National Black Cat Day is October 27. National Cat Day is October 29. They were started four years and an ocean apart by people who never met, and they now sit two days from each other on the calendar, which is why cat people treat the last week of October as one long holiday. Below: who started each, and the one thing the shelter data says is actually wrong with black cats, which turns out to be your phone.
Two days, two countries, one week
Black Cat Day was created by Cats Protection, the UK cat welfare charity, on October 27, 2011. Their reason was a number: the black cats in their care were taking a week longer, on average, to find a home than cats of other colors. The day was a campaign to close that gap, and it worked. By 2019 the same charity had the difference down to two days.
National Cat Day is American and older. Colleen Paige, a pet lifestyle writer and animal welfare advocate, founded it in 2005 to draw attention to the number of cats waiting in shelters, and to give people an excuse to make a fuss of the one on their sofa. October 29, every year.
Nobody planned the two-day gap. It just works. If you have a black cat you get both days, and if you have a black cat you probably feel you're owed them.
Do black cats really get adopted less?
It depends on which year's data you read, and the recent data is kinder than the myth.
The old story is that black cats sit in shelters while everyone else goes home. A widely quoted 2013 ASPCA study found something more boring: black cats were adopted at the same rate as other cats. They were 33% of the cats coming in and 31% of the cats going out. There were simply more of them, so at any given moment more of them were still waiting, and it looked like a preference when it was mostly a headcount. The article's own verdict: partly perception, partly a numbers game.
Newer numbers from Shelter Animals Count, the national shelter database now run by the ASPCA, say the same thing with a bigger dataset. Black cats are the second most common color to enter US shelters, after multi-colored cats. In 2023, 70% of them left through adoption. And October, the month some shelters used to pause black cat adoptions out of fear for what people might do with them, was the fifth best month of that year for black cat adoptions. The same report calls the Halloween ritual story "widely regarded as an urban myth". So adopt one in October. Nobody is going to stop you, and nobody should.
That leaves one real problem, and a study published in March 2026 put a number on it. Researchers showed 1,004 people forty adoption photos from Petfinder, ten each of black, white, orange tabby and brown tabby cats, and asked them to name the cat's emotion, rate their confidence, and guess whether the cat would be adopted within two weeks. Black cats were rated significantly less adoptable. People read fear and anger into their faces more often, and were less sure of what they were reading. The interesting part is what did not matter: superstition scores and skin-color bias made no significant difference. The photos did.
The extra days a black cat waits have less to do with anyone's grandmother than with lighting. On a dark blanket under a ceiling light, a black cat is two eyes and a void, and nobody adopts a void.
How to photograph a black cat
This is the most useful thing on this page, and it takes two minutes.
- Put the cat between you and a window. Side light, not backlight. A black coat only shows its shape when light rakes across it.
- Tap the cat's face on your phone screen, then drag the exposure down until the fur has texture. Every phone brightens a dark subject by default and turns the cat into a gray smudge.
- Never use the flash. It gives you the two-eyes-in-a-void photo, plus a reflection.
- Put something pale behind or under the cat. A cream blanket, a white wall, the kitchen floor. The cat's outline needs an edge.
- Wait for the eyes to be open and looking somewhere. Hold the shutter, take twenty, keep one.
If you run a rescue and your black cats' listings are all indoor-at-night shots, this is the free fix that study is pointing at.
What to do on the day, before buying anything
Adopt, if you were going to anyway. Petfinder filters by color, and a black cat listed with a bad photo is a good cat with a bad photographer. Give something to the shelter that has one, or to Cats Protection if you're in the UK. Post the good photo you just took. And if you already have a black cat, this is the week to stop apologizing for the camera roll.
What to get the cat person in your life
For a cat of any color, start at gifts for cat lovers, then narrow: cat mom gifts or cat dad gifts if the person has a title, cat socks if you don't want to overthink it, cat wall art if they just moved, a cat t-shirt if they wear their opinions.
And if you're writing a card to go with any of it, the cat puns are one post over. Use one. Not three.
Two days, one week, one cat who doesn't know it's their holiday and will act the same as every other day. That's the whole point of them.