“Getting old is not for sissies,” Bette Davis once quipped. And she was a woman who knew a thing or two about not being a sissy.
Besides the question of what the h*** happened to my neck skin, there are lots of other issues that aging tosses our way like where did this AARP card come from and why are you calling me “ma’am??” We are a youth oriented society and we forget that senior doesn’t mean done.
Julia Child didn’t start her PBS show The French Chef until she was 51. Mother Teresa got the Nobel Peace Prize at 69 and Gandhi led the march that made him the hero of India (and of a few others) at 61.
Friends For Life is honored to have a policy of waiving all adoption fees for any adopter 65 or over adopting a senior pet. Why would we do that?
For a shelter, seniors are potentially the perfect adopters. They tend to be home a lot and that is sheer heaven for shelter animals who have often lead lives lacking in one on one attention. It is a shelter pet’s dream to become the focus of someone’s world. There is no rushing out the door in the morning to make the commute and no coming in at 8 and tossing a briefcase down too exhausted to interact. The pace of life for many seniors includes plenty of time for brushing, petting and the occasional dressing up of the pet in the bad sweater. (Pets have to take a little bad with the good, we tell them.)
Pets can help reduce stress ,lower blood pressure, increase social interaction and physical activity and help seniors learn. As they engage in reading up on new breed information or training / feeding technique, it becomes a chance to reawaken some of the skillsets a senior may not have had to use for a while. Sheriff the cat was recently adopted by a lovely senior cat mom who didn’t realize that his adoption fee would be “on us” until the moment of the adoption. We were happy to make her day and she certainly made ours by giving Sheriff an absolutely wonderful home.