What is animal communication ?
Ah. There are some things this supple, majestic English language of ours simply doesn’t have adequate words for yet.
photo by Brennan Caverhill
The scientific definition of animal communication would be “telepathic communication between species.” But that really tells you nothing about what this work is or how it happens. To give you a better sense of it, I can assure you that everyone can and does communicate telepathically already, to some extent. Have you ever “just known” what your child or animal was thinking or when someone close to you needed your help? Have you ever “just had a feeling” about a new acquaintance, place, or situation? Have you ever been so close to someone you found yourselves finishing each other’s sentences? We all do communicate telepathically already. In our culture, telepathy is just rarely reinforced or developed, let alone utilized or respected as a useful means of communication. Most of us are taught early on not to trust our subtler senses, and for those of us who set out to “re-learn“ and develop our telepathic abilities, the hardest part is not receiving information, but learning to trust that our perceptions might possibly be accurate!
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” ~Helen Keller
In my experience telepathy is an ancient, sensory language of emotion, images, intuition and physical sensation. Telepathic conversations are rich and vivid and profound, but they are a very different experience from conversing verbally with another human using English words. For me personally, receiving an answer to a question is more often like finding myself plunged (in my mind) into a vivid, virtual-reality, emotionally charged scene from a silent movie. It can be obvious what the animal is communicating (for instance if I ask her what she thinks of your new boyfriend and she shows me a huge, smelly, flea-bitten gorilla scratching himself in your living room). But sometimes the answers are not so obvious, and in my experience, the real skill involved in doing this work well involves knowing how to correctly interpret the “answers” one receives.
For example: Say you ask me to ask your cat how she is feeling, and say she is feeling upset, threatened by, and jealous of a new cat you introduced to the household. She may simply communicate to me a sense of confusion and anger and jealousy, or she may show me a picture of her person’s back to her, or she may show me a little movie in which she is being pushed out of the house... In these instances it would be clear to me that she is feeling upset and somehow excluded, but I would come to you for more information. “Did you recently bring a new cat into the house?” “Is there a new baby?” “Is something else taking up your attention now?” In other words, when I ask her how she is feeling, she does not typically answer in English words: “I’m feeling jealous about the new cat they brought home last week.” For me, telepathy is a very fluid, poetic, visual and emotional “language,” and to interpret information correctly about an animal I’ve never met in a situation I know little or nothing about, it is usually helpful to have the person present on the phone to fill in the context and help me interpret the animals answers accurately. In the above situation, the cat might, of course, directly show me an “angry” picture of, say, an orange tom cat pushing her out of the way. From this it would be clear that that the upset had to do with another cat, but I might not immediately be able to discern whether this cat is a new member of the family, a cat next door, or a strange intruder in the territory. Again, I would need you to help fill in the context.
“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” ~Peter Drucker
The best scientific study of animal communication I know of concerns an African Gray Parrot who is fluent enough in human English to participate in a scientific double blind study. While his person is in a different room of the house looking at photographs, the parrot says aloud what is in the photo she is looking at, from his room in the house!!