My Racist Dog: Only Trusts Whites (Rejected Children's Books)

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That means you might need to go out of your way, and out of your own comfort zone, to ensure your dog makes friends with a virtual rainbow coalition of people!

We both started to chuckle, albeit a little nervously, but I felt it was important to try to lighten the mood a bit. I'm very unconvinced by this - my dog had a real thing about people in hats and would bark wildly at them. A behavior professional not only can develop a customized program for your dog, but also can be your extra set of hands and eyes, giving you feedback, tracking progress, and tweaking the program when necessary. Treats are the obvious go-to here; but don’t forget verbal praise, bellyrubs, running, playing, and sniffing.

As soon as the scary stimulus is out of view, or far enough away that the dog stops paying any attention to the stimulus, the handler stops feeding the treats or the game. Learn to “speak dog” and create calm happy obedience with Calm Energy’s uniquely effective real-world methods. There were a couple of times my dogs went off on one at people; one was a man dressed as a giant licorice allsort doing some promotion.

Roxy is a particularly sensitive dog yet this hasn't bothered her, it might have done when she initially came to live with me but doesn't seem to now. I always wear a hat (and different sorts - cap, trilby etc), so it's really not that he wasn't used to them. My Dad is black and she gets on perfectly well with him, so it's not an anxiety or 'hatred', maybe she recognises the skin colour difference and thinks it's my Dad.Conflicting genetic and archaeological evidence suggests that dogs began to be domesticated in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. It's just another habituation thing - skin colour as a variable just like people wearing sunglasses or hats, or certain colours or shapes of dogs or whatever else exposed to or not in the critical puppy socialisation period. The psychological concept of “mirroring” has been proposed before, and it certainly is a real phenomenon in dogs: mirroring means taking emotional and psychological cues from someone else, and dogs have evolved an amazingly empathetic capacity for this with their human owners. Fight and flight are two heads of the same coin; neither is balanced, peaceful acceptance; and both should be discouraged.

My Mum's dog goes insane every time she sees a black man, full on barking, running round like crazy if off-lead. A handler’s fears, apprehensions, and emotions can travel right down the leash to her dogs, so if you’re harboring some fears of your own about people of certain races, your dog could certainly pick up on it and react.

I’m African American, and since I’d be working with her dog, she knew she needed to be up front about it from the start.