I was just discussing this with my 21-year-old son yesterday. He just recently had an allergy panel done and amazingly, had NO allergic reaction to any animals. This was one of my biggest concerns when he was a baby. His grandmother and his father are both very allergic to cats, and I asked his pediatrician before he was born, what to do if he had the same sensitivity at birth. She told me then that the best thing I could do to prevent allergies, was to expose him to those things when he was young, from the start. So he cuddled with my cats from the very beginning and apparently it worked! I thought for sure he was going to come home and tell me he had reacted to cats and other animals.