What is black dog syndrome? Black dog syndrome has nothing to do with the physical health, behavior, or anything else of black dogs. It’s not an illness, condition, or disease. It’s not contagious.
What it is is a sad and surprising statistic: black dogs in adoption situations often take significantly longer to be adopted than their brown, white, and speckled counterparts. For example, at the Pasadena Humane Society & SPCA in Pasadena, CA, dogs spend on average 2 weeks’ time in a shelter waiting for an adoptive family. For black dogs, that length is often two months.
Black dog syndrome is also known as “black dog bias” and “big black dog syndrome,” and it’s a strange phenomenon. After all, people who adopt a family pet from a shelter have their hearts in the right place. They’re not looking for a purebred or anything like that. They just want a sweet, loving dog to take home and make a member of the family, so you wouldn’t think they’d be judging based on seeking a certain color.
The adoption inequality isn’t isolated to dogs; cat adoptions often turn out similar statistics. Whether cats suffer from “black dog syndrome” or whether the name is feline-ified into “black cat syndrome,” the problem remains. Visit a pet shelter where the intake day is listed on the tag, and you’ll very likely find that black cats, like their canine counterparts, are more likely to be the animals who’ve been there the longest.
So why do people consistently end up overlooking animals that, by all accounts, are just as sweet as all the rest in the shelter? The answers aren’t exactly clear, but there are a few popular speculations.
Breed Stereotypes
Some people think black dog syndrome is a result of species bias from movies, pop culture, and even the news. For example, there are many movies that find a big black dog whenever they need to portray a threatening canine. Pop culture and news stories also demonize certain breeds because some owners abuse and use the dogs in negative ways, but if treated properly and cared for, they wouldn’t be aggressive.
Less Photogenic
Another theory is that black dogs are adopted more slowly because they don’t photograph as well as brown dogs. Many animal adoption agencies post photos of all animals open for adoption on their websites. However, the photo quality for most amateur digital cameras does not do these cute dogs justice. Often, their eyes do not stand out, or look like tiny white specks, and you cannot easily make out the shape of their faces. For this reason, people may feel less of a connection with the dogs online, and will therefore be less interested in seeking them out at the shelter.
Shelter Overload
Unfortunately, black dog syndrome itself may be a major contributor to black dog syndrome. How is that? Well, the longer it takes for black dogs (and cats) to be adopted, the higher the ratio of black animals to brown and white in the shelters. With many black pets to choose from, they may seem “too common,” and people will be drawn to the brown pets because they seem “more unique” or “special.”
Keeping this in mind and judging animals for their personalities, not their appearance, is one of the best ways to combat and hopefully reverse black dog syndrome.
