6

Multiple Sources

IN JOURNALISM THERE'S A RULE OF THUMB that one must get multiple sources to verify allegations, particularly when the subject matter is controversial. The habits of my career sent me looking for confirmation—scientific research, credible sources—that nonverbal, nonphysical communication between beings is possible, a real phenomenon. And if that were true, how might it work?

I'm no scientist, but I decided to try a small experiment myself. I designed a kind of blind study. That's the term for an experiment in which the identities of the subjects aren't known to the experimenter. The plan I devised was loosely based on this definition. Again, it made no claims to be truly scientific. That standard requires multiple replications of the results in tests conducted by different researchers. Still, curiosity led me on.

At my request, a veterinarian in New York City selected some dogs she had treated and diagnosed. I would give only the names and breeds of the dogs to a psychic, Alecia Evans. I also sent Alecia photos of the dogs; she had no other information. Her job was to “read” the health condition of each of the dogs. I would then check back with the vet, Dr. Jennifer Chaitman, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and a thorough and highly regarded professional. She would say how accurate Alecia's readings were. I did not know the condition and diagnosis of the dogs. So Alecia could not read my mind. She had never spoken to or met the vet or the dogs' owners.

The results were quite stunning! There was Cassius—a golden retriever. Alecia said, “He's very sore. He does his best to keep up with his family, but he's exhausted trying to move that big body around. His left front leg and right rear leg take on most of the weight.”

Dr. Chaitman confirmed, “True, he's a huge dog—116 pounds—and he has crippling arthritis.”

Then there was Bo—a four-and-a-half-year-old Havanese. Alecia said that he was taking on his owners' stress and worry, and the worry weakened his own stomach energy. Dr. Chaitman wasn't sure about the worry, but again confirmed Alecia's reading of physical symptoms. “Bo had had an intestinal infection.”

Moving on to Yu Tu, Alecia picked up that the dog was held most of the time and was treated like a human child—not allowed to live as a dog. Dr. Chaitman revealed that Yu Tu had a curvature of the spine and that it was hard for her to walk.

Fifi showed up to Alecia as a loving little dog but one who was “definitely in charge.” Dr. Chaitman reported that Fifi often nipped her mom around the ankles!

Hobbes, a Bengal cat, seemed to Alecia to have a bacterial infection in his lungs. Dr. Chaitman had diagnosed him with an intestinal parasite with an accompanying respiratory infection!

Gracie, a Yorkshire terrier, didn't seem to Alecia to have any major health problems except for “a rear leg imbalance.” Dr. Chaitman confirmed that she had had a balance problem a few years prior to our test.

When Alecia read George, another Yorkie and Gracie's housemate, she said he seemed to be developing eye issues. Dr. Chaitman said he had had one eye removed. Alecia also picked up that he had an enlarged liver. Dr. Chaitman said he'd been treated for pancreatitis.

In sum, after Dr. Chaitman saw what Alecia had reported, she said, “She is incredibly on target for almost all of them.”

Dr. Chaitman says she herself has consulted animal communicators for help. “There are times when I can't figure out what is wrong with a patient after paying careful attention to the history and exploring every reasonable test in Western medicine. I appreciate how kooky this appears. But I have been amazed at how some psychics are right on target.” I was struck especially by the fact that a successful, highly trained vet gave credence to the possibility of diagnosing an animal by nontraditional methods.

But how could I understand what the psychics were doing? How exactly were they working? I began to talk to the communicators I knew about their process. How do they experience what they do? How did they come to this work?

Samantha Khury said she gets pictures from animals—and also sends them. “Animals record visually,” she explains. When she meets an animal, she sits very quietly in a kind of meditation. Apparently she is seeing what they're “saying” and in turn picturing what she wants to say to them. Then she translates the conversation to humans. Her clients include racehorse trainers as well as countless dog and cat owners who come to her to help solve behavioral issues.

She had so accurately described my apartment and the neighborhood where Brio and I had been living when I first went to her. “How can you do that?” I asked.

“Animals are very sensitive to their environment,” she said. “And they remember things just as well as we do.”

Brio once demonstrated the power of his memory in a remarkable way. I'd sold a house on the island where Brio and I often summered. It was at least a couple of years after the sale that I was renting another house there. Brio of course was with me. Some friends came to visit and wanted to see my former home. So we went—with Brio along for the ride. He jumped out of the car when we arrived at the house. Instantly he ran toward a cramped space under the wood deck that he could squeeze into. He emerged holding an old toy of his in his mouth! He must have remembered that he had left it there and known that now was the ideal time to get it. He knew we weren't living there anymore. Remarkable!

Like Samantha Khury, many animal communicators say they read animals through visual images. Dawn Hayman, on the other hand, doesn't communicate in this way. Instead, she describes “a deep knowing.”

