"Creature Comforts"

If I have learned anything from this article and from having my own pet, it is that we need animals more than they need us sometimes. The story about the man named Eggers and his parrot, Sadie, was extremely captivating to me. Service animals are defined as performing “tasks” or being trained to do specific things for humans, but in Sadie’s case she was not trained yet she still has a profound impact on her owner’s day to day interactions with others. The night my cat found me, I was having a depressive episode. I had been driving around, crying, and contemplating suicide. When I got home, she jumped on me and we have been inseparable ever since. Whenever I am home, if she hears me crying, she comes and lays on my chest until I calm down. If I am having an anxiety attack, she comes over and rubs on me until I pick her up and hold her, which calms me down immediately. I can easily say that she makes a dramatic difference in my mental health. I was able to be off of medication over the summer when I lived at home with her and also over winter break (she lives with my parents temporarily because I can’t have her in the dorms). I have considered getting her certified as a service animal or a “comfort animal”, but I haven’t had a chance to and I’m not sure if it will make a difference if I will. Because, as stated in the article, less and less places are accommodating to those types of pets. However, I can see both sides of the argument. I agree that it can be unsanitary to have pets in certain places and that it can be difficult to determine who really needs their pet with them and who doesn’t. I know that if I was asked to prove what Pika (my cat) was trained to do to help me or to show what she does for me, I would not be able to. It really needs to be determined on a case by case basis, but whether or not that happens depends on how much time we as humans are willing to take to look into this specific issue.