Today is National Black Dog Day, I have written about black dogs several times over the years. Like many people involved in animal welfare I have also written about Black Dog Syndrome, the idea that black dogs are routinely overlooked in shelters simply because of the colour of their coats. It is something we hear all the time.
Black dogs don’t photograph as well. Their expressions are more difficult to see. People find them intimidating. They don’t stand out on adoption pages. Old superstitions surrounding black animals still influence us. All of those explanations have been offered for years & I have repeated some of them myself. But there is a problem.
When you actually start looking at the research into Black Dog Syndrome the evidence isn’t nearly as straightforward as the story we have been telling. Some studies have found black dogs appear to experience a disadvantage. Others haven’t found one at all.
One study looked at four years of records from two animal shelters in the United States & found black dogs didn’t remain available for adoption significantly longer than dogs of other colours. They weren’t euthanised at a significantly higher rate either. What did appear to matter was age & breed. Older dogs waited longer & experienced poorer outcomes while dogs categorised as bully breeds were also disadvantaged. Another study looking at dogs in two no-kill shelters in New York found coat colour didn’t affect how long dogs waited either. Age did & size & breed grouping also played a part.
Then we have research which points in the other direction.
A study involving more than 7,000 dogs at a public shelter in Kentucky found completely black dogs did have somewhat lower odds of adoption & a higher risk of euthanasia once other factors were considered. But even there colour wasn’t the biggest influence. Breed category, size & whether a dog was considered purebred were stronger predictors of what happened to them.
Interestingly that research didn’t find evidence supporting the often repeated idea of Black Dog Syndrome either.
Research involving shelter dogs in the Czech Republic produced another result. There black dogs did experience the longest median wait for adoption.
So what does all of this tell us?
Probably that we need to stop talking about Black Dog Syndrome as though it is a universal fact.
There may be shelters where black dogs genuinely are overlooked. There may be communities where colour influences people’s choices & there will undoubtedly be individual adopters who choose one dog over another partly because of appearance. But something happening in one shelter doesn’t mean it happens in every shelter. Something appearing in one dataset doesn’t make it universally true.
And that made me think about National Black Dog Day itself.
For years we have tried to help black dogs by telling people they are unwanted.
But if the evidence doesn’t consistently support that story perhaps we need to think about the message we are putting out. Because there is a strange contradiction in repeatedly telling the world that there is something about black dogs which makes other people less likely to want them. Somebody may never have considered a black dog less desirable until we tell them black dogs are apparently considered less desirable. That surely deserves some thought.
There is something else which deserves our attention too.
If age, breed or size are having a greater impact on shelter outcomes than coat colour in some places then concentrating on Black Dog Syndrome could actually distract us from dogs facing a very real disadvantage.
I grew up with a little black toy poodle called Mitzy & she remains one of the reasons this subject has always interested me. Mitzy wore a bright red collar which looked fabulous against her black coat. She was confident, beautifully behaved & a huge part of my childhood. She had originally been given to my parents because she was apparently a barker. I don’t remember her being particularly noisy with us so perhaps she had simply been bored or needed something different from the home she had before. Whatever the reason she was a wonderful little dog.
Years ago when I first wrote about Black Dog Syndrome I said anybody who overlooked Mitzy because she was black would have missed out on a whole doggy lifetime of fun, love & frolics. I still believe that.
What has changed is my willingness to accept the wider claim that black dogs everywhere are being overlooked because they are black. The evidence is simply too mixed for that. And that’s okay. We should be able to revisit things we have written before when we learn more. Animal welfare shouldn’t be about repeating something because it has been repeated for decades. It should be about asking questions, looking at the evidence & being prepared to change our understanding when the evidence tells us the situation is more complicated than we thought.
So this National Black Dog Day I’m not going to tell you black dogs are unwanted. I’m not going to tell you they are sitting unnoticed in shelters everywhere because of the colour of their coats. I’m simply going to celebrate them. And I’m going to remember a little black poodle in a bright red collar who taught me many years ago that the colour of a dog’s coat is probably one of the least interesting things about them.
Happy National Black Dog Day.