“I don't get words necessarily,” she says. “I don't hear a voice, but I do get an overwhelming thought, feeling, or understanding.” She considers herself to be an example of what some researchers are now calling “highly sensitive people.” Studies show that about 15 percent of the population shows traits of this characteristic, including increased sensitivity to the environment and a great capacity for empathy. Biologists have also identified these characteristics in more than one hundred species.¹

Dr. Lawrence LeShan, a psychologist often considered a pioneer in mind-body medicine, has said that “the sensitive” who has moments of apparent paranormal perception or prescience “is looking at the world in these special moments as if it were constructed along different lines from the way we ordinarily believe it be constructed.”² In other words, they report they're seeing it from the eyes of another being or seeing things in the future beyond the boundaries of time and space.

This is exactly the kind of description that I kept getting from the intuitives and animal communicators. Linda Gnat-Mullin told me the story of a big rescue dog who'd suffered abuse and was very tense and agitated. She got pictures from the dog's point of view, she told me, of a rolled newspaper hitting his nose and a man repeatedly yelling at him. She says she told the dog that those days were behind him as she gave him a Reiki treatment. When she called the owner later to see how the dog was doing, she heard that the dog had gone into the backyard for the first time and seemed to feel much more secure.

Another time Gnat-Mullin was walking on Broadway in New York City and a dog “kind of eyeballed me,” she recounts. The dog was on the sidewalk at an open-air restaurant. This time she said she got a picture of books falling from above—like big art books. “The dog looked at me very intently,” she remembers, “like ‘got it, got it?'” Gnat-Mullin told the owner her dog had told her a book fell on him. The reply? “The owner looked at me and said, ‘a bookcase fell on my dog!'” Gnat-Mullin says she gets pictures first, and then feelings and emotions from the animal follow.

The information traveling between animal and human, Gnat- Mullin believes, comes as vibration—information as frequency. “I think it has to do with something in the same way that our eyes are converting waves to colors and images,” she explains. “I think people who can receive this have expanded their ability to receive vibrations that are subtler than vibrations that other people receive.”

Lynn Younger, an animal communicator based in Arizona, also believes the connection between communicator and animal is about vibration. She says we humans seek to understand it rationally, and often end up blocking that vibrational channel over which information travels. But animals, she is convinced, “can just feel it [the vibration].” Younger told me that she often goes into a kind of trance when she's doing a reading and doesn't remember afterward what was said in the session.

I was beginning to get a sense of how the intuitives and animal communicators experienced their interactions with animals. They report feeling that they've entered a mysterious other dimension that some people seem to have a special ability to tune into—a dimension beyond the physical world of the five senses.

I played devil's advocate, looking for reasons to doubt that the psychics were truly “hearing” what animals say. I'd wondered from the start if they could be reading my mind, not Brio's. Dawn had one answer. “There is something to that. There is some part of it because you're in a relationship with Brio. So there's something of you I can pick up. But I can't pick up the details of how they see the world through you. Their worldview is unique to them.” That reminded me again of how Samantha Khury had described my street and my apartment from Brio's perspective.

And Alecia had apparently been able to feel Brio's physical body from thousands of miles away. I certainly did not and could not do that. I had no sense of what was going on with his spine and legs when he couldn't walk. So Alecia wasn't getting the information from me.

The communicators themselves say they've initially had to convince themselves that they truly are “hearing” the animal. Dawn Hayman initially had continual doubts. She had to be convinced by some remarkable “readings” or hunches that she got—and dismissed as mistaken—which then turned out to be true.

Dawn had an old ex-racehorse on her farm. In a dream, Dawn “heard” the mare say, “I'm pregnant and you need to feed me more.” The next day, Dawn relates, the horse “told” her the same thing. Dawn didn't believe it. “I said, ‘Oh, for God's sake, you're not pregnant!'”

The horse had been bred four times but hadn't gotten pregnant. One day the vet came to the farm for other reasons, and Dawn's partner told him about the mare. So he decided to do an ultrasound at no charge. “All of a sudden,” Dawn remembers, “out came this laughter from the shed.” The mare was indeed pregnant! The vet explained that sometimes in older mares ultrasound doesn't pick up a pregnancy. Finally, this new test did show that a foal was on the way. “It made a believer out of me,” Dawn says. “I had to say, ‘My God, there's something to this!'” So Dawn came to accept and believe in her apparent gift: her ability to communicate with animals.

Alecia too had doubts at first. “I grew up not believing in any of this stuff,” she told me. “When I started hearing the animals, I thought, Right, I am making this up. It's hilarious. Wow, I'm really creative and imaginative,” Alecia said, laughing. “But then the animals would tell me things that there was no possible way I could have known. If I've never been in someone's house before, never seen the dog, I can describe the house, where the windows are, where the dog's bed is.”

Once she had a client call from England about a dog that was very sick. They didn't know what was wrong. “The dog kept showing me this bag of food,” Alecia told me. “I never met this dog, never saw even a picture of it. I'm just talking on the phone and tuning into the energy of the animal. The dog is showing me a bag that is purple, yellow, and orange. I asked the owner if those were the colors of the food bag. She said, ‘Oh my God, yes!'” The next picture Alecia says she saw from the dog was a barn where cows were kept and where they'd be slaughtered. Then she saw rats on the floor. “I said ‘Oh my God, there's rat poison in your food and nobody knows.' The dog was showing me that wherever this food was manufactured there was rat poison and the food got contaminated.” The owner took the dog off the food and reported that he got better.

