The title page of one of my books, A Gift from Bob, carries a quote from the father of psychotherapy Sigmund Freud. It reads: “Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
At the time they were written, a hundred years or so ago, they weren’t exactly regarded as the wisest words the great man had ever committed to paper. A century later, however, they seem as profound as almost anything Freud wrote about the human mind.
Scientists now acknowledge that animals can transform our lives. They can provide vital emotional and psychological help to people suffering from everything from loneliness to epilepsy, illiteracy to terminal illness. Time spent with cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters, horses – you name it – is most definitely never wasted. Quite the opposite, in fact, as…
