Appreciating Animal Qualities

Every one of the animals we have the pleasure to work with has unique qualities and we try to draw those traits out as much as is possible. For example, Bubba (a cat) is our champion mouser. I often find Bubba stalking the mice in our garage. In fact, we obtained the dogs we have now for the specific qualities that their breed has to offer. Shelby is the queen of the chickens and guards them quite fiercely. Reese guards the apple orchard and dispatches some of the larger intruders that sneak into our garage.

To be honest, our garage would probably be overrun with pests if it were not for our animals! You see, our garage door does not close properly and this provides a perfect opportunity for rats and mice to make their way into our garage. That being said, one of our friends that lives in Pennsylvania recently got his garage door repaired by a garage door repair company after researching professional garage door services in 19406. It is about time that we got our garage door fixed so once I have finished writing this article, I am going to see if there is anything I can do to repair our garage door.

However, this post isn’t really about our garage door, or our dogs, but rather our cat, Smucker.

RebeccaAndSmucker

You may have heard about animals that can detect certain medical conditions in humans. Many of us associate these traits with dogs, but apparently cats also possess this capability. Rebecca has diabetes and sometimes her blood sugar gets too low. This condition produces physiological changes that even humans can detect when it’s almost too late, but animals can detect them before it becomes an emergency. Smucker has this capability and we didn’t even train him for it-rather, he trained us.

Rebecca recently had a severe bout with low blood sugar over a period of days and Smucker was instrumental in helping me save her life. It turns out that he will aggressively pat Rebecca, lick her, bump against her, and yowl when he detects her blood sugar is low. In fact, he gets downright pesty about it and makes a real nuisance of himself. At first I attributed it to a cat loving his owner, but after a while I realized that he only does this when Rebecca’s blood sugar is low. He’s alerting us to a health condition that Rebecca has.

When Smucker woke me up on a Sunday morning by alerting to Rebecca’s low blood sugar, I knew just what to do. I took her blood sugar and found it at only 41. She was unresponsive for the most part, but still able to let me feed her. So, I fed Rebecca some pear sauce from our larder-problem solved. Her blood sugar came back up without a trip to emergency, as would have been necessary had I slept any longer.

This capability isn’t something we’ve tried to obtain from Smucker, he simply decided to provide it to us. Animals are like that. They often provide the most profound gifts if you’ll only let them. What have your experiences been with your pets? Let me know at [email protected].