Alecia explains that when the animal, like this dog, gives her information, then she can bridge the gap between what they see and what they know. In this case, the dog sent the picture of the food bag and Alecia intuited that there was poison in the food. One other point about this story: it happened at a time when it was widely assumed that dogs don't see color as humans do. But Alecia was convinced that the dog was sending her the image of the colors on the food bag. Recent scientific studies have shown that dogs do in fact see color. Their color perception is more limited than that of humans. But their eyes do have color receptors, and they can use that perception to discriminate between objects.³

But what about other “ordinary” people, other dog people, other animal lovers? Could the average person, not trained in animal communication, feel a special intuitive, even telepathic, relationship with a dog? I also wanted to hear from people who felt extraordinary qualities in a dog or other nonhuman animal, qualities lying beyond the physical senses.

Other seemingly rational professionals reported that they felt they did have telepathic communication with their dogs. D. A. Pennebaker, the renowned documentary filmmaker, shared his experience of Bix, a large mixed breed so beloved by all who knew him that he made the pages of the New York Times. Pennebaker's bond with Bix led to a new understanding of dogs that changed his thinking altogether. Like me, he expected nothing extraordinary from the dog-human relationship in the beginning. He had what he calls a revelation as he came to know beyond doubt that Bix had consciousness. My conversation with Pennebaker brought a frisson of recognition. “I felt he was reading my mind,” Pennebaker recalled of Bix, “and I just kind of knew what was going on in his head.”

Animal communicators say that anyone can learn to “talk” to dogs and other nonhuman animals. Many people take workshops to hone their skills. There's evidence of success. Take the story of a couple of musicians in New Jersey and their dog, Shiner. Kathy and Rick Sommer had worked on communicating with Shiner. He was a rescue dog, and he had health and fear issues. They also felt he was “special,” just as I did with Brio. “There was a whole deep soulful world in his eyes,” Kathy told me. She and Rick even took a course in animal communication so that they could better sense what Shiner was thinking and feeling.

Then one day their communication skills became a matter of life and death. There was a car crash. Kathy was driving with Shiner in the back. The car behind her knocked into her and smashed the whole back window. Shiner escaped onto a busy highway. Kathy, unhurt but frantic, called him to no avail. It was time to test what she'd learned about telepathy. She began to send Shiner messages—images with instructions to go find a person to read his tags—and to sit and wait. Rick joined her in the desperate search for Shiner. Their tale is surely one to captivate dog lovers and help make the case for animal communication.

Kathy and Rick drove around and around in neighborhoods near the crash site, desperately looking for some sign of their dog. Finally, they got a call from a woman. She said, “I think I have your dog.” Kathy and Rick rushed to the address—“the nicest block in Yonkers, New York,” Kathy says. Shiner was sitting on the porch of a house—many miles from their own home, in fact in a different state—waiting. He was “waiting and watching” Kathy recalls, just as she'd told him to do telepathically. The homeowner said she'd taken one look into his eyes and said to herself, “This is an amazing dog.” She couldn't tie him up, and she didn't try to get him inside. She just let him wait.

Animal intuitives certainly believe that there is an interaction between species that is unheard and unseen by the five human senses. Donna Lozito, another animal communicator I would meet, believes that all beings communicate telepathically by nature. “It's just that we humans have evolved into something different. There's too much human noise that blocks telepathic sending and receiving,” she told me. Lozito—clearly led by intuition—asks, “Why do we think animals are lesser than us just because they don't speak human language? Man thinks he is the be all and the end all. When I was younger I was taught that animals don't have a soul, that they can't think and they don't have feelings.”

Albert Einstein is said to have commented that “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”⁴ Einstein may not have said those exact words, but he wrote more than once about the importance of intuition and imagination. “And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader.”⁵

That's one powerful voice to add to the argument that reason, our five human senses, and the material world should be seen as valuable tools—but not as our only tools, not as the only power that governs our lives.

Mainstream science has generally dismissed telepathy as actual communication between beings. From the end of the nineteenth century to the 1940s, however, there was a lot of curiosity and interest in telepathy by researchers who conducted numerous studies seeking empirical evidence of mind-to-mind communication. In the 1950s Laurens van der Post's account of his travels with the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert triggered new fascination with the idea of telepathy. Van der Post reported that the Bushmen seemed to have an inbred ability to get information from afar; people in the camp would know when their hunters had made a kill many miles away.⁶

The accuracy of van der Post's stories was later questioned by skeptics. Some of the laboratory research in the first half of the twentieth century did show statistically positive results supporting the possibility of human telepathy. Many of the studies tested whether subjects who were strangers to each other could guess what randomly selected cards another subject in a remote location was thinking of.⁷ However, often the methodology was criticized and the experiments were difficult to replicate.⁸

My blind study, along with the testimony of credible professionals, including a vet, and the psychics' own experience, bolstered my confidence. I came to think that I wasn't completely misguided in my growing belief in human-animal telepathy. To explore its validity, though, means not just studying human telepathy and ability to “read” animals but also asking the question: If animals are telepathic, can they read us? Can they even “talk” to us telepathically?