There's something incredibly compelling about watching kittens at play, to see these cute and innocent little creatures, hunters in the making, making their first foray out into the big bad world is a wonderful sight.
Playing with toys and encountering obstacles totally unaware of the perils and the dangers that lie in the average living room they throw themselves at objects, and will employ anything to hand as means to climb ever higher fascinated by anything that lies outside by their reach. They follow sparkling and moving objects, honing their inbred hunting skill, they are entranced by mirrors but have yet to learn that the face they see peering back belongs to them! And of course they fight, with each other, with you, with anything. Truly the domestic cat shows off its hunter predator nature hard wired in its genes, the behavior we see today was programmed into its instincts long ago when the cat was a wild thing and had to hunt to survive.
How can watching kittens be therapeutic you say? Well yes it's a proven fact that pet owners live longer that their solitary counterparts, why should that be? Does grooming and handling a cat lower blood pressure? Does watching a cat at play have a relaxing effect and take the minds focus away from the self for a while? Does the pleasure release endorphins, the happy chemical into our bloodstream? All these are probably true, but who needs to rationalise. Watching cats at play is fun, pure and simple an innocent pleasure simple as that.
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