Witchy Memes

It's funny, because communicating with animals isn't magic but is actually pretty easy to do — just start out by listening and understand that you shouldn't project human communication expectations onto animals (and also that each animal will communicate in a different "language")

I was talking to a friend recently about how they're super good with cats, and how frustrated they feel when people ignore all the ways that a cat is trying to communicate with them and inevitably get scratched. In some cases, this is because the person is more experienced with dogs, so when they are projecting their expectations about how dogs communicate onto cats, then the cat appears to be completely opaque and gives no warning that it is unhappy.

Animals can and do learn to adapt their communication to humans, but we need to meet them halfway.

(Something I just remembered that's sweet is a Tumblr post where someone who is blind or partially sighted said that their cat seems to understand that its human cannot see well, so it has learned to meow so that the human doesn't accidentally bump into the cat. I'm only half remembering, but it's possible that the cat is also blind, and if that's the case, then the cat's understanding is more that it has learned that whilst it can hear the human approaching, the human cannot hear when the cat is approaching. It's very cute)