Tag: socialisation

November 2016, I saw a tiny tabby kitten slink under one of our cars. Soon, we realised the stray fluffy black cat that lived in Mum’s front yard had two kittens, one black, one the tabby I’d seen.

By March 2017, she’d relocated to the back of the house and, with her kittens was stealing Mum’s elderly cat’s food. I pointed out she’d been living on mum’s property for over a year, and that this was her second litter. We began the process of feeding, socialisation and medical care. We had to get them accustomed to being handled before we could get them desexed, for example. The mother cat was letting us pet her after a week. The kittens, who had never been touched by a human and were by this point close to six months old, took longer.

This evening, Winter, who has been enjoying the gas heater this winter season and coming up for pets semiregularly, climbed up onto the couch and parked himself on my lap for the very first time. It’s been about half an hour, and he’s still there, purring. My tiny scrap of a kitten is now a chunky tom who probably needs less breakfast (my mum overfeeds them), but he’s happy, and the living proof that rescuing animals is worth it. Perhaps I’m more willing to wait and have contact on their own terms because I’m autistic, but there are plenty of people out there who say that there’s a narrow, several weeks long window for socialising kittens born wild, and after that, there’s no chance of a cat accepting a relationship with people. Well, look at my boy. Never touched till he was six months. Not desexed till nearly nine months. Born under a car, and breastfed until I started feeding them, supplemented with whatever they could scavenge or kill. Maybe too many people out there just aren’t open to a relationship that you have to wait and work for.

lightspeedsound:

Ok if your introvert friend tells you “you don’t count as people” you know they will ride or die with you for life. Not counting as people is the introvert Platonic friend equivalent of getting married.

This is a thing with autistic people too! Some of the best people I know are not-people. Friends I can just hang out with and be as ‘not-on’ as I need to be to be happy. Sometimes that means sitting around having super-in-depth conversations about fandoms and media and literature, and sometimes that is all of us on our own devices being quiet, and everything in between. Not-people are the best.

youneedacat:

“Towards a Behavior of Reciprocity” by Morton Ann Gernsbacher.  Not captioned as far as I can tell.  It mostly goes through a bunch of studies showing the best way to “improve autistic social skills” is to train nonautistic people to behave reciprocally (with give and take) to autistic people.  And how weird this is given that “lack of social and emotional reciprocity” is a criterion for autism, not for nonautistic people — yet it’s the nonautistic people who lack reciprocity when it comes to autistic people, and autistic people show plenty of reciprocity if we’re shown it first.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

tardiscrash:

Let’s be real, in a time before the internet people didn’t have more adventures and make more meaningful connections. They watched TV and listened to CDs. Before that they listened to records and read magazines. Before that they listened to the radio and read bad dime novels. Before that they embroidered or some shit.

People have been staying inside and ignoring other people for as long as there have been buildings. 

Seriously, this. I mean have you read Jane Austen? I mean, sure, there are dances and parties and all that shit, but in particular, in Pride and Prejudice, there’s at least one big scene at Mr Bingley’s house where Lizzie’s reading, Darcy’s writing a letter, and the others are all doing their own thing, too, with occasional bursts of conversation. They’re sharing a space, but they’re not constantly engaged with one another.