A genuine Facebook friend of mine, Barbara reminded me that today is Veterans Day in the US. In the UK, yesterday we had Remembrance Sunday and today it is Armistice Day (Remembrance Day). If we are to be grammatically correct it should be Veteran’s Day with the apostrophe but the United States Department of Veterans Affairs website states that dropping the apostrophe is the way to go “because it is not a day that ‘belongs’ to veterans, it is a day for honoring all veterans.” (thanks Wikipedia).
The pictures below were plucked from the internet and are all copyright free in my view except for the 3rd one down which provided by Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Mastriano. He is seen taking a moment out of his war duties to visit with Diesel, the Headquarters cat, in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Many of the photos had funny captions which I have removed because I felt that they were inappropriate. I don’t think you can make fun about this topic. It is too serious a matter. We give thanks and our warmth for their efforts and sacrifices.
On both sides of ‘the pond’ we celebrate and give thanks to the brave members of the armed services who protect us and who have helped to ensure our freedom, which we should never take for granted.
In the US, Veterans Day (which was also originally known as Armistice Day) is a federal holiday on November 11th – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. On this day Americans honour military veterans – the women and men who have served in the United States Armed Forces.
As this site is about cats and their welfare I feel obliged to combine the two: the military and the cats. They actually go together very nicely. I am sure that there are many military men and women who have befriended cats and dogs while deployed to foreign lands in times of conflict. Companion animals are great comforters to military personnel who sadly suffer from PTSD or some other mental health condition as a result of the traumatic events that took place while fighting overseas.
We must remember that war is horrendous. It is not what we see in films and shoot-em-up videos. I sometimes think that kids don’t understand this. They don’t realise that war is ghastly. People get killed and lives are destroyed. Men and women can be badly injured and sometimes these injuries are hidden as they are inside the head. May our companion cats and dogs help these people get over these profound mental health injuries which can be intolerable and lead to suicide.
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