What’s the best thing your pet ever did for you?

What’s the best thing your pet ever did for you? What did your kitty friend bring to your life, or your dog? Pets aren’t just cute and funny. They’re so much more than this, and what they bring into our lives is difficult to put into words.

I stumble over this question in Quora and Yahoo answers, and I just had to write a post about it, because it really is an interesting question.

The best thing my Persian cat ever did for me was make me see things differently, recapture my childhood happiness to some extent. This is what happened.

As a child, I was fascinated by nature, animals, and music. It was what i lived for. I never socialized with other kids, being shy and a loner. But these three things were all I needed. They were magic.

When I turned nine, things had looked different, not as exciting as they used to be. It’s not that i didn’t like the things I used to, but they’d lost their hypnotizing quality. It was like the rainbow had faded, its colors tinted with gray. I didn’t understand what happened, and it scared me to think I’d live my whole life this way.

When I was ten and a half, one of the feral kittens I was feeding at my parents’ yard had run away. I didn’t expect it, didn’t know kittens ran away if they’re not fixed. It was my favorite kitten, a cute orange one. I was depressed for half a year.

Eventually, I kind of grew out of it, but a mild depression lingered for decades, making me attracted to danger in my teen years, in the foolish belief that the excitement of risk would chase away the boredom.

And later, in my early twenties, I’d deliberately chosen night jobs and would walk home after midnight in the worse neighborhood, with a knife in my pocket. I had taken crazy chances, and looking back, I see I’m luck to be alive.

So, this is the best thing my cat had done for me. This will sound crazy, but after I lost my cat Milky, I started remembering my early childhood and missing it, even though I was in my late thirties. At first I didn’t understand why, and then it dawned on me; I wanted to go back to that time in my life before I lost my cat.

And suddenly, I started craving nature, not as fiercely as I used to, and it’s not like I ever stopped loving nature. But I started paying more attention to trees, bushes, flowers, blue sky, the sunlight, the way the palmtops turned the sky and the sun into a puzzle of green and blue and gold. I started paying attention to the birdsong.

This is the best thing my cat had done for me, and the worst thing, of course. I’d give anything to get her back, and I’d give up this ability to enjoy nature if it would bring her back, but she’s given me something.

And now on a happier note, my new cat Hazelnut used to scratch and bite me constantly as a hyperactive kitten, and I had developed a higher threshold for pain. So when I went to the dental hygienist, she told me I don’t complain like some of her clients. That’s the best thing my kitten had done for me, lol.

And once my cat Angel had killed a winged cockroach that had gotten into the house, and I’m terrified of these things.

And what is the best thing your pet ever did for you? whether it’s a cat, dog, rabbit, parrot, iguana, (or a pet alligator if you live in Miami, where you can keep any pet you want), please share in the comments.

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