Children With Autism Can Become More Social With A Cat By Their Side
Source: Medical Daily
As much as the internet collectively enjoys the furry spectacle of cats, especially kittens, there's also a very real trend of wariness surrounding the feline.
Cats are often painted as unloving, murderous, disease-carrying moochers who manipulate us into a decidedly one-sided relationship — a description that especially becomes popular when they're compared to dogs (and which I fully confess to having engaged in from time to time).
But my dog favoritism aside, the truth is that cats, for all their supposed frigidness, have long been a trusted ally and supportive comrade to humankind. One sterling example of this is in the benefits cats confer to those with socially crippling autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Coaxing Them Out Of The Shell
In 2012, French researchers published a study in PLOS One in which they took a look at whether pets could help people with autism, characterized previously by Medical Daily as an inability to connect to other people and engaging in repetitive, often unusual behaviors. The "spectrum" in ASD denotes the varying degrees of severity with which these symptoms can present themselves.
Read more: http://www.medicaldaily.com/children-autism-can-become-more-social-cat-their-side-343684
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Life is entirely meaningless without them.
