The holiday season now stretches from Halloween to Thanksgiving, peaking with Christmas, Hanukkah and ending with New Year’s Eve. Black Friday on November 25, 2016 promises bargains and headaches. Consumers spent over 350 million on Halloween pet costumes alone this year and many pets will receive holiday gifts this year.
Before wrapping Fluffy in a hot dog costume or gift-wrapping Fluffy a new toy, stop to consider what the true meaning of the season is. Americans are naturally generous at heart and pets, more than ever are the recipients of their largesse. In our eagerness to please our pets it’s easy to lose sight of what the want and need.
Never Mind Black Friday: These are the six Holiday Gifts Cats Crave.
While cats enjoy new toys and treats any time, they don’t understand of the concept of the holiday season. What is a fun, exciting time of celebration can be a stressful, over-stimulating or lonely time for cats.
This year in the collective spirit of joy and generosity let’s turn our thoughts to kindness, compassion and gratitude towards our cats. The greatest gift we can give our cats this holiday season doesn’t cost dime. It’s the gift of awareness and it’s the gift that keeps on giving in purrs of thanks from our cats. Awareness is the sister of compassion and the end result is a deepening of the feline-human bond
Science has proven how simply petting a cat helps reduce stress and lower blood pressure. Cat lovers have always known a happy cat makes happy home. Learning what makes our mysterious feline friends tick will help us gain self-knowledge as well.
Cultivating the gift of awareness through a Cat’s Six Senses
Cats live in our world and homes but we also live in their world. They have invisible boundaries and territories (more so in multi-cat or pet homes) we aren’t privy to. Our worlds and their territories are in a constant state of flux. Behavioral issues often result when the two worlds don’t intersect harmoniously.
Cats’ senses are more developed than ours and its far too easy to over-stimulate a cat. An overwhelmed cat will react with a fight-or-flight aggressive or defensive response. They will hiss, bite or scratch or run away and hide. It’s up to us to learn their language and be aware of changes in their moods and decode their body language. Despite living with humans for over 9,000 years cats are not fully domesticated. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis who recently sequenced and analyzed the cat genome discovered little had changed in a cat’s DNA during their evolution. All of the cat’s senses are designed for hunting prey and survival.
No comments:
Post a Comment