Every year around this time, black cats start showing up on porches, in shop windows, and on the front of greeting cards with their backs arched. And every year, a particular claim starts circulating with them: that black cats are the last to be adopted, and that shelters stop adopting them out in October to protect them.
Both halves of that are worth looking at, because one is more complicated than people think and the other is mostly not true.
Where the superstition actually comes from
The association between black cats and misfortune is not ancient and it is not universal. It is regional, and it is relatively recent in the long history of people living with cats.
In much of the medieval and early modern European imagination, the black cat became attached to witchcraft, night, and the idea of a creature that moves unseen. The colour was doing the work rather than the animal. A cat that disappears into shadow at dusk is a useful image for anyone telling a story about things that happen when you are not looking.
Elsewhere the sign flips entirely. In Japan, a black cat crossing your path has long been read as good fortune, particularly for women seeking a match. In parts of Britain, a black cat arriving at the house is lucky, and sailors’ families kept them for safe returns. In Scotland, a strange black cat on the porch was a sign of coming prosperity.
So the superstition is not a fact about black cats. It is a fact about which story a particular place happened to tell.
What the shelter research shows
Here is where it gets more interesting than the usual version of this article.
The belief that black cats fare worse in shelters is not baseless. Robert Carini and colleagues at the University of Louisville looked at 7,983 cats at an urban Kentucky shelter and did find what researchers call black cat bias: lower adoption rates and higher euthanasia rates for black cats compared with lighter coated ones. The pattern ran roughly white, then brown and grey, then black.
But Carini was careful about the size of the effect. He described the patterns as weak in strength, while adding the obvious point that from the cat’s side of it the outcome matters enormously regardless of effect size.
Other analysts have pushed back harder. Shelter Animals Count, which works with animal level data across a large number of organisations, has argued that black cats are not in fact struggling to find homes and that their adoption rates are strong.
The honest summary is that the effect is real in some datasets, modest where it appears, and contested overall. It is not the crisis it is often described as, and it is not nothing.
The October finding
The part of the Louisville research that surprised us most concerns this exact month.
Within that dataset there was a subset of roughly 1,200 entirely black cats. If the popular story were true, that October brings a rush of interest in black cats, you would expect their adoption numbers to rise in the autumn. They did not. The study found no improved adoption rate for black cats in October.
That is worth sitting with. The month most associated with black cats in the public imagination did nothing measurable for the black cats actually waiting in kennels.
And the adoption ban
The other claim, that shelters routinely suspend black cat adoptions in October to protect them from people with bad intentions, turns out to be thin. Some organisations have done it, usually out of caution rather than in response to documented incidents. Many more have publicly stopped, on the grounds that it keeps cats in kennels longer during one of the busiest adoption months of the year, and that the risk it guards against has never been well evidenced.
If a shelter near you does pause black cat adoptions in October, that is their call and they will have their reasons. It is just not the widespread practice it is often presented as.
Why any of this matters to a children’s book publisher
Because the stories we tell about animals attach to them and stay attached, sometimes for centuries, and they change what happens to real animals.
A black cat in a picture book is almost never neutral. It is either a Halloween prop or it is being gently rehabilitated. We have spent time on this ourselves, and our own black cat characters are ordinary domestic animals with opinions and habits, not omens. Nero, who turns up in more than one of our books, is a black cat whose defining trait is that he lies down suddenly and without warning. That is the whole of his mystery.
If you are choosing books this autumn, it is worth noticing which ones let a black cat simply be a cat.
A small ask: if you have a black cat, this is a good month to post a photograph of them doing something completely unremarkable. The internet has enough arched backs.
