I guess the subject frames the question pretty well, but perhaps some background might help.
I’m a big, ugly white guy living in S. Korea. There aren’t too many white guys around here, so I don’t blend… I’m used to being stared at on my frequent beer runs by Korean humans (they know a damned furriner when they see one!), but I have noticed that dogs are staring at me too!
I’m not kidding! I will be walking down the street, minding my own business, and see a dog blithely trotting along (insert obligatory dog-in-Korea joke here)… said dog will ignore all the Koreans around, but on catching sight of me will stop dead in its tracks, and STARE. I know I’m not imagining this, as Astrogirl noticed it tonight as well.
So, can dogs actually visually distinguish a white guy from a Korean? Or do I offend in some other way? What’s going on here?
I read in a book about the Japanese internment camps (USA, WWII) that volunteers of J ancestry were used in an experiment to see if dogs could be trained to attack Japanese. Worked great; only problem was that the dogs cheerfully attacked everything else, too. Experiment ended.
So at least using WWII-era training methods, dogs couldn’t or wouldn’t distinguish between Japanese and whites.
I would think that your smell is very different from that of a standard Korean, and the dogs are just confused by that funny smelling hominid.
Apart from that, I know that dogs can distinguish people’s skin colours… at least mine was able to. He was not kind to any dark coloured people, and he would bark whenever a man (this was only against males) of colour walked nearby… and it was by sight, since we were inside a fourth floor apartment, with all windows closed.
I used to live in a duplex in east Dallas (near where the billboards are in Spanish). My landlord lived in the other half of the duplex and had this big dumb chucklehead of a dog named Chewie. He looked to be part pit bull and part golden retriever - he had G.R. style fur but that wedge-shaped shark head that pit bulls have, softened somewhat by the G.R. DNA. Happy, friendly, cheerful, stupid dog. Mike had taken him off the hands of some neighbors who couldn’t afford to keep up with the way Chewie ate.
Chewie loved most everybody, but he did NOT like young Hispanic men - they brought out the pit bull in him. And if the young Hispanic man in question was wearing a baseball hat, Chewie would go BALLISTIC - he’d start biting the chain-link fence trying to chew a hole in it so he could go after the guy.
Now, clearly Chewie had had a bad experience as a pup with someone who fit the description. But he was VERY specific in the people he wanted to kill - white guys in baseball hats, even if they had dark hair, did not set Chewie off. So I’m forced to conclude that he, at least, knew a Hispanic guy when he saw one.
Back around 1970 there was a book by a French journalist living in America about the state of race relations in the U.S… In it he told of his experiences after adopting a dog and learning it had apparently been trained by its previous owner to attack black people.
Why wouldn’t they be able to? Have you ever seen how some dogs react to their family members on halloween, when one is wearing a mask? Dad smells the same, but looks different. Arf,arf.
Nothing racial in that, just different. Many dogs don’t like different. Doesn’t mean a thing except that they feel threatened.
I’m a little about this subject, I guess because many of the bigots I grew up with would use that to support their own prejudices. Dogs are smarter than people in some ways.
Am I ranting? Sorry.
Peace,
mangeorge
If you wear different clothes, use different (Western) detergent, you smell quite different.
If you don’t eat the same food in the same proporations as other Korean folks, you certainly smell different. (Eating any multi-vitamins?)
Dogs have more sensory organs (so it’s said) in their noses than we have in our eyes. If your B.O. is distinctive, it’s a fashion statement no self-respecting dog could ignore.
White Dog (1980) – starring Kristy McNichol, Sam Fuller and the late Paul Winfiled – offers a look at this phenomenon. Romain Gary is listed at IMDb as one of the writers – is this your Frenchman, slipster?
I once read in a book about a weird dog behavior. Sometimes a dog would go crazy if he saw his owner wearing a new hat.
The dog is used to one thing, the color of Korean people. So when a white guy appears, he’s going to stare, and probably bark when you get close. I think there was a discussion on this board about a dog that would bark whenever it saw black people.
If you observe how those people interact with their dogs, and imitate that behavior, many dogs will warm up to you pretty quickly. Dogs in general actually like people. Go figger!
Peace,
mangeorge
I had a pit bull bitch that didn’t like stocky, dark-skinned men. It made no difference if they were of hispanic, asian or african ancestry. She liked almost everyone else instantly. I adopted the dog when she was 9 months old, so I have no idea if she was kicked or threatened by someone with a dark complexion as a pup.
Animals are also very sensitive to what their people or their “pack” thinks. If a dog is with its owner, it could be picking up on the owner’s curiousity or hostility. Even if the dog was roaming around free, it might notice what the center of attention is. [dog thought] What’s everyone staring at? Oh, must be the big pale guy. He smells funny- less kimchee and spam. Now, how can I get me some food out of this situation?[/dog thought]
NO, i’m not kidding. I have a black friend that will come over and Buddy (my dog) will go nuts. I also take him in the car with me frequently and he growls and barks at black people, only black people. As for background, I bought him as a puppy, he has had no other owners. When I first got him I was living in a very small town in WV that had very few people other then white hicks. So until I moved to Vegas just over 2 years ago he had never seen a black person. To top it off he is a small pure white Bichon. Stupid cracker.
When I first got my puppy, I lived in Denver. My circle of friends was mostly white; my neighbors were mostly Anglo and Hispanic. Denver is a very white city; we didn’t even encounter African-Americans at dog parks.
For a few weeks, I dated a wonderful black woman. She came over to my house to pick me up for our second date. Bailey greeted her like anyone else.
Fast forward a couple of years, when I move to Florida. Bailey encounters more African-Americans, and there’s no problems at all. However, it’s the minorities that don’t like Bailey – here’s a cute fuzzy white dog, and about half of all African-Americans and Hispanics of Mexican or Puerto Rican descent we encounter are absolutely terrified of her. In Denver, Hispanics weren’t afraid of dogs, and the few black people we saw had no problem either. Completely different story in Orlando.
If I’ve got Bailey with me while I’m shopping at Lowe’s or Home Depot, little white kids will almost always yell “PUPPY!” when they spot her, and do everything they can to make their way towards her. Little black and Hispanic kids almost always run away screaming in terror and crying for their mommies, as if they’ve seen something worse than the boogeyman.
Is there a type of person that Bailey doesn’t like? Yup. Rednecks. No problem with whites, considering that I am one. However, if someone is a stereotypical redneck, scruffy and rough around the edges, Bailey doesn’t want to have anything to do with them.
