There are a couple of standard questions you ask a person when you are trying to get to know them.
What's your favorite color?
What's your favorite type of music?
Where are you from?
And my personal favorite:
What's your favorite animal?
For me, my favorite animal differs from most people seeing as it's an ostrich but that's beside the point.
There's a reason that we want to ask people which animal they prefer and it's simply because animals are freaking cool.
If you don't know that animals are so amazingly awesome, then I feel sorry for you and I highly recommend you take some time to find out.
That's 79.7 million households.
If that many households own a pet, why is it that we still hear about dog or chicken fights? Why are animals still abandoned on the streets merely because the owners deemed them 'too aggressive'?
Why is it that when you want to make fun of someone's lack of intelligence, they get called bird brained? If it were me, I would take that as a compliment.
It's because not everyone knows. They don't know that birds are able to solve complex puzzles. They don't know that you can teach old dogs new tricks.
Just like we need to squash stereotypes we have of other people, we need get rid of all the misconceptions we have about the animal world.
Not all pit-bulls and rottweilers are fighters. You can train a vulture to let you hand feed it mice. We need to stop letting television shows like "River Monsters" and events like Shark Week shape our view of the world under the sea.
Each individual organism acts differently. Sure, it's well known knowledge that golden retrievers are one of the sweetest dogs. But if they grow up in an abusive household and not given the love they crave, any dog can turn from sweet to fearful in a heartbeat.
I volunteer at The Animal Behavior Center in Sylvania, located near the Whiteford and Alexis intersection and let me say, that place has opened my mind tremendously. This business, run by the amazing and extremely caring Lara Joseph, has a wide variety of animals living there. Including, but not limited to, the sweetest rottweiler on earth, an enthusiastic cockatoo, a vulture there for training from Nature's Nursery, a ring-tailed lemur from the Indian Creek Zoo for training, a deaf dog, and a green-winged macaw.
One of the umbrella cockatoos in particular, was going to be put down for being 'too aggressive'. That same bird now spends its time saying 'Peek-a-boo' and begging to be pet. It's amazing what a little care, time, and training can do for an animal.
In short, animals have many benefits for humans besides being a food source. They help bring families together.
Poaching needs to stop.
Letting unwanted pets loose on the streets needs to stop.
Animal cruelty needs to stop, from the domestic world to the wild.
I urge you to give your pet some extra love. Not just today, not just this week, but for the entirety of their stay with you.
I end this article with a quote one of my best friends recently used to caption one of her pictures on Instagram:
"What a beautiful world it would be if people had hearts like dogs."
