Part one of the Malta Dog Life Global Expert Series — where we speak to leading dog trainers from around the world about what their experience means for dog owners here on the islands.
There is a particular kind of chaos that plays out in Maltese apartments. The dog barks at neighbours through the door. It refuses to walk calmly down stairs. It has claimed the sofa as a fortress and responds to the word “no” with what can only be described as philosophical indifference. The owner — usually kind, usually patient, usually someone who has read every dog-training article they could find — is exhausted and confused.
What most of them have not considered is this: the dog is not broken. The dog has simply decided, in the absence of clear guidance, that it is in charge. And that single realisation, according to dog trainers who have spent time studying under Cesar Millan at his Dog Psychology Center in California, changes everything.
Seventeen Years of Pack Leadership Training in Chicago
Midway Dog Academy was founded in 2007 in Chicago, Illinois — the same year Malta introduced its current Animal Welfare Act — by Megan Wallace, whose training journey led her to Cesar Millan’s Dog Psychology Center in California. Over the seventeen years since, the academy has grown from a single Chicago operation into a network of training professionals spanning San Diego, Los Angeles, Nashville, Chicago, and Raleigh, North Carolina. At its heart are Megan and her team, who trained at and visited at his world-renowned Dog Psychology Center and built their entire methodology around what they learned there.
Their approach is rooted in what Millan has spent a career demonstrating: dogs are pack animals who actively seek structure, and when that structure is absent, they fill the vacuum themselves. Usually in ways that humans find exhausting. And, crucially, that dogs find deeply stressful.
“A dog that has no clear leader will take that role itself,” says Wallace. “And most dogs genuinely do not want that job. It creates anxiety. It creates reactivity. It creates exactly the behaviours that owners find most difficult to live with.”
This is not about dominance in the old-fashioned, forceful sense. The Midway methodology, like Millan’s own, is rooted in calm assertive energy — the idea that leadership communicates safety, not threat. A confident, consistent owner tells the dog that the world is manageable. An anxious or inconsistent one tells the dog that it cannot relax.
Why Pack Leadership Matters Even More in Malta
The pack leadership message resonates with particular force in Malta’s densely populated urban environment. Valletta, Sliema, St Julian’s, Birkirkara — these are places where dogs share stairwells with strangers, walk in busy streets lined with parked cars and scooters, and encounter dozens of unfamiliar animals on a single outing. The sensory load on a dog in these environments is enormous.
A dog without clear pack structure in this context doesn’t simply misbehave. It becomes overwhelmed. It barks at everything because everything feels like a threat it must manage alone. It pulls on the lead because the world is chaotic and no one is providing direction. It guards the apartment because it has decided, quite rationally given the information available to it, that the apartment is its territory to defend.
The pack leadership approach addresses all of these behaviours at the root rather than the surface. The goal is not to suppress barking or pulling with corrections, but to change the dog’s fundamental understanding of its role — and its owner’s role — in the relationship.
Three Starting Points for Malta Dog Owners
The Midway Dog Academy team has identified three practical entry points for owners who want to begin shifting the dynamic at home, none of which require expensive equipment or complex training programmes.
The walk. In pack terms, who leads the walk communicates everything. A dog that walks ahead of its owner — pulling, scanning, alert to every stimulus — believes it is leading the pack and responsible for the safety of the group. A dog that walks alongside or slightly behind, calmly, without tension on the lead, understands that the owner is the guide. This single change, consistently applied over several weeks, can transform the energy of the entire relationship.
The threshold. Doors, gates, stairwells — Malta’s apartment buildings are full of thresholds — are moments of transition where pack leadership is either asserted or surrendered. Who goes first matters. An owner who allows the dog to bolt through every doorway is, in pack terms, following. An owner who moves through first, calmly, with the dog waiting for a signal, is leading. It takes seconds to implement. The cumulative effect over days is significant.
Calm energy. Dogs are extraordinary readers of human emotional states — far more sensitive than most owners appreciate. An anxious owner creates an anxious dog. A calm, consistent owner communicates safety. The Midway team emphasises this above all else: the owner who learns to regulate their own energy first will find that the dog’s behaviour shifts to match it, often more quickly than any specific training technique would achieve.
A Different School of Thought
It is worth noting that the pack leadership philosophy is not universally accepted within the dog training profession. Other schools of thought — including the positive reinforcement approach championed by UK trainers and the evidence-based behavioural work gaining ground in Australia — place greater emphasis on reward over structure, and on understanding individual behaviour rather than pack dynamics. We will explore those perspectives in the coming weeks as part of this series.
What the Midway team would say — and what seventeen years of practical work with thousands of dogs across America supports — is that for many dogs in many environments, clarity of leadership is not a philosophical question but a welfare one. A dog that does not know who is in charge is a dog that cannot fully relax. And a dog that cannot relax is a dog that will, sooner or later, make that problem visible.
None of this is complicated in principle. It is difficult in practice, which is why Wallace and her team at Midway Dog Academy have spent nearly two decades working with owners as much as with dogs. The dog, they will tell you, is rarely the problem. The relationship is. And relationships — whether in Chicago or in a Sliema apartment with a view of the Mediterranean — can always be improved.
Expert Profile: Midway Dog Academy
Business: Midway Dog Academy
Founder: Megan Wallace
Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA (also serving San Diego, Los Angeles, Nashville and Raleigh, NC)
Founded: 2007
Speciality: Pack leadership training, board and train programmes, puppy training, behaviour rehabilitation
Website: midwaydogacademy.com
Google Business Profile: View on Google Maps
Malta Dog Life’s Global Expert Series continues next week with a look at the UK’s most decorated dog trainer and what science-backed behavioural methods mean for dogs living in Malta’s British expat communities.