Conversing with Cats & Other Creatures
by Constance Young

"It is only those who see the invisible who can do the impossible."

— Dr. Ernest Holmes, Founder of the Science of Mind

Before researching this article I was skeptical, although open-minded, about whether animals can "talk" to us from either within this plane of existence or from the afterlife. The stories I had heard about psychics communicating with humans from beyond the grave became somewhat more convincing to me after watching the cable television series, Psychic Detectives, which shows true-life, hard-nosed detectives relying on psychics to help them successfully solve crimes. But communicating with cats and dogs — even ferrets? They don't speak a human language, so how can they "talk" to us?

When my discerning friend Philippa told me about her remarkable experience with an animal communicator, I began to be swayed. Philippa's dog Amy had stopped eating and appeared to be depressed. Philippa, who lives in New York, consulted by telephone with a psychic who resides in California. The communicator told her that Amy was in "deep mourning" for her companion, Philippa's other dog, who had recently been hit by a car. Then the communicator said. "Amy said to ask you, why did you get such a silly dog?" The psychic had had no way of knowing either about the untimely death of Philippa's other dog, or that she had just adopted in its place a young cockapoo — a combination of cocker spaniel and poodle. Now, what could be a more silly "hybrid" dog to a venerable straight-laced old terrier?

After hearing of Philippa's experience, I decided to get in touch with Julie Barone, a Kingston-based animal communicator and holistic health counselor. She did some readings for me during an interesting lunch at Lucy's Tacos in Red Hook. "All living creatures have electromagnetic fields around them," she explained "…and remote communication is just getting your field to interact with the field of the other being… It's like tuning into a radio station where there are lots of different radio waves in the air, but you have to tune in to pick up a particular one." In the book The Language of Miracles, Julie's mentor, renowned psychic Amelia Kincaid, explains interspecies communication in the language of quantum physics, which she says is the language used to express the mystery and miracle of interconnectedness in all of nature. "The atoms that make up your body might once have been part of an ancient star system… Energetically you are in flux with the world around you."

In The Language of Miracles, Amelia Kincaid relates many stories of interspecies communication. One was about a horse named Guy Fawkes who would buck and bite at his own forelegs... until Amelia persuaded him to whinny instead when he needed attention. When her client then complained that the horse was whinnying all the time, she was able to convince the horse to restrict his whinnying to daylight hours so everyone could get some sleep.

Another incident in the book involves my lunch companion, Julie Barone, whom Amelia first met in the summer of 2005 when Julie was handler to some horses she had brought from the Catskill Animal Sanctuary to the Omega Institute to be subjects in an Animal Communication Workshop Amelia was giving. In exchange for being the animals' caretaker for the day, Julie was allowed to participate in the workshop. She told me she didn't have high expectations for the workshop. She never for a moment thought she would be able to communicate remotely with the animals, much less get answers from them. Yet in her book, Amelia writes, "When Julie 'read' a picture of a cat for the first time, not only did she knock the owner's socks off but she also blew her own mind. Mine, too!"

As Julie explained it to me, she didn't know anything in advance about the person whose cat's picture she was given but, she said, she was able to see through the cat's eyes the entire inside of the woman's house in color. According to the owner, it was correct in every detail. Julie even drew a picture of the floor plan of the house "from the cat's perspective," complete with furniture and the windows in place. She said that when she asked the cat, whose name was Sergio, if anything was bothering him, he showed her a piano with a white cloth laid across the top. Julie interpreted Sergio as telling her that the piano surface was too slippery when he jumped up there. The woman who owned Sergio admitted that "Sergio loves to sit on the piano," and that when she comes home after being away, the white cloth that is usually on top of the piano is often on the floor.

In Julie's readings from pictures of my companion animals, she correctly said that my dog Grace has minor arthritis in her hips and has problems with her back teeth. She also gave a good personality profile of my mischievous black and white cat Destiny who, she said, wished she could have some "mouse-flavored food," or better yet, "a fresh mouse." (True, on the occasional mouse sightings in my house, it is Destiny who methodically tracks down and retrieves the little creature from its hiding place.) "I get a lot of youthful energy from her," Julie said and added that Destiny is probably my youngest cat. This may or may not be true — because all my companion animals are rescues, I don't have exact birth dates for them. Julie also said that Destiny was interested in having "more of those puffy ball toys." Indeed I had some toys that fit that description, but they are probably under a couch somewhere.

From a picture of my two Siamese cats together, Julie correctly named the cat who recently died, and her age. She also described the personality of the remaining cat as "somewhat of a loner." She said that the deceased cat, Sita, is still "with him in spirit form, which is a comfort to him but is holding him back in some respects." I certainly can't know if this is true, but the two Siamese were close when I got them, often snuggling together. Since Sita's death Ravi, the survivor, has yet to find a similar relationship among my half-dozen rescues. In some cases though I will never be able to validate much of what she said. How can I know if Destiny is jealous of Baby, another of my cats, because he interferes with her relationship with my other cat, Gucci?

Some scientific explanations
Amelia Kincaid translates some of the principles of physics and the words of her mentor, astronaut and lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, to explain interspecies communication. According to Amelia, we can solicit information from animals by willing our consciousness to be mobile and travel on electromagnetic waves, much the way bats navigate and hunt using echolocation. By allowing the mind to function in the wave, not the particle aspect of consciousness where most of us spend our waking hours, writes Amelia, you can build a bridge of nonverbal communication with a fellow creature. "Water makes a splendid analogy for consciousness. Water has three forms, but only one essence. The same is true of the mind." In its steam form, consciousness might be like an even more refined wave that enables you to take flight in your own mind to "track" lost animals or "see departed souls through the veils of heaven." According to Michael Talbot in his book The Holographic Universe, the sum total of a creature's experience may be present holographically in every cell of its body.

We may be hearing more soon from Julie and a pool of other animal communicators who have been participating in an international double blind study. Each communicator gets pictures of several test animals, and their readings are compared and verified by the animals' owners. Before the study began, the team did a trial run on a group of owls in England who were part of an endangered species breeding program. Someone had broken into the aviary and murdered several of the owls. The communicators were asked to question the surviving owls on what they saw, and the owls described three people, one of whom was recognized as a volunteer who had worked there. All of the communicators had similar readings, Julie said.

For now, I am trying it myself. I intend to reread Amelia Kincaid's book and go through her exercises. Before even finishing the book, I tried to "read" a stray black cat whom I neutered and vetted and that I have been feeding for several months. When I open my door, he won't come in despite inclement weather, so I "asked" him why not. He "told me" that he was looking for Louise. I asked who she was, and I perceived him as saying "she's a shaggy white dog." There was a long-haired white cat that had been hanging around whom I recently found a home for, so I "asked" if maybe Louise was a cat, and it seemed to me he abruptly said "I don't know, she looks like a dog, but maybe she's a cat." I still don't know if this was really his voice or my own flight of fancy, but I'm working on it.