’s opened up here and that the reaction he’s going to get is exactly the opposite of what he was going for, where the public finally says “Enough!”  That’s at least one good thing that can come from this, and let’s hope that it does.

Next: Part 2 – Priorities