This is one of the reasons I picked out Raven, my new little black kitty.
From Cracked.com:
#4. The Black Cat Superstition Kills Droves of Adorable Kitties (and Puppies)
Every year, more than 5 million dogs and cats find their huggable asses sitting behind bars in an animal shelter. About half of those get adopted. The other half? Well, for them, the animal shelter is the last stop in their furry little lives. And since we're a website and therefore can't accompany this paragraph with the soul-destroying stylings of one Miss Sarah McLachlan to make it even more heartbreaking, we'll tell you that a huge chunk of those senseless deaths are absolutely thanks to an age-old -- and infinitely dumbass -- superstition.
The color black has been associated with evil and misfortune for untold eons, and we don't mean in the way your asshole great-uncle drunkenly informs you every Christmas -- we're talking about the good old-fashioned "black cat = bad luck" superstition or, as shelter workers call it, Black Dog Syndrome. It refers to the fact that black dogs and cats are typically the very last to be adopted, and are therefore much more likely to be sent to the doggy gas chamber to make room for the constant influx of critters of the fairer variety (just the way your asshole great-uncle would want it).
The outlook for black pets gets even more dire when you consider the fact that this prejudice seems to have blossomed into a full-on kitty racism tree since it first set down its unlucky roots. Not only are people apparently still subconsciously blaming black cats for their lack of winning the lottery, they've also come to associate black dogs with dangerous behaviors. In one 2013 study, participants rated black dogs as not only less friendly (and, therefore, less adoptable) than their yellow or brown counterparts but also far more likely to make a lovely snack out of your face meat.
To be clear, people made this judgment call based on a photo of a black dog that they'd never once met or even asked "Who's a good boy?" Good thing we've never treated our fellow humans with such superficial prejudice, huh?
This may go a long way toward explaining why we seem to automatically judge darker breeds such as rottweilers as exceedingly vicious, despite the fact that they're actually less aggressive than their pint-sized counterparts and that their behavior seems to largely correlate with that of their two-legged companions (we call it the "asshole owner, asshole dog" syndrome). Of course, the fact that they have a conveniently human-face-sized mouth ringed by nightmare-daggers might also have something to do with it.
http://www.cracked.com/article_22148_5-silly-superstitions-with-insane-global-consequences.html
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, my much loved kitty #4.
