Can black dogs break the color barrier?
Black may be beautiful, but when it comes to dogs of a darker hue, potential adopters often overlook them — especially if they’re big. If you’re like me, you probably chose your dog based on something like the melting feeling you got when he held one ear up and one ear down the first time he looked at you, not the color of his coat. But when Petfinder.com, an online database of more than 300,000 adoptable pets, declared August 12 national “Adopt-A-Less-Adoptable-Pet Day,” they discovered that finding homes for black dogs, particularly larger ones, was a real problem for their 12,681 member shelters and rescue groups. “In our July 2009 survey, 54.2 percent of our respondents told us that they had experienced ‘big black dog syndrome,’ where pets were harder to place for that very reason,” said Kim Saunders, head of shelter outreach and public relations for Petfinder.com. The good news is that black dogs have a lot of friends. Petfinder launched a campaign telling adopters that dark furr
