gallusrostromegalus:

gallusrostromegalus:

gallusrostromegalus:

Unexpected Benefit of Black Panther: my local pet shelters went from having something like 50-60 black cats between them to having NONE, becuase they’ve all been adopted out and named after the characters. “T’challa” is the most popular, but there are a fair number of “Okoye”s and “Shuri”s as well.

…and one very confused Elderly Humane Society Volunteer wondering why someone would name such a sweet cat “Killmonger”.

For everyone in the comments worried about the cats being abandoned after the ‘fad’ fades:

I live in Durango, CO and the shelters are SUPER small so they do thier best to make sure people are really ready to take a pet home for good.  In order to adopt, you have to:

1. Fill out a questionaire about what facilities your home has and how you plan to take care of this aimal.  If the shelter sees something amiss (Trying to keep a nervous dog in a house full of children, not knowing jack about repitle husbandry, etc.) they won’t let you adopt that animal.
2. Everyone is given a “Get Ready For pet!” Checklist of supplies, houseproofing, and medical procedeures that will be needed for an animal before you can adopt.  Seeing the full checklist and cost tends to weed out people who weren’t terribly serious about keeping an animal.
3. All but one of the local shelters is no-kill, and the kill shelter doesn’t let people return animals to them, instead sending them off to one of the five no-kill places.

According to Mary who runs the cattery, these cats are mostly being adopted to people who were looking to adopt *A* cat in general, then see the black kitties and go “LIKE BLACK PANTHER” and take them home, so for once, black cats are being adopted first.

Also, cat adoptions are up in general, so that’s also great!

So before this post goes any more viral, I need to point out a serious factual error on my behalf.

My source for the original post is a friend that volunteers at the shelter, who, I learned earlier tonight, uses Voice-To-Text for chat.  The text I reccieved from her last week read as follows:

“At the staff meeting [REDACTED] says we’ve adopted out fifty or sixty black cats between other shelters since Black Panther opened.  Everyone loves them all of a sudden.”

She finally saw the post and contacted me tonight to tell me that VTT garbled the message and what she actually said was Fifteen or Sixteen.   There are now MORE black cats up for adoption now that they’ve been fixed and vaccinated, but they were fresh out when she told me last week.

So while that’s not the wildly sucessful adoption rate I though had happened, the good news is that still 15 or 16 (She’ll check next time she’s in) more cats with homes, and that so far NONE of them have been returned!  Friend is fairly sure they won’t be, as the shelter overall has a low return rate from the above mentioned procedeures and the fact that, as mentioned above, most of these were people looking to adopt a cat in general, then picked out a black cat specifically becuase of Black Panther.

I apologise for the error in reporting and wish I’d known about the it sooner.  You know, before Buzzfeed and MSN decided to steal this post .  Thank you for your understanding, and if you could spread the corrected version around I’d appreciate it.