This past weekend I started on my path to doing pet therapy work on a volunteer basis.  This means that I took an all-day class on the human component of a therapy animal team.  The class is offered by Pet Partners and is the first step in becoming registered to do animal therapy with your pet – you know, visiting people in hospitals, retirement and nursing homes, schools, prisons, and other places where people can benefit from having a visit from animals.  I’m SOOOO looking forward to being a part of this!

But did you know that the vast majority of therapy animals are dogs???  The course instructor had never taught anyone who wanted to use their cat as a therapy animal, but Pet Partners certainly supports it.  To the instructor’s credit, he did his best to answer my cat questions and even invited me to attend a cat evaluation the next day, which was also very informative.

Please don’t get me wrong – I really do like dogs, but obviously I am a cat person.  And I like dog people too, but obviously, I am a cat person.  I was a little nervous about being trapped with hanging out with a bunch of dog people for the entire day, but they really were friendly and nice, just as I expected them to be; I just didn’t know how much I would have in common with them.  And to be fair, cat people can be kind of weird, too.  But man, they sure do get passionate about various breeds and talking about the differences between all the various types of doggies!  This made me think, just as there are personality differences between breeds, surely there are personality differences between dog people and cat people.  So I did a little investigating.  And here’s what I found:

Interesting, yes?  And for those of you who want a little more detail, I found these stats from DeathandTaxesMag.com:

I don’t know how true these figures are, but they sound about right to me.  Perhaps this can be best illustrated by the following video, which has been floating around for a while, but I love it:

Hmmmm…on second thought, perhaps using cats as therapy animals might be a bit more challenging than I was expecting.  So, if you have any hints or advice for me, feel free to let me know.  Anyone?  Anyone???