I was suprised to learn that large predominately black dogs are more likely to be euthanized than any other colour dog.
msnbc.msn.com
It's not like Pamela Gregg was a stranger to helping out the underdog. She thought she knew what kinds of pooches linger the longest in animal shelters: Older dogs, abused dogs, sick or injured dogs — dogs like George Bailey, the hound mix she'd rescued after he'd been struck by a car.
But black dogs? While searching for a companion for George Bailey, Gregg was shocked to see a banner on an Ohio animal shelter's Web site that detailed how tough it is for big dogs with black coats to find homes.
"It said something like, 'We know that you people prefer colors, but we've got wonderful black dogs here, won't you please consider them?'" recalls Gregg, who's 49 and lives in Xenia, Ohio. "I was shocked, because I think that black dogs are beautiful — and I couldn't believe people would not get a dog based on its color."
To the uninitiated, the idea seems so strange — doggie discrimination? But among those in animal rescue circles, the phenomenon is commonplace enough to have earned its own name: "black dog syndrome."
"There's not a lot of that type of statistics on many aspects of sheltering," says Kim Intino, the director of animal sheltering issues for the Humane Society of the United States. "But I think that every person that has worked in a shelter can attest that in shelters animals with black coats can be somewhat harder to adopt out — or to even get noticed."
blackpearldogs.com |
