Word: doggedly
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...question remains for shelter operators across the country: Why does it appear that black dogs, particularly the large ones, and black cats are unadoptable? The phenomenon has been dubbed "black dog syndrome." Is it superstition? Black cats are considered unlucky by some. Is it mythology? Big black dogs have been portrayed as symbols of death in literature and legend, cast as bad guys in movies like The Omen, and even featured in modern stories like the dog Grim in the Harry Potter tales...
Friedman, who favors black cowboys hats and western wear, is partial to black dogs. "The Friedman [dogs] are all mutts, poi dogs as they call them in Hawaii," Kinky says of his own five dogs - Mr. Magoo, Perky, Chumley, Fly and Brownie (the lone brown dog in the bunch). "The only thing wrong with having four black dogs and one brown dog is when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I stumble over them," Friedman says...
...theory is that there are more unadopted black dogs because there are simply more of them than canines of other shades. "I have heard that black is the dominant gene and in general that's why there are so many of them," says singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris. Active in the animal rescue movement, Harris adopted a big black dog, Bonaparte, years ago. "He was a goofy, poodle-looking dog," she says. "He looked like something Dr. Seuss would have designed." Bonaparte was her "road dog," traveling with her on tour and when he died she went into deep grief...
...travels with two "road dogs" - Keeta, a yellow mix dog saved from a 2005 hurricane in Mississippi, and Bella, a black dog with a sugar-dipped muzzle, the white and gray wisps of hair that often give black dogs an aging appearance. "Bella is Keeta's dog," Harris says, a "soulful" black dog of unknown age who came from an urban Nashville shelter just days before she was scheduled to be euthanized...
Some experts dispute the severity of "black dog syndrome." Kimberley Intino, director of animal sheltering issues for the Humane Society of the United States, cites one study by Pethealth Inc., a pet insurance and animal microchip company, that went through numbers from 679 shelters and found black dogs indeed had longer stays before being adopted - but just by two days on average. "The idea that black dogs are not being adopted is not as gloomy as it is being portrayed," Intino says. But the anecdotal evidence seems hard to dispute. When it announced its unfortunate promotion, over half the dogs...