Black Cat Bias: Prevalence and Predictors

“Jones & Hart [22] using evaluation of cats’ photos found in their sample that people rated black cats as less friendly and more aggressive than their non-black counterparts.”

“Findings were somewhat supportive of BCB (H2) in that black cats had the highest euthanasia and lowest adoption rates of any of the six colors.”

“In European folklore, domestic black cats ( Felis catus ) are perceived as omens of misfortune (Jones & Hart, 2020).”

“The three items with the lowest agreement were ‘black cats bring bad luck’, ‘cats scratch furniture out of disrespect’, and ‘cats urinate outside the litterbox out of disrespect’, all of which are likely to be inaccurate [3,19,21–23].”

“Similar to “big black dog syndrome”, which claims that large, black dogs take longer to be adopted and have higher rates of euthanasia [15–18], Jones and Hart [19] used the term “black cat bias” to describe the negative behaviors and attitudes toward black cats.”

“and live outcomes result from the traits of individual animals (Weiss, Slater, et al., 2012), such as coat color (Carini et al., 2020; Jones & Hart, 2020; Svoboda & Hoffman, 2015) and age (Brown & Morgan, 2015).”

“A different study, however, found that superstitiousness was associated with black cat bias, as well as difficulty reading the emotions of black cats [14].”

“Consistent with prior research [8], participants in the present study attributed negative emotions, particularly fear and anger, to black cats more frequently than to cats of other coat colors.”

“For example, the term “Black Cat Bias” originated from research identifying historically lower adoption rates for cats with dark coats (Jones & Hart, 2020; Kogan et al., 2013).”

“Recent studies have explored 3 The why and how of scientific writing how phenotypic characteristics influence adoption rates of sheltered dogs 30 and cats, 31 and how cat name and narrative voices in online adoption profiles influence LOS.”