We breed dogs to be more social than the wolf. There is very interesting research that has been done with a wolf and a domestic dog. If you have a tamed wolf and you have him sit in front of the experimenter or stand in front of his master and his two dishes, one to the right, one to the left – so that the dog or wolf see the food put in the left hand dish but the owner points to the right – the domesticated will go where owner points, whereas the the wolf goes right where he saw the meat thing put. In other words, in a dog social cue from a master can override where he saw the being placed.

Medication should never be considered the only tool for helping a person.

Basically when it comes to autistic kids and animals there's kind of three ways that they work, some of them are instant best buddies, they understand a cat, they understand a dog - they're best studies with it, they just know how to communicate with it. Then there's other kids that begin with a little bit of fear of the cat or the dog, but then they begin to like it and then there are other kids where you have a sensory problem - the cat meows and it hurts their ears, so they want to stay away from the cat because you never know when he might meow.

I know a lot of animal communicators and I think a lot of them are just good behaviorists because they pick up on a lot little posture things like how the eyes look, the posture of the cat ears, is it tense? They're picking up just a lot of their body cues from the dog, the cat or the horse.

I can remember being bullied and teased. It was absolutely horrible. I got kicked out of ninth grade for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. It was absolutely terrible.

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.

My grandfather was an engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes.