MovieChat Forums > General Discussion > Can dogs be racist?

Can dogs be racist?


Can they be biased against or show aggression towards a certain skin colour?

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No, they can't. Because all dogs go to heaven while all racists go to hell. One can't simultanously go to heaven and hell at the same time, right?

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Of course the same people who go on and on and on about racism tend to think religion is a load of hokum, so is there a hell for anyone at all?

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Maybe.

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Yes, of course they can be. Like someone else said, they pick up on the biases of the owner.

One time I was about to cross Park Avenue, when a schnauzer from across the street noticed me, turned around and immediately started barking aggressively at me even before the light had changed, and wouldn't let up until I passed him.

I also had something similar happen when I went to a party. The host's dog was quiet the entire evening, but as soon as I entered the apartment and as soon as I got up to leave, he started aggressively barking at me.

One last story. There's a dealership near my house. Every time neighbors passed by the fence, the guard dogs would violently lunge at everyone and bark, like they were seconds away from attacking. You didn't even have to touch the fence or anything. You just had to walk past them. This happened for years.

One day, they were at the fence calmly greeting someone while he was trying to pet them, and they were so docile that he even was able to stick his fingers through the fence. The guy was a local drifter/homeless guy who happened to be--you guessed it--white.

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So, similar to babies and children? They pick up and learn the behaviors of their parents. Nobody is born racist, I suppose.

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Yes, most definitely. They can sense when their owners are tensing up out of fear or be taught to only hate a specific race or sex.

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I believe so
My beautiful pit bull was rescued near Yankee Stadium by a dog rescuing pal of mine...she was scarred up, completely filthy and half starved
Her violent aggression towards his other rescue dogs was so intense he gave her to me

She would attack ANY animal she encountered and was violently charged up upon the sight of Latino or black men...she nearly gutted the mailman a few times

That area of The Bronx was Blood and Latin King gang territory back then and dog fighting was big business

The vet told me she was probably a 'target dog...'
A 'target dog' is a runty male or female Pit that gets locked in a ring with a champion fighting dog to be mauled and chewed to pieces, for practice...horribly disgusting but true

We gave her a loving home and a good life but that dog was a racist!

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[deleted]

I don't think the idea of "dogs being racist" makes sense when you try and compare it to the modern sense/being of racism in humans.

Dogs like any animal really can show biases, but when trying to compare that to how humans think and operate, I think you're bound to reach an endless area of uncertainty. While I can't add much more, I can say that the so-called "examples" or descriptions people might give to express racism in dogs/their dogs are probably not justifiable. In anecdotes people might tend to gain a wrong or at least biased perspective from evaluating certain things because of how they might draw a conclusion/correlation/specific from witnessing something.

You don't know if the dog may have not liked said person due to their body language, voice tone, etc. (this doesn't all come back to race, no). Dogs are commonly said to have better senses of things like body language and mood extrapolated from it/etc. than people can in some ways at least. In cases where a dog may simply not like 'X' person it could come down to the traits outside of said person's color itself/actual look than just the dog noticing and judging on that single feature only and nothing else. The issue's likely multi-faceted.

I've seen dogs like and dislike people in the same races/ethnic groups/etc. so attributing it as a race-only factor doesn't seem to justify certain individual cases or the like. Sure, some species do show discrimination of different colors/shapes/etc. of others of their kind, but I'm not even sure this could in any form be highly comparable to the (likely) more complex rationalizations of human prejudice/racism.

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