The first time Chrys Long-Ago experienced mind to mind connection with an animal, it was the last thing on her mind:

 

I used to keep my horse at a boarding stable in Anchorage. One day when no one else was around, I was cleaning the stall and brushing my horse. I became so absorbed in the moment that the pressures of life just drifted away.  I realized later that the activity put me into a mindfulness meditation, for that's what happened – I relaxed my mind. 

 

When I walked out of the barn, a movement caught my eye. It was a lovely gray tree squirrel who ran up onto a 55-gallon barrel and sat down not far from me with a nut in his paw. In that relaxed mind state, I turned my attention to the squirrel and spontaneously greeted him in my mind. I don't know why I did that, because it wasn't a habit at that time. 

 

I said, "Greetings Little Squirrel." He put his nut down and turned his head. He looked straight at me and then turned his body toward me in an open-body posture. This was a wild squirrel! We had direct mind-to-mind contact for at least 20 minutes. I heard everything he was saying.  

 

I asked him things like how is it to be a squirrel and how old are you and how do you like living at the horse barn. The words came into my mind very quickly. He called the horses ‘grass-eaters.’  He said, ‘We call them grass-eaters, grass-eaters,’ in an almost sneering kind of way. He said that squirrels considered themselves creatures of the air more than of the ground, that they love to live in the swinging boughs of the trees and leap from branch to branch. I was totally consumed by the whole sense of being a squirrel, flying through the air like that.  

 

He told me how they would venture down the tree head first, consciously looking everywhere, because all of their predators are on the ground, except for owls. He also told me how territorial they were, which I didn't know about squirrels. I later researched it and found out they are very territorial.  

 

I asked him how long squirrels lived. “Three winters,” he said. When I asked if that wasn’t a rather short life, he said, “Who would want to live any longer than that?" He just had this amazing perspective! 

 

Chrys was the first animal communicator I spoke with. Not only was she very knowledgeable about animals, but Chrys had worked hard to make sense of how this thing called animal communication fit from our end. Like myself, she was intrigued with how the human mind could “translate” thoughts and ideas, even complete sentences, from a variety of species so different from our own.

 

It all begins with telepathy, one of those loaded words that seems to poke fun at something that, underneath it all, we all know to be true. One dictionary defines telepathy as “communication by scientifically unknown means." Etymologically, the word derives from tele, meaning distant or far away, and pathy, from the Greek patheia, meaning feeling or perception. Perceptions from a distance, feelings from far away – a definition for a rather vague and intangible form of communication.  

 

Still, who has ever not "had a feeling" something was about to happen? How many times have you "just known" what somebody was going to say or do? Is this really so strange? 

 

Carol Gurney, a communicator from California, believes that one of the first steps to opening to telepathy is realizing it’s something we do all the time. "When you are in touch with your feelings, telepathy happens very quickly," Carol explained. "You can get a whole concept within a flash. Maybe people get scared by the word – telepathy, but we are just putting a fancy word on something that we do all day long. When a friend tells you she is fine, but your gut says something’s not right, how do you know that? It’s telepathy!"

 

The jump between believing telepathy between humans is possible to believing telepathy between species is feasible is a tricky one for some to master. It requires not only viewing animals as intelligent, sentient beings, but accepting that a flow of communication between humans and animals is possible. Carol feels that people talk with their animals all the time, though don't necessarily recognize it. "The thought of the animal blends with your consciousness," she told me. "It has to become your own inner thought for that flash of a moment in order to get it. What happens is that we judge it as ours. We don’t know how to tell the difference sometimes. We’re not giving ourselves credit that we’re getting it, nor are we giving the animals credit that they do communicate." 

Getting the facts from any animal can sometimes prove to be a puzzling and surprising affair. When I asked Sam Louie how he thought humans were able to understand what animals had to say in terms that were understandable to our consciousness, he offered me a story.  

 

Early in his career, Sam did some volunteer work with a woman who rescued Dobermans who had been impounded for aggression. In an attempt to place the dogs so they would not be destroyed, the woman asked Sam to talk with them to determine what type of family situation would be best. The woman was desperate to place a dog, also named Sam, as she needed to move and care take her ill father. When Sam asked the dog what could be done, he distinctly heard the words in English, “When the rains come."  

 

"Part of the skill as a psychic is not simply receiving information, because data without some analysis or interpretation is not very useful," Sam told me. "At the time, I simply interpreted this message as meaning we might not be able to place the dog until November, because that's when the rains begin in the San Francisco Bay area. But this wouldn't work for the woman, because it was August and she had to leave by September. When I asked the dog again, I got the same response, 'When the rains come.'  

 

"A couple of weeks later, a woman named Annette Rains showed up to adopt the dog."  

 

“Whoah!” I exclaimed, and Sam laughed. Not only was I struck by the humor in the situation, but by the intriguing way human word allusions can play a key role in animal communication. Plus, how did Sam the dog know “the Rains” were coming? 

 

Communicators explain there are several ways in which humans can both send and receive messages from animals. No doubt this is an attempt to pacify the logical mind as it strains to understand and make sense of something which evades the confines of logic. However, like an inquisitive puppy, the logical mind sometimes needs its analytical bones to chew.

 

Clairvoyance (French for “clear seeing” or “clear vision”) is the ability to see images not normally perceived. Usually this refers to the projection of a picture, slide show or even a short movie of an animal doing something that plays within the darkened theatre of the receiver's mind. Sometimes perspective shifts and the communicator views the scene as if through the animal’s eyes. 

