Look at the photo. That is the face of a creature people have been nervous about for hundreds of years. Witch hat, bow tie, total calm. Not exactly the devil's messenger.
Still, the black cat is Halloween's official mascot, and that fame comes with old fears attached. So every autumn the same question comes back: are black cats in danger, and do people avoid adopting them?
The Halloween ban that backfired
For years, many animal shelters in the US had a simple rule: no black cat adoptions in October. The idea was to protect them from people who might want a 'prop' for a party, or worse.
Dr. Marty Becker, a well-known vet and columnist, called these bans well-intentioned but wrong. He found no evidence that black cats are used in rituals around Halloween. When cats go missing, he wrote, cars, poison and trapping are the usual reasons. "There is no evidence that black cats are at special risk" if they are adopted around Halloween, said Francis Battista, cofounder of Best Friends Animal Society.
Battista also pointed at the hidden cost. Keeping cats in cages for a whole month means less space for everyone else. Bans like this, he said, put "more cats of every color at risk" in crowded shelters.
Katherine Shenar of San Diego Humane Society summed it up in a line shelter workers still quote: "What we had done was protect the animals to death." Many shelters flipped the rule. Now some of them run black cat adoption events right in October.
So are black cats adopted less?
Here the science gets interesting, because two studies seem to disagree.
In 2013, Dr. Lori Kogan and colleagues at Colorado State University went through years of records from two shelters: nine years from Larimer Humane Society and 18 years from the Dumb Friends League in Denver. Black cats did wait longer for a home. Adult black cats stayed about four to six days longer than cats of other colours, and the pattern held for kittens too. "Days matter" in a shelter, the researchers said, because longer stays mean more stress and fewer free spaces.
The same year, the ASPCA looked at it from another angle. Black cats made up 33% of the cats arriving at shelters and 31% of the cats adopted. In other words, they go home at almost the same rate as everyone else. There are simply more of them, so a room full of black cats looks like 'nobody wants them'. Inga Fricke, then at the Humane Society of the United States, explained it as a matter of perception: more black cats coming in makes it look like they're being left behind.
The real villain: bad photos
Kogan herself didn't blame superstition. Her guess was much more modern: black cats "simply don't photograph as well." In a dark corner of a cage, or on a website full of tiny pictures, a black cat becomes a shadow with two eyes.
Her advice to shelters was marketing, not magic. Better light, better photos, a little personality in the description. Maybe even a witch hat.
So if you see a black cat crossing your path tonight, relax. Statistically, the worst thing that can happen is that you end up with a very handsome roommate who is terrible at photos.