Has a black cat crossed your path recently?
Stigmas surrounding black cats have endured centuries, being a commonplace symbol of Halloween festivities today, thousands of years after they were first introduced to the western world. Some say that these ancient stigmas still harm black cats today, as black cats are believed to make up both the most unadopted and euthanized cats in shelters.
Dr. Kimberly Ange-van Heugten, a companion animal science professor, said superstitions surrounding black cats as we know them began in the middle ages when cats and other cultural symbols of the east were being questioned by the ruling Catholic Church.
“The stigma on black cats somewhat goes back to the cat in general, being a symbol of the goddess called Bastet in Ancient Egypt,” Ange-van Heugten said. “The Christian religion was very against idols, and so people worshiped this Bastet as one of their main idols for thousands of years and was kind of the Egyptian culture.”
The association between cats and mischief and misfortune can be credited to the fact that cats are less domesticated than dogs. Cats are estimated to have been domesticated around 5,300 years ago in China, whereas there is evidence that dogs were first domesticated around 23,000 years ago in Siberia. The most contributing factor to this association is that cats domesticated themselves. McKenzie Egan, a third-year studying animal science, said cats are efficient hunters and completely independent on their own, never needing humans to survive, even prior to domestication.
“When humans built barns and rats and other prey animals started being attracted to those, that’s when cats were like, ‘This is pretty nice. I’m getting food, I can tolerate this creature that comes in every once in a while,’” Egan said.
Due to their independence, cats exhibit what Ange-van Heugten identifies as free-thinking behavior, which she said contributes to the unpredictability and subsequent mystery and discomfort exhibited by Europeans surrounding felines.
This discomfort surrounding cats caused rumors to arise, claiming that cats were servants of the devil, stealing the breath from babies and harvesting the souls of vermin. In an official church document by Pope Gregory IX in 1233, the Catholic Church officially deemed black cats an incarnation of Satan, indirectly encouraging their extermination.
Ange-van Heutgen said accusations of witchcraft were seeping into the mainstream during this dark age for cats, where common discomfort caused the two to be associated with each other.
“The idea of witchcraft became more popular, and it just so happened that those two things were happening at about the same time and had no relationship with each other,” Ange-van Heutgen said. “A woman who had a black cat could be killed with the cat. You did not want to be a woman in the Middle Ages and own a cat of any color or variety.”
The World History Encyclopedia said many people believed that witches took the form of cats and the most common sentence for women who were suspected of being a witch on the grounds of owning a cat was to be tied in a sack with the cat and thrown into a river.
While the Church was suspicious of all cats, Ange-van Heutgen said their attention was particularly drawn to black cats simply because of western associations with the color.
“Black has always been the color of death, the color of grief, the color of sadness,” Ange-van Heutgen said. “But again, in other cultures, death is sort of a new life… so it’s not the same in every culture.”
While the violence against cats has subsided over the years, remnants of these stigmas exist today. Egan said more people dislike cats than dogs, again due to the fact that cats have not been domesticated as long.
“They have their own boundaries,” Egan said. “Most of the people that I’ve encountered that don’t like cats don’t respect or understand their boundaries.”
According to the National Library of Medicine, black cats experience the highest euthanasia and lowest adoption rates out of all the colors of cats.
Ange-van Heutgen said much of the reason why more black cats are euthanized in shelters is not mostly because of the ancient stigmas that surround them, but simply that there are more black cats than any other color of cat due to black fur being a dominant gene. Also due to black being more common in cats, some people desire cats with rarer coats.
“If you take the scientific approach, black cats are more common, so there [are] more black cats in shelters,” Ange-van Heutgen said. “If you have a cat that comes into a shelter that’s in a calico color, which is really rare, they’re going to get off as faster because they’re more unique.”
A more pressing matter for black cats is that many shelters limit or completely pause the adoption of black cats in the weeks preceding Halloween, due to accusations of people adopting black cats to kill them in ritualistic practices or using them as an accessory to Halloween costumes. Ange-van Heutgen said while these instances exist, they are very rare, and limiting the adoption of black cats is detrimental, especially to the fact they are more prevalent in shelters.
“In fact, what we should do is offer cheaper adoption rates for black cats in October, or highlight them,” Ange-van Heutgen said. “Limiting them for an entire month [is] probably more of a negative than it is positive.”
A major goal of Ange-van Heutgen’s Introduction to Companion Animal Science course is to prepare students to be able to pick a pet that suits them.
“I encourage them to think hard about adopting first because I don’t want it to be a spur-of-the-moment decision,” Ange-van Heutgen said. “I want it to be a thing where you make sure you have enough balance on your credit card to pay for all their emergency visits and all their regular visits and all that good stuff. That said, black cats are just as great as any of the rest of them.”
