MSNBC reports on discrimination in dog adoption. Evidently, black dogs are adopted in much less numbers than other colours.

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.”