The dog is more social. I am not saying that cats are totally unsocial but dogs are more social.

I've got my one area I work in and I want to educate people about autism and I also want to improve, you know, animal handling and transport and make a real change out in the field on the ground.

When I was diagnosed, mothers were blamed for causing autism. There was no autism support. They'd put autistic kids in institutions. I had severe autism. But my mom wouldn't accept that. I was put in speech therapy. My mother was always pushing me to do stuff.

People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.

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.

Whereas an elephant that was scared to death that diesel powered equipment, equipment that ran on a gas engine, was just fine. Because somebody had attacked it with construction equipment. But if it had a diesel engine, it was bad.

Social thinking skills must be directly taught to children and adults with ASD. Doing so opens doors of social understandings in all areas of life.