Enjoying the company of domestic animals is not due to bipolar in itself. It can certainly be an influence in how we interact socially, and so it can predispose us to certain forms of interpersonal interaction, but what that form is depends more upon the environment one has been influenced by then it does their personal capabilities or deficits.

I would, however, fully agree that bipolar enables a greater awareness of how others view the world. One who has bipolar is presented with multiple realities wherein one essentially becomes, for the duration of an episode or while experiencing a heightened emotional state, a different person.

While normal people with normal perception exist in realities of singular perspective individuals with bipolar experience a world of plurality. When in a state of depression one is presented with a place of most terrible events. During states of extreme anxiety it is a pit of snakes. The reality one perceives is not immutable nor objective and is not simply abstractly understood to be so but actively demonstrated.

For normal people the cat caused them harm, it was not the conditions the cat is faced with which triggered it's response. To normal people crazy people do inexplicable things because they are crazy, it is not because stressful conditions triggered a physiological response. Understanding perception is not relevant to their reality but for us, people with bipolar, it is an aspect of objective reality we are informed of and forced to confront.

We know what others so often deny as we do not have the luxury, the affordance, to act otherwise. This distances us from them in ways it is difficult to comprehend. We live in different worlds, as if we are but visitors from a foreign land - we are alone as we stand in a room full of people. It is an innate awareness sometimes not fully realized, as in this instance here.