Did you know that black cats almost always have gold-ish yellow eyes? They do and it’s because of the excess production of melanin in their body which also turns their fur black. If you know what albinism is (lack of melanin/pigment), black cats have the opposite.

Now, considering Halloween was yesterday, I had to go with the black cat. And if you decided to adopt one weeks before Halloween, I bet you had a hard time finding one. Animal shelters fear they will be used sacrificially given their history of being associated to witchcraft. It goes back to the Middle Ages when some people actually believed witches took on the form of a black cat or that they were a part of their satanic spell castings. The results: dramatic mass killings of these cats. Insanity I tell ya!

Since then, those superstitions have died, thankfully, yet black cats still hold a stigma as being bad luck (in the U.S. - not so much in other countries - quite the opposite). However, their genetic mutations that cause their black fur are being studied by National Institutes of Health as a means to resist diseases in humans. These gene mutations are in the same genetic family that assists in such human resistance to certain diseases, like HIV. Their melanism could be the key to curing HIV.

Who’s still a scaredy cat of a black cat?