You just reminded me of my dog who would growl if you covered your eyes with your hands. Even if you were already there. He’d slink up to you and sniff. Then he’d be okay.
I didn’t know Bugblatter Beasts could be domesticated. 
I don’t know if anybody mentioned anything like this, but my old dog, a German Shepherd (yes, I know) was not exactly racist but would get agitated and bark at anybody speaking Spanish. Now, to be fair, this may have been because the way we got her was that our next-door neighbors (who were Latino) tied her up in the back yard and neglected her, until the day when my stepfather finally decided he’d had enough and hopped over the retaining wall, untied her, and brought her into our yard. The neighbors never said a word, clearly they hadn’t wanted a dog in the first place.
She turned out to be a very good dog for us, long after the neighbors were gone.
Charlie Barker is a Shweenie dog. 1/2 shi-tzu 1/2 hairy wiener dog. I see a trend with wieners here. But he has a cool German/Chinese accent and thinks he’s longer than he really is.
Anywow, Charlie Barker came to us at 1 year old from a Mexican couple whose male didn’t like him and I read that shi-tzus will take off. I thought at first he was a machinist because he always makes a bolt for the door.
I don’t know how abused he was from the Mexican gentleman. But he will bark at random kinds of people. If I pick him up and hold him it calms down but sometimes he will actually nip at the ankles of people. One white lady friend of ours, he will never get accustomed to. UPS, FED EX, MAIL, all get their barking ration. Especially the Mail lady. He’s been cool around black gentlemen. When sitting on the porch he will bark at anyone walking by on the street. And cats. Great watch dog.
I am pretty sure that Caesar Dog Hollerer is correct about all his pack mentality
doggies have. I tried a spearmint. I walked him like Caesar does and went ahead of him out the door and walking and did all Caesar Milan’s tricks like that.
He cooled out on the barking part quite a bit. I believe he thinks he is the pack
leader and must protect me so when I show him I am the pack leader he mellows out. SHWEEEEEEEEEEEENER. :smack:
He is the greatest dog. He uses psychology on us. He also will sniff the mufflers of our VWs. Like they are animals. Talk about odder than ball. Charlie Barker.
Love him to pieces. Please donate to the Charlie Barker fund. One milk bone a month will feed 37 celebritards in rehab that are uglier than dogs like they all are.
My beagle Quincy who died last year had a problem with black women. We found him walking in a rainstorm past our house about 15 years ago. We live close to a large street so we went out and got him. We ran ads in the paper , called the humane society and tried to find who lost him. Finally we realized he was ours. When we took him in to get him fixed the vet had to fix his teeth. He one kicked out and another broken.
He always had trouble with women and especially black women. He could not be picked up. I thought he was thrown ,because it bothered him so much. He would jump in your lap if he wanted to but would not allow you to grab him. When he had a sore neck the vet xrayed him and found pellets in him
. He had been shot before we got him. He went through hell. It was our job to make life better.
If a black woman came to the door ,he was furious far more than just the mailman coming to the door. He was the brightest dog I ever saw though.
Dunno if it is too late to add:
My dog is a Shiloh Shepherd (think big German Shepherd) and I live in the city (Chicago). As such she has many occasions to run across all sorts of people.
For her part she makes no distinction among people based on sex or race. For her (and true to breed) she is a little aloof and lets others make an overture towards her which she invariably happily accepts. It really comes down to the demeanor of the person approaching her and she responds accordingly.
The only time I saw her get anxious at a black person was when walking her at 1a on a not well lit street and a bum appeared nearby from a dark alley. She went stiff and hyper-alert (ears straight-up, all attention laser locked on that guy, poised to move fast yet still as a statue). The guy started approaching (maybe 15 feet away) then saw her and stopped. My dog was not being overtly threatening (no sounds, no movement, no teeth bared) but I think she had a promise of bad things written all over her if you messed with her. He asked for money, I had none (was just walking the dog) and he went his own way.
I have no clue if she picked something up from me or sensed something on her own or just figured this was not a good situation (she is spooky-smart) but it was cool as hell. That said, while the man was black, I seriously doubt his skin color had anything to do with her reaction. I’ll never know but I think if he were white it would have gone down the same way (me included…I make no distinction on skin color at 1a with strange people appearing out of alleys, they universally scare me).
Only time I have ever seen her do that though. Otherwise she is a pussy cat (don’t tell her I said that).
I have over the years owned many dogs. What I found strange was that without my saying or doing anything almost every dog I ever owned barked at black people until I more or less introduced the dogs to the black people who were friends. From then on the dogs were friendly to those black people but only to those black people. They still barked viciously at the rest of the black people they saw. I even had one that I had to roll up the windows to keep the dog from jumping out of the car to try to attack black people he saw on the street.
I have absolutely no idea what caused this to happen but it was common to all my dogs and I did nothing to cause this at all. It just seemed to happen from the first time the dogs saw black people. Just seemed very strange to me. It was not even necessary for the dogs to be on the street for this to happen. They would bark like crazy every time they saw a black when I was just driving down the street. And I lived on the fringe of Washington, DC for a long time and in the Boston area for another long time and also in NYC and its suburbs. There were always a lot of black around and I had a lot of black friends. As I said I had to introduce the black friends to my dog before the dog would stop barking at them.
