How do we use 'skip'?

Took me forever to understand this concept since you're constantly learning the program needs to be explicitly told what to do.

So, to make something skip, you just tell it to do nothing with it when it finds it. Here's an example. Let's say I want to make a function that takes a list and returns the number of cats.

animals = ['cat', 'cat', 'dog', 'cat', 'cat']

def cat_counter(my_list):
    counter = 0
    for animal in my_list:
        if animal == 'dog':
            continue
        elif animal == 'cat':
            counter += 1
        else:
            print("Something in here is not a cat or a dog")
    return counter

In the above, I first check for 'dog', if it finds 'dog' the loop continues and essentially skips any dogs in the list. If it finds 'cat' it increments the counter by 1. If it finds anything else it reports back "Something in here is not a cat or a dog".

'Continue' isn't a skip keyword, but instead, it tells the loop to keep going if the condition is met. Since I didn't tell Python to do anything other than continue it skips.