If you’re a dog or cat parent, you may have experienced your furry friend trying to alert you to something you were not aware of but should be. There are times when our dogs bark or our cats meow at seemingly nothing, at least, nothing we can immediately perceive. While it may turn out that it wasn’t anything that we should overthink, sometimes, our four-legged buddies are doing their best to impart a warning worth listening to.
A netizen writing on Quora offered a personal example:
“I thought my dog was barking at nothing. But he persisted. He had heard the faint cries of my elderly neighbour as she lay dying after falling down the stairs at night. We broke the door down. Paramedics stopped the bleeding from her face that would have killed her. The hospital mended her broken back, neck, nose, ribs and wrists. She worships our little dog. He saved her life with his extremely annoying barking.”
The kitty we have today may not have been a direct lifesaver as the dog in the above example, but she did her owners a valuable service by audibly signaling there was an intruder at home. Alex, who goes by @palwpfiction on TikTok, has a gorgeous cat named Azula who is not only adorable with her beautiful fur and striking blue eyes but is also endowed with hawk-like vision.
Azula’s got FIRE perception skills
Alex was blissfully sitting in front of the TV in her impeccably decorated living room when Azula, blue gaze glued to the ceiling, started emitting these cute meows her owner thought were worth recording. However, at least at first, Alex and Azula were not on the same page: Azula was not simply trying to act cute and Alex was unaware of the uninvited visitor hanging from the ceiling fan.
The kitty had detected the upside-down intruder before anyone else. That said, if there is ever a time of the year when it feels oddly appropriate to have a bat enter your home it has to be the spooky season. It’s as if the little guy is metaphorically telling the homeowners that Halloween is just around the corner.
In the end, they attempted to use a bag to catch the bat and get it safely out of the house. However, quickly understanding it was no longer welcomed, the bat excused himself and decided to leave of its own accord.
One netizen shared their less benign experience dealing with bats at home, “our cat woke us up one night…. he’d pinned a bat down in our dining room. we had to get it tested….it was chaos. we learned a whole colony of bats was living in the house walls. good times.”
“All of us have been vaccinated for rabies,” reads the video’s caption. In the U.S., most people who become infected with the disease get it from contact with a bat. That said, the chances of this happening if you’re not handling bats as part of your daily occupation are quite low.
It is estimated that only 1 in 200 bats carry rabies. The infected specimens can most often be found in North and South America, with continents like Europe witnessing far rarer instances. Even if you live in America, this does not mean bats should inherently be feared, much less that we should indiscriminately get rid of them as a preventive measure, as these flying mammals are essential contributors to the health of the ecosystem.
It is always better to be careful, though. So, although they can look as cute as the one featured in the above video, it’s wise to avoid touching them if possible.
Besides being entertaining and wholesome, this TikTok must have also served as a lesson to Azula’s owners. Next time, they will surely be quicker to heed their kitty’s meows and follow her keen-eyed stare before doing anything else, such as grabbing their phones to film her like proud pet parents tend to.