Dogs and non-euros

Our beautiful and very friendly looking, but somewhat irascible dog (Molly), died. We now have a somewhat demonic looking (Kateva) but actually friendlier mongrel. I can't say whether it's this change, or the transitions in American society over the past 15 years, but I have been struck by how many people are afraid of our dog. There seems to be an ethnic distribution to this.

The usual cliche is that black (african) americans are, on average, less accepting of dogs. My limited exposure would not contradict that, but I think it's perhaps inverting the question. I don't see a great deal of difference between black Americans and recent immigrants from everywhere outside of Euro-land.

So the peculiarity perhaps is in western europeans or "Euros", who seem culturally more accepting of dogs than most other ethnic community. There's a long history of working dogs in western europe, and I'm not sure that history occurred elsewhere. If true, it's the Euros who are "odd", not the rest of the world.

Dogs are much more popular in Japan than they were 30 years ago, and even in China there are now pet dogs, so perhaps things will change. I suspect, however, than as America becomes minority-Euro we'll see more "no dog here" signs. It will become harder to travel with the family dog, so we should see even more upmarket kennels ...