Last week saw British footballers subjected to racist taunts; now it seems our felines are the victims of colour-based prejudice.
All-black meow-ers have graced everything from Parisian cabaret posters to peanut-butter jars, but it turns out they're the most marginalised moggies around. According to UK charity Cats Protection - which today (October 25) launches National Black Cat Day - they take 40% longer to rehome than their more chromatically diverse counterparts.
http://www.cats.org.uk/news/help-black-cats-improve-their-luck
In an attempt to restore their meow factor - and consign those pesky witchcraft rumours to the litter tray - Cats Protection's social-media campaign is urging human supporters to share purr-inducing stories of black-cat ownership, as well as snaps of themselves in ebony ears and tails, on its Twitter and Facebook pages.
Glamour model Lucy Pinder - better known for pant-displacement than pet-devotion - is endorsing the campaign, having posted on-site an unusually demure shot of herself in pussycat regalia next to some sage pronouncements about swarthy felines' "striking and noble looks" and general worthiness as animal companions.
But why the discrimination in the first place? Tom Briggs, the charity's former Digital Communications Officer, says it is "because of the tough economic climate - fewer people are adopting cats, so there is more choice available. There may be a tendency to see black cats as less exciting than tabbies and gingers."
A few centuries back, ink-furred mogs could only dream of being boring. Medieval Brits viewed them as demonic shape-shifters who hung around with wart-infested hags, heralding darkness and death. Vast numbers were culled, an act which now - ironically - is deemed to have increased rat populations and thus the spread of bubonic plague.
Though the association in the UK has long since changed to one of good fortune, old myths die hard in a nation's consciousness. Matters aren't helped when alleged British big-cat sightings so frequently involve pitch-pelted, puma-esque "beasts", or The Sun prints the horror story of a pensioner mauled by a "maniac moggy" with a "black heart".
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4502138/Reservoir-mogs-Cat-did-this-to-80-year-old-Nora.html#ixzz2AEyqTpMo
And anyone originally from the US, Spain or Italy - where the Satan superstitions persist even today - may struggle with the notion that coal-coated felines are unlikely to do anything more offensive than throw up the odd hairball or lick their genitals in public.
Whether Cat's Protections efforts really will encourage adoptions of the 13,000 black cats currently in its care is uncertain, but there's a serious underlying message. As Rachel Cunningham, public-affairs manager at Blue Cross pointed out on HuffPost last Friday, animal abandonment in Britain has soared in recent months, with a 70% rise in kittens - of all hues - coming into its centres in the first half of 2012 alone.
It's hard to disagree with her that buying from breeders, especially online, should be vehemently discouraged, and prospective pet-owners steered towards rehoming. With a gestation period of just nine weeks, an un-spayed female cat can spawn up to 20,000 kittens in her lifetime; surely instating Blue Cross's proposed National Neutering Day is a no-brainer?
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rachel-cunningham/is-britain-still-a-nation-of-pet-lovers_b_1984688.html
For those unmoved by the "left on the shelf for weeks on end" rhetoric, the melanistic moggy's appeal could be promoted in other ways. There's something undeniably hip about jet-black felines, whose place in the public imagination has seen them endorsing late 19th-century Montmartre nightclubs (Le Chat Noir Cabaret), early 20th-century US anarcho-syndicalists (the Industrial Workers of the World's hissing black "sabotage cat" symbol), and even South Africa's best-selling peanut butter (Black Cat - so much sexier than Sun Pat).
Back at Cats Protection, they're being celebrated in more traditional fashion. An activities day at its headquarters in Haywards Heath, East Sussex (on November 4) features a fancy-dress contest (for humans), behind-the-scenes tours of its feline barracks, and, bizarrely, a visit from How Clean Is Your House's Kim Woodburn - who will presumably be having kittens over all the errant cat hair.
So remember, a black cat is for life, not just for Halloween. Forget the occult tosh; these mogs just want to be loved and looked after, and occasionally puke on your soft furnishings. Meow it loud, they're black and they're proud - and you should give one a home.