Good one
Every living animal has a learned response to stimulus. When animals experience pain, they associate that pain with the circumstances surrounding it, but the association formed isn’t always the correct one.
When my sister put in an invisible fence for her dog, part of the training involved putting little plastic flags along the line of the wire, so the dog could tell where not to go.
Which worked fine. But the dog developed a terrible fear of little plastic flags in every context, the ones that the utility locators would use to indicate underground facilities, the ones that the neighborhood association would put out to mark the curbs for the snowplows, it didn’t matter.
And as he was a 150 pound Dane mix, his panic reaction wasn’t always easy to deal with.
And it happens with people.
There was a stink, some years back at the Mall of America. The inner city youth of color were claiming that they were being profiled by the mall security, who were following them around. The mall security freely admitted it, saying that they were concerned about shoplifting.
The problem is that the average shoplifter is a middle-aged white female, not a teen-aged black male.