Cecil was pondering a question from one of his readers about “racist” dogs - namely, dogs which seem to react badly to humans of one race or more different races than their owners. I know he’s gathered some hard facts on this subject, but the suggestion was made that we should start a thread on the SDMB to see what sort of experiences the Teeming Millions might have had in this area.
So I decided to start this thread to ask on Cecil’s behalf - have you ever known any “racist” dogs, and which race(s) did they hate?
I’ll start by saying I’ve known one racist dog, a dachshund who would always growl and bare his teeth at black adults, and just avoid and sometimes bark at black children. This was of course somewhat problematic as we were living in an area which was demographically about 50% black/40% white/10% other at the time.
I had one that didn’t like black people or cops. Or even a cop working part time as a process server.
OTOH, I have one who adores rough-looking people like bikers but hates bicyclists with the heat of a thousand suns. Helluva watch dog, that one. :rolleyes:
Not in my personal experience, but I’ve met sexist dogs. For instance, when I lived in Washington DC I’d sometimes encounter a woman jogger whose dog would growl at men. It seems to me women sometimes use their dog as personal protection, so it’s really not surprising if a woman is nervous about jogging through a park in the evening, the dog is going to ping on whoever makes its master nervous.
Yes. My parents inherited an abused dog who disliked black people. Fortunately they mostly got him out of it. He was a German Shepherd mix. But further they’ve had the same thing several times as what levdrakon mentions… sexist dogs who don’t like men because they’ve been abused in the past (my folks did lots of rescue).
None of my dogs have been racist! My current dog only gets upset if anyone doesn’t scritch her behind the ears.
I have known one racist dog. He was raised in the backwoods of Vermont and never was exposed to diversity until his family went to Florida on vacation. After 10 years of seeing only white people, this dog went ballistic when it first encountered a black person. I don’t know how it reacted to Latinos or Asians.
Well, my dog was definitely prejudice, but not based on race.
He barked aggressively at any men who had beards. Basically, it seemed like he did not recognize bearded men as friendly humans, so he barked and tried to attack anyone with heavy facial hair.
My guess is that some dogs will perceive Black and White people as separate entities, especially if they have had limited exposure to either race.
When I was in my early 20’s and new to dog ownership, I remember hearing anecdotes about dogs reacting badly to one race or another. At the time, I chalked it up to the dog picking up on the handler’s latent racism or fear.
Not long after that, my girlfriend at the time “rescued” a small poodle by buying it from some rough looking characters on the street near our home in NYC. (Please forgive the quotes – I’d like to differentiate this sort of rescue from rescuing a stray.) They had apparently stolen the dog with a quick resale in mind and weren’t treating him well.
While I was walking the dog the first night, this otherwise seemingly calm dog lunged at some men walking by behind me. They were latino, as were the dog’s captors.
I couldn’t chalk it up to any latent racism on my part, since not only was I unaware of their ethnicity, but I was unaware that they were even there as they were behind me.
We had one once who we surmised was abused by a man or men. She was found cowering in some leaves and rescued to become a fine family pet; a shepherd-collie mix. She was gentle and friendly with children and female adults, but absolutely would not tolerate male adults (young boys were fine). She even was quite hostile to our male neighbor, who fed her biscuits and whom she saw everyday. He never threatened her, but she was always suspicious. In her defense, the tail was often wagging as she barked defensively.
In Vietnam, our US group had a mascot, a medium-small mutt named Smokey. The story was that someone brought him back from Cambodia once on a plane, so we don’t know his early puppy history. He loved all US GIs, but barked loudly at Vietnamese locals if they came anywhere near. Which was doubly strange, as the locals would sometimes retrieve GI uniforms from the trash and wear them, so it wasn’t the dress that set off Smokey. Although we were on the base most of the time, we thought Smokey would warn us pretty well if some VC tried to sneak in the barracks at night.
I love this story. My dachshund reacted badly to men with gruff voices.
Which reminds me, she reacted badly to other dogs, but not all other dogs. It depended somewhat on the breed of the other dog – there were just a couple breeds I knew she was safe to approach. She had a Maltese friend, for example, and Great Dane friend so Malteses and Great Danes generally didn’t send her into barking fits.
I had a black lab/shepherd mix dog who was the epitome of doggy gentility; he was the upper-crust British gentleman, the one reading the paper and drinking brandy by the fire in the exclusive club. If ever there was a human in a dog suit, he was it. He treated everyone with equanimity.
Except Rottweilers and adult black males.
I found him as a stray when he was about a year and a half old, so I can’t speak for his upbringing (I will say he was housebroken and had an excellent grasp of all the basic commands, so someone had obviously taken time to train him), but he would go uncontrollably nuts if he saw a member of his ‘Hate Them!’ group.
I also owned a golden retriever/collie mix that had a definite violent hatred of men, which despite my own attempts and those of several close animal behaviorist friends, simply couldn’t be overcome enough to make me feel comfortable about having him in the environment I was in at the time. I returned him to the pound I’d adopted him from, which thankfully was a no-kill shelter, and I hope that he eventually found a nice older woman owner.
I’m curious if there’s a link between ‘racism’ and the sex of the dog. Both of mine were male, as are (it seems) most of the dogs mentioned in this thread.
There is an episode of King of the Hill on point. Hank’s dog, Ladybird, growls at a black guy who came to fix something at Hank’s house. Animated angst ensues, until Hank figures out the problem. He took Ladybird to the repairman’s home, and the dog was friendly. Turns out she did that because Hank doesn’t like repairmen working on his home, regardless of race. The dog was apparently cueing on Hank’s displeasure at not being able to do his own repair and not on the guy’s race.
I adopted my poodle cross dog as an adult from the city pound. She is a very easy going loveable dog, but for the first year or so she would occasionally growl at older Asian men. She wouldn’t growl at all Asian men, but the only people she would growl at were.
My dog barks at anything that is large and/or dark - blacks, UPS men in brown uniforms, people in large dark hooded parkas, cops in dark uniforms, big beards on big men, etc. It’s obviously not that dogs don’t like blacks per se, but that they don’t like big/dark people who probably set off a defense reaction in animals hardwired to protect themselves against predators. A person I know has said there should really be studies done to see what color/shade of uniform causes what reactions in dogs.
My family’s done a lot of rescue work over the last fifteen years or so—fostering, placing, or outright adopting stray or abandoned dogs. A pretty wide variety of types, breed wise, though we tended towards ones that were otherwise unadoptable. So mostly older dogs, or ones with medical issues, or that were some variety of eccentric (i.e. had some personality quirk, or were just crazy).
Now, we’re relatively pretty remote, so many of the dogs wouldn’t see people outside the family that close or that often. And I’d guess that most people they would see would either be white or hispanic, just by the odds (and we’re standard west-european American mutts ourselves). But I’ve never recalled any of them having a problem with a human based on race, specifically. Mostly their reactions are focused around alerting the pack to a potential threat to their territory, or alerting the rest of the pack to a potential source of snacks and/or tennis balls. Sometimes both, in quick succession.
We’ve had a few “sexist” dogs, IIRC, but most of them actually preferred to be around men, as a matter of fact. And we’ve actually had a couple who didn’t like dogs. But as far as I know, none of them were racist.