Posted on 04/10/2008 7:56:22 AM PDT by libstripper
NEW YORK (April 9) - When Aaron Jones walks Gozer, his Rottweiler-hound mix, people cross the street to avoid them. Mothers scoop up their children. A lost motorist once rolled up the windows and drove off after spotting the dog. One woman screamed.
"He's the nicest dog I know," said Jones, 33, of Oakland, Calif. "It's hard to understand all the fear."
Gozer isn't aggressive and doesn't look mean or bark, Jones insists -- people are afraid of the dog purely because it's big and black. As a puppy, Gozer was passed over for at least a month before Jones took him home.
According to animal shelter officials, big, black dogs like Gozer have more trouble finding a happy home than do other dogs. Some shelters even have a name for it: "Big black dog syndrome."
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.aol.com ...
My mom is morbidly afraid of large dogs of whatever color. As a child she lived in a rural area troubled by rabid dogs. She will be 79 this year so it goes back a bit. At any rate, the kids in the neighborhood had to walk to school in a tightly-knit group with little kids on the inside and older kids on the outside armed with sticks. My mom happened to be one of the older kids. We had small dogs in my growing-up years but mom was deathly afraid to go near a large dog. Frozen evaluation, sure, but I can see where she got her phobia.
The dog in your picture’s foreground perfectly illustrates one of the problems with black dogs mentioned in the article—it’s impossible to make out the details of his face. My solution to this for people who are photographing dogs for adoption is to over expose the black dogs by about 1/2 f stop. That should be easy with a digital camera because you get immediate results and can, without cost, delete any pictures that don’t come out right.
Those aren’t dogs... they’re hyenas.
As for the guy in Oakland. I’ll lay you odds, he had a big spike collar on his dog and uses a heavy chain as a leash. People probably cross the street when they see him with or without his puppy.
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