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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Cat Discrimination


We’re just a week from Halloween, which means that owners of black cats across the country are starting to keep a nervous eye on their loving pets, lest they be subjected to holiday-inspired pranks. Around this time of year, says University of California, Berkeley, black cats “can be associated with bad luck and witches,” a prejudice that persists not just for a few months in the fall, but actually has important consequences year-round for the fates of these felines. People ascribe certain personality traits to cats of different colors, a bias that skews adoption rates and leaves some cats—particularly black ones—in the lurch.

Surveying cat owners, Mikel Delgado and colleagues found that people are “more likely to assign positive personality traits to orange cats and less favorable ones to white and tortoiseshell ones. Orange cats were largely regarded as friendly, white cats as aloof and tortoiseshell cats as intolerant.”