With Halloween coming soon, October is a great time to remind potential cat adopters to consider adding a beautiful black rescue cat to your family! While some shelters and rescue groups do not feel comfortable adopting out black cats around Halloween, others use the holiday as an opportunity to spread the word about how adopting a black cat is a cool thing to do! Black cats (and dogs) are overrepresented in the shelter population, so now is the perfect time to open your heart to an animal in need.

Here are a few awesome facts about black cats, courtesy of the website Catster:

• A black cat’s fur color can change over time. Like us humans, they can go grey as they get older, and some black fur will “rust” with exposure to the sun.
• Solid black coloring in a cat requires both parents to carry the same black color gene. Tabby is the dominant cat coat type, so some black cats actually have faint tabby markings in their fur if you look closely at them.
• Black cats tend to be healthier than cats of other colors. Research has shown that the genes associated with black color also make the cats’ immune systems stronger. They tend to be more resistant to diseases like FIV than other cats.
• Black “panthers” are actually two different cat breeds, depending on where they live. In the Americas they are jaguars, and in Africa they are leopards. Like domestic cats, the black coloring in big cats is genetic.

Still need more convincing that black cats are cool? Just ask cat lover Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead (click image to enlarge):