Of Life and Petz

Of life and pets is an online blog created by me on my 2 passions – yes, on basically everything to do with Life and Pets. The title is a dead giveaway. Pets have long played a role in my life, in fact, since I was nothing more than a baby. I don’t remember a time when I never had any pets, usually a dog or a cat, but there were fish, hamsters, birds and an array of other colourful lil darlings too. Looking back at photos of my younger days, most photos have an animal or two in them, and the most important thing I notice is, I’m constantly smiling when there are animals present in the photos!. Yes, amazing as it is, it does not take pet-owners long to realize that pets have an uncanny ability to make you smile and never fail to entertain, though we have been having them around for years. There’s always something different, something cute, something funny which they do which tend to make us laugh, no matter how tired or frustrated we are.

The love we shower on them is returned in leaps and bounds, yes, literally!!! A simple cuddle, a gentle mew, a cute nibble is all it takes sometimes to de-stress us and save us a visit to the shrink. It’s marvelous how these lil darlings seem to sense our depression, happiness, sadness etc. After living a while with any pet, we seem to adapt and mould ourselves unconsciously to a level where we understand one another. Pretty unbelieveable as it sounds, nearly all pet owners would vouch for that. The way we seem to understand when our pet starts acting differently, or shows the slightest symptoms of being ill, when to an outsider the pet seems just fine.

It seems to be a bond created out of pure, mutual understanding, one which expects truly nothing in return. For example, leave a cat or a dog away from your house and see how they inevitably (most of the time), find their way back to the house. They seem to be directed by their bond to us, an unconscious bond, which we create too when we start loving a pet. We manage to communicate to one another, without speaking each other’s language. A simple look from us shows them that we are mad at them, a glance from them shows us that they are hungry, the list is endless. This goes in supporting the theory of the Universal Language, one that requires only love to communicate, which is embedded in every human being, in fact in every living creature on the planet, one that we speak with our hearts. Over time, we humans have forgotten this language as we started doing things which we thought were more important. Having a pet and loving them is an excellent example of how the Universal Language works. We needn’t bark or mew or go underwater to communicate with our pets, it gradually happens, as we start speaking to them with love, the language of our hearts. How did the animals know of the tsunami even before it happened. Eye-witness accounts recount birds and animals feeling agitated even before the tsunami appeared, when we humans felt nothing, and were left wondering what was wrong with the animals. This is because, the animals have not stopped speaking the Language of the Universe. They understand nature’s way of speaking to them, they knew that something bad was going to happen, and they knew the direction to head to was away from the sea even before the tsunami appeared with it’s giant wave of destruction.

Each pet has a different personality, unique only to itself which echoes us humans- every person is unique. For example, even for dogs, though they are from the same breed, and have similar traits, no 2 dogs in the breed have exactly the same personalities. Yes, they may possess similar traits, which would cause us outsiders to think that the 2 dogs react in the same manner and therefore are the same, but the dog owner would know better. He or she would know which dog has qualities which the other hasn’t. They would know each pet’s behavioural patterns and their likes and dislikes.

The relationship between man and animal is a complex yet simple one. All it takes is for us owners to open up our hearts and love our pets, and in return, we receive love, entertainment, support, protection and a variety of other rewards, but above all, unconditional love, which is the one thing animals possess, and even that, they give unconditionally and fearlessly. We humans can sure learn some lessons from animals.