Hi all!
You may have looked at the title to this post and thought: "What? Why does that matter?". But there is a reason why Aqueous, a dragon character from my Elemental Dragons series, has black scales.
This was a deliberate design choice.
I didn't choose him to have black scales because of Toothless from the 'How to Train Your Dragon' series or because it was my favourite colour.
I chose it because black animals are the least likely to get adopted.
Aqueous - created by Stevcelazarevsk on Fiverr
In animal shelters, black and black and white cats are always the first to be put down. The same goes for dogs too. This is because they aren't seen as 'pretty' enough and their dark fur doesn't show up in pictures as well as animals with different coloured fur. It sickens me that people would choose to disregard an animal because it doesn't show up in their selfies, but unfortunately that's what people are like.
So, I decided that Aqueous would be a black dragon.
Why? So then people might think twice about adopting a black animal.
Rocky is black and white and Mishka is black. But despite how beautiful they are, if they were in a shelter they'd be looked over more.
By making the main character bond with a less 'desirable' dragon, I wanted to highlight the issues that shelters face. In Elemental Dragons, Aqueous is an extremely rare dragon - he's the first black common dragon to have bonded with someone. This makes him special, and throughout the books people make comments about his appearance as they've never seen one like him.
By making Aqueous special I'm hoping that it will encourage people to adopt black animals, so then they can have their own little 'Aqueous'. People need to see that there's nothing wrong with black animals, they just need to get the right lighting when taking pictures of them. This shouldn't be a factor when adopting, but unfortunately with the rise of smart phones and social media this has become more prevalent. So many people have spoken out about this issue and I wanted to incorporate it into my books somehow.
When I told my boyfriend about this issue, he decided that he wanted to adopt a black cat instead of a tabby one. This is how we ended up with Mishka.
Mishka - as a black cat she would be less likely to get adopted in shelters.
My favourite advocates for this are Cole and Marmalade, who constantly share facts about black cats and gorgeous pictures of their cats. I've linked one of my favourite articles here if you want to check them out.
Do you have a black pet? Feel free to share pictures in the comments!
That's it for this week, I hope that I've educated a few people on this issue. If one person thinks twice about adopting a black cat after reading this, I know I've done something right.
See you next week!