 

Clairaudience (“clear hearing”) is a type of inner hearing, which includes sounds as well as words. These may be sounds an animal hears, though distinct words and sentences might also be heard on the inner level, rather like thoughts.  Communicators point out there is a qualitative difference between hearing your own thoughts and hearing the thoughts of an animal.

 

Clairsentience (“clear feeling”) is the realm of kinesthetic feeling. This can include taste, smell, and other physical sensations. Communicators who work with sick animals may feel aches and pains in their body corresponding to the aches and pains of the animal. Feelings such as depression, lethargy or apprehension may also be perceived in this manner. Emotions are also a form of clairsentience.

 

Intuition, which might be translated as inner knowing, is a form of immediate insight. A good intuition is sometimes accompanied by a case of the willies, those tingly ghost fingers which lightly creep up over the top of your spine, making all the hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention, an obvious indication that something important is happening here. Intuition is a strong inner sensing or deep-gut knowing.

 

While some rely on one method over others, most often a combination of impressions will be received. There may be an overlay of images and knowing, or inner words and thoughts, sounds and feelings. Sometimes there is what communicators scientifically refer to as “a big blast of information,” which then needs to be sorted out, or translated.

 

Carol Gurney asserts there are no limitations in the way an individual may receive information. "If you are an artist or very creative, you might get a lot of images from the animal because that is how you see the world. If you are personality oriented, you may get personality things from the animal, such as things they like to do. People who are very spiritual, to whom meditation is like brushing teeth, may connect with the spiritual aspects and longings of that animal. We’re like magnets. We draw to us what is comfortable for us to hear and in the mode of communication that is comfortable. Where we are within ourselves is what we will draw in." 

Mary Getten notes there are also differences in speaking to domestic animals as opposed to wild animals. She finds domestic animals easier to relate with because they are so familiar to us. "They are used to our time clock and know the things that we deal with day after day. When I'm talking to someone's cat or dog, it's pretty easy to understand what's going on because we basically live in the same world. When you communicate with wild animals, it's a little different because they have a natural instinct to avoid people and are not used to having the experience of communicating with a person."

 

Mary has formed a relationship with a whale named Granny. When Granny agreed to share some of her thoughts for this book, Mary telepathically connected with the whale and translated what Granny said in response to my questions. As Mary made contact with Granny, her voice changed dramatically. It deepened, slowed, and sounded almost as if she were very far away. 

 

“When I contact a whale,” said Mary, “it's a real down-shift into a totally different energy level. One of the problems in working with whales is that their world is so completely different that we often don't have words to explain it. I've had the experience of a whale showing me what it feels like to echolocate. It's almost indescribable.” 

 

This is part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, of what various aspects of animal communication bring forth. For how can we conceive of something, such as echolocation, that we don’t have a human sensing mechanism for? The obvious would be to adapt the senses we do have. The fluid translation of feelings, images, thoughts, even words is one which lies at the core of animal communication. If we don’t understand that all communication between species is based on a translation of one mode of understanding into another, we will begin asking ourselves all sorts of silly questions such as how is it that whales know English? 

 

Mary laughed. “Right. How do whales have a concept of that? The only way we can speak for animals is to interpret their images and information in the language that we have. That is one of the limitations.” 

 

Animal communication is a bit of a balancing act. In addition to finding the best possible words while translating animal to human thoughts, we must constantly be open to what the animal is saying – not to what we think the animal is saying or what we want the animal to say. In this sense, learning animal communication is about learning to get out of our own way. It’s about moving past our limited perceptions of what we believe the world is like. 

 

There are times when animal communication is fairly straightforward -- a cat explaining why she doesn’t like her litter box, a horse expressing preference for one stall over another. But there is also a wild side. It can be deep and spiritual – a dog explaining karma, a parrot relating how once she was a Buddhist monk. It can be thrilling and outrageous – a dolphin expressing what it is to live in multiple existences simultaneously. The exchange of thoughts and ideas with any animal is as open as we are willing to be, subject only to the limits of what we believe possible.  

 

How might we perceive flight with an eagle’s consciousness, tunneling from a mole’s perspective, speeding across the land with cheetah legs? The mind reels at the possibilities. On a practical level, there is the prospect of highly useful information, animals sharing insights on how and why they do the things they do. In her capacity as a naturalist and biologist, Marta Williams suggests that asking animals about their living habits might be a first step to seeing a larger aspect of the world. In the beginning, answers could be compared with biological data already collected, though animal communication could “be used in place of much of the invasive and damaging field study practices that are employed today by modern biologists.” 

 

What other discoveries would we find by going to the source, asking animals themselves what they think, what they feel, what role they play upon our planet? Carole Devereux told me that animals may represent a last chance for humans.  

 

"Sometimes people can't talk to another human being, but they will talk to a horse," Carole related. "Why? Because a horse is nonjudgmental. Unconditional love flows very naturally between animals and people who are somewhat jaded about the human race. Humans have judged each other for so long that we don't trust each other anymore. When people are with an animal, barriers come down. That's why I work with animals in therapy, because it's a door, an entryway. Animals are the gateway to a higher awareness of spirituality."  

 

If we are willing to open the door and take that first step beyond the entryway, if we are ready to really look and listen, letting go of all those constructs of what we think we know, if we choose to honestly and openly form a deeper relationship with animals and the rest of nature, whatever and whoever will we find?