Finding out what happened to your animal in the past

Finding out what happened to them is something a lot of people want to ask their animals. I always feel slightly nervous when people book a session with this type of request, even though I’ve got a good track record of uncovering things that have helped people to help their animals. This is for several reasons. Firstly, I always start my communications with the known - telling the owner things about their animal that they already know but I didn’t, (to establish that I have made a connection), and that point in a communication when I move from the verifiable to the unverifiable always comes with a little anxiety for me. We are leaving the portion of the call with the safety net, and what if I don’t do your pet justice!? All I can do in any communication is my best to serve your animal well, and to do my best to keep my ego and performance anxiety firmly out of it. Staying focussed on serving the animal is how I do that.

Another reason why it can be tricky is that sometimes they just don’t want to talk about it. I always, always want to honour an animal’s free will first and foremost, and if they don’t want to talk to me, or if they want to avoid a specific subject, then what they want goes, period. If their past has been traumatic they may well just not want to drag it all back up to tell me about it, and I really don’t blame them for that decision.

I suspect too, that how secure the animal feels in relationship with me, has an influence. Sometimes if I ask a question and don’t get a clear answer too early on in a communication, I get more success by spending a good portion of time making idle chit chat with the animal, building rapport and trust before trying again. I think this too is fair enough; I don’t think I’d tell somebody I’d only just met all about my difficult past, either!

Sometimes the animal simply doesn’t remember, perhaps because they didn’t place the emotional importance on the events at the time that we humans do. In some ways this is the hardest situation for me to work with as an Animal Communicator, because the animal is happy to tell me whatever, and their owner is sure that there must be a strong story there, but as far as the animal is concerned, it was a non-event. This happened recently in a communication with a cat, who has spent all but the first 8 months of her 15 year long life living happily if nervously with her current humans. They knew that she had been seized by the RSPCA for what the charity told them was “emotional abuse” but as far as she could tell me, it was an unremarkable time of her life. Perhaps there has simply been so much water under the bridge that she really doesn’t remember a time when life was hard, or perhaps it happened at such a formative time in her life that she just doesn’t really understand that what happened was unusual and cruel. I feel bad for her people that I couldn’t really provide them with any more insight than what she had given me.

At the other end of the scale sometimes I am blown away by the specificity of the memories an animal has from years ago. I remember one horse in particular telling me that he had understood exactly what a man had said about him when he was a foal: that "he would “never come good.” He had been born with wonky legs from his position in the womb, but this is not uncommon for horses, and their legs often do straighten out and cause no problems later in life either naturally as they grow or with fairly easy and non-invasive treatment. His current owner hadn’t known him as a foal, but his legs has certainly not given her any cause for concern, but every time the poor horse stepped on a stone or went slightly lame or footsore he was convinced that this was it, this was what that man in his stable had forecast! His owner and I were able to reassure him that this was an unfounded fear, and that he had grown into a beautifully fit, sound and healthy horse. The same horse described to me a journey to his present home; he had been separated from his herd and had a long journey with strange horses on a vehicle “like a horse box but more metal bars,” and had taken huge comfort on the scary journey from the “really big” horse he had travelled with, who had seemed to adopt him as if he were their foal. His owner told me that he had arrived to England from Ireland (a long journey) on a cattle waggon (hence the bars), with several other horses, and the transporters had needed to unload a large draft horse before they had room to unload him, and that he had whinnied to the draft as they loaded them up again to take to their own destination.