Klan Dog: Can Rover Be Racist?

When mentally disturbed 58-year-old New Yorker Andrew Owens stabbed a 4-year-old guard dog, named Jenna, in the eye for barking at him, it looked like just another sad case of animal cruelty.

But Owens, in attempting to supply an explanation for his attack, presented a twist to the tale that has people across the Internet contemplating the ridiculous: Can dogs be racist against minorities?

Both Owens and Jenna worked at a Yonkers, N.Y., heating oil delivery company, with Owens as a delivery man and Jenna on security. The day of the fateful confrontation, Owens "egged on" the barking dog and lunged at it, according to police who said Owens then pulled out a 9-inch folding knife and slashed the dog across the face from the top of the right eye across to the eye socket.

Much of the blame for the incident should be heaped upon the dog's owner, Paul Tocco, who allegedly told Owens that the dog didn't like black or Hispanic people.

To me, the dog seems to have more sense than both humans involved in this race tale, which exposes our obsession with all things racial in this country.

Yes, dogs can have a strong disdain for others, and we can accept that without question. Some dogs don't like any other dogs. Other dogs can't stand little children or people who walk with canes or walkers. Not an issue.

But when a story raises the possibility of Rover turning racist against people of color, it conjures up a host of questions, situations and possibilities that have been fueling Internet chat rooms for days:

"Dog lovers, like myself, generally want the entire matter dropped. The subject makes us uncomfortable since dogs catch enough hell from people without being tagged as racist."

"People insisting dogs can be racist recall how ol' Sparky down the street used to bark at the black mailman but never barked at the white UPS driver."

"White people, trying to be funny, [are] suggesting that racist dogs must know something we humans don't know."

Black people seem a little less embracing of man's best friend than whites.

The pictures of black civil rights workers being attacked by police dogs in the Southern states probably did little to enhance their reputation among some black folks.

And when the 1982 movie "White Dog," starring Paul Winfield and Kristy McNichol, about a dog trained to attack blacks, was released, it was the protests of the NAACP, which claimed the film carried an anti-black message, that delayed the film's distribution.

But back to Jenna.

Let's forget for a second that the dog was doing his job (barking at an intruder) and look at some science.

Most animal behaviorists agree that dogs can be taught to react against sets of individuals. A dog could also learn to dislike individuals if they suffered some trauma by members of a group at an early age.

The dogs' vision can also play a role. Though dogs can see colors, they do so with far less sharpness than humans. I've read a report where a dog's eyesight had deteriorated to the point that dark moving objects appeared to be big scary moving blobs. Jeeze! I would bark at that too.

So, yes, a dog can react negatively to certain people. But I refuse to call a dog racist.

That plays in to a silly notion that gives aid and comfort to those who would injure and abuse dogs for no good reason. In my view, anyone who attacks a defenseless animal is just a few steps away from attacking a defenseless person.

I would rather have Jenna, barking and all, as my neighbor than Owens any day of the week.

Check out "White Dog" here: