Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'

People wouldn’t have become who we are today if we hadn’t coevolved with dogs.

I know a number of autistic adults that are doing extremely well on Prozac.

The thing is, autism is all different, you know, variables. And you start out with a certain amount of, you know, the point where the differences in the brain are going to just be a personality variant and, like, for very mild Asperger's. But you get into more severe kinds of autism where there's obvious speech delay, obvious abnormal behavior in a two and three-year-old child, you know, the initial neurology is different from case to case. But all children with autism are going to do better if they get really good educational intervention.

If you get a little kitty and he's down on the bottom, and he's laying on his chest, you know tucked up underneath, then that cat is not relaxed.

Cats are great with clicker training. There's a great video you can get called "Clicker Magic". There's a scene in that video where a cat is trained to go through a mini dog agility course - it's all done with food motivation and clicker training. You can train them to do all sorts of thing.

One of the ways to reduce that barking would be to have volunteers come in especially for hte for the dogs and take each dog out for 45 minutes each day and spend quality time with the person - that would help reduce the stress and in fact, one of my students did a study on that.