Dogs are racists only if their owners are - man in Nigeria, was attacked and eaten by his hungry dog, boerboels terrify people in Johannesburg, and in Canada some folk take their canine companions to daycare.
I recently moved to a small, cynophilic Canadian city called Kelowna. The first home I visited in this city had a special sofa for dogs. It took me only a few days to discover that people take their dogs to daycare and that dog doctors are well-to-do. In fact, holding funeral services for demised dogs, adopting stray dogs or financially rewarding lost dog finders are not uncommon practices in Kelowna.
As a child, I learned to love dogs from my grandmother; I learned that dogs love to be petted and cuddled. I learned that dogs have an acute sense of smell and that they can identify or remember a person by how they smell. I also discovered that dogs cozy up to you when you rub them gently in the head or lovingly pat their back.
I was stupefied when I read in the news about hungry, young city men who specialised in hunting stray dogs for meat. I learned in the city that some dogs eat raw human faeces and, worse still, that they eat human beings. Then I moved to Johannesburg and encountered dogs trained to hate black people. While I had come across cannibalistic dogs in Ibadan, I was not prepared for the world of racist canine subjects that I became exposed to in Johannesburg.
This was when I realised that in South Africa even dogs are racist — or, better put, dogs in South Africa often become socialised into antiblack racism. Boerboels were notorious for their aggressive attacks on melanated people.
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