Just to note, your valuable input has been reflected in Cecil’s current (19 March 2010) column:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2928/are-some-dogs-racist
Thanks from Cecil and Ed!
See, I’m just the opposite. My dog loves black people. He goes nuts whenever we’re out for a walk and run across someone. Now, granted, he’s a gregarious little fella, but I notice that his enthusiasm goes up when we’re near someone who is black.
But he hates people with carts that clunk rhythmically on the sidewalk. And people with capes (yes, we walked by someone with a cape once…I was scared too).
Cecil’s 3/19 column on potential dog racism (“Are Some Dogs Racist?”) overlooks a key feature about dogs: they have a fairly well-developed ability to recognize the features and expressions of human faces. It may well be this ability that is confused by the face of a dark-skinned person, just as it is often confused by sunglasses, beards, or other details that obscure recognition.
A key part of the evolution of dogs from wolves was their acquisition of the ability to interact with human beings not only by scent, but also by recognizing their faces, and also their facial expressions of mood and emotion. (See also.) (Crows have also recently been proven to have sophisticated facial recognition abilities, making dogs’ abilities easier to accept, for those reluctant to do so.)
What does this have to do with dark-skinned people and dogs? Even we humans have difficulty recognizing faces that include a confounding feature of some kind, or features with which we’re unfamiliar. Darkness or distance makes this more difficult for us, for starters, as do certain kinds of cosmetic changes or disguises. (Sadly for celebrities, sunglasses don’t seem to work any more.)
But scientists have now also well-documented the “Cross-Race Effect”, or “interracial-face-recognition-deficit”, whereby even a human being with no demonstrated prejudice against persons with other ‘racial’ characteristics will have more difficulty distinguishing between faces from these other ‘racial’ groups. (I note here for the record that there is no proven genetic or biological validity to the concept of ‘races’, other than as collections of visible appearance features.) Importantly, people can be trained through exposure and can significantly improve their recognition of other groups. In other words, this deficit is neither permanent nor unavoidable.
Moreover, even webcams and facial-recognition software have difficulty recognizing the darkest faces, because of the reduced visual contrast between the key areas of the face, particularly between eyebrows, lips and other skin.
So, why wouldn’t dogs, whose visual acuity is not generally as strong as humans’, have the same difficulties with low-contrast faces? And why wouldn’t a dog raised primarily around white faces have an “interracial-face-recognition-deficit” for black faces, or vice-versa?
While it certainly seems reasonable that other factors could also intrude, such as recognition of fear by either the observed or observing human, the anecdotal evidence suggests that an additional explanation is needed to cover the broader spectrum of situations where dog prejudice seems to occur. Facial recognition failures would seem to cover it.
Pretty much every dog I’ve lived with and known has hated, to varying degrees, people in halloween costumes or masks.
Actually, cats too react negatively to the unusual.
So do a lot of people.
So I go along with that theory, we all tend to be most comfortable with the routine.
Peace,
mangeorge
I don’t have any dogs but while I was serving for my army duty (1 year) I witnessed army dogs barking at locals (kurds). The dogs were friendly with anyone in military outfit and also children and women, but they kept on barking and growling to the local people.
I acquired some raw data today. My dog and I have spent the last two days driving from Indiana to Arizona.
This morning we left the hotel room to take a walk and a black truckdriver was in the parking lot working on his vehicle. Rommel didn’t bark or act hostile.
This evening, we were at a rest area in New Mexico. A younger black man pulled in beside me with his radio loudly playing rap music. I don’t like rap and I was a bit startled because I didn’t realize a car was coming in until it was right beside my truck. The dog barked loudly, and I wondered if he might have picked up something from my body language or face.
He may be racist, though. For some reason, this rest area had a small monument to Jefferson Davis sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy or a similar goup. I tried to coax the Rommelbeast to piss on the monument, but he wouldn’t do it!
I know of one case of reverse discrimination by a dog. I lived in Texas a few years ago and my neighbors were an African American husband and a Latina wife, who was what we would call “full size,” They were getting ready to move out of state and did not want to take their sweet female terrier/poodle mix with them. I arranged for a co-worker, a Latina female, to adopt her. The co-worker/adopter never met the couple.
A few weeks later my co-worker told me that a service man came to service her central air unit and the dog was all over him with affection and tail wagging. I asked if the service man was by chance black and she said yes. So I explained that the dog’s previous owner was black. She then thought a minute and asked me about the body shape of the wife. Apparently her overweight sister would get the same treatment from the dog whenever she came to visit!
I hate to complicate things any further, but my wife (and I must stipulate this point) owns an otherwise very cute West Highland White Terrier, that shows a remarkable dislike of black colored dogs.
Standing one foot tall, he will aggressively respond to black dogs of any size (and German Shepherds). His short posture does not get in the way of his enormous ego and allows him to attack where it hurts the most. His fearlesness demands respect, even if he is a little redneck.
Other white dogs are always greeted friendly. Even if the other white dog shows signs of aggression, he will just walk away without so much as a growl.
The Dalmation living a few streets down confuses him, and colored people don’t seem to bother him one bit.
My first dog (a Shepherd/Schnauzer mix), that my parents picked up from the pound, was aggressive towards people in uniform (how a dog recognizes a uniform is beyond me), boys on mopeds, and my older brother.