Looks like the LA Times has picked up on some of the controversy in the animal welfare head space about dark colored animals. While we have reported about it here on PETS 911 it is not fully accepted across the board; yet it seems to be prevalent enough to merit both concern and controversy about the expectations of the public.
While the response seems to be not about adoptability, but length of wait, that still seems to fit the fears that this particular term is covering. Harder to adopt out isn’t the same thing as impossible to adopt out–it’s still something that may need further public education and outreach to counteract.
When prospective adopters do venture to a shelter, black dogs sometimes fade away into the kennel shadows. “They almost become invisible,” Bernstein said.
Reliable quantitative studies on the problem are few, and Ed Boks, general manager of the Los Angeles Animal Services department, said his data indicate black dog syndrome is a myth.
In the last 12 months, he said, 27% of the 30,046 dogs taken in by his department were predominantly or all black. Of those that were adopted, 28% were predominantly or all black, he said.
Whitman said the question isn’t whether a black dog will get adopted, but how long it will take. The average wait at her shelter is two weeks, she said. Black dogs may linger two months.
Karen Terpstra, who until recently was executive director of the Humane Society of Kent County in Michigan, said the problem is national. “We’d have a purebred black Lab, 2 or 3 years old, pretty much the perfect age, and it would sit there for weeks waiting to get adopted,” said Terpstra, now chief operations officer for SPCA Cincinnati. “A tan Lab would go in days.”
Link, via the LA Times