Are Animals Telepathic?
When I was growing up my Mum volunteered for the local RSPCA for many years. She would often be going out at all hours to rescue some animal or other that was in need. Quite often that animal would end up back at our house for a while and sometimes, if no one else wanted them they would stay on in our menagerie of waifs and strays. My Mum was, and still is, a true animal lover and because of this the animals clearly love her back. But there always seemed to me to be more to this story than meets the eye, because often many animals would have the uncanny knack of seeking her out when they needed help. I’ve seen many an injured creature calling out to her to be rescued, from a sheep stuck upside down in a farmer’s field to an electrocuted stork in Florida – I’ve even seen a lost parakeet land on top of her head in a swimming pool. No matter what the animal was, they all seemed to know that they could trust this human, and that this one, out of all the others that were around, would be the one that could help them. And they were right.
Some of this affinity with animals has certainly rubbed off on me and possibly because of this when I was younger, I had a strong pull to follow a shamanic path. The first time I went to university I studied social anthropology and I was fascinated by the fact that shamans throughout history and throughout the world have always had the ability to communicate with nature. They would often seek out certain animals to receive messages and guidance from the spirit world. This idea appealed to me, so I would try and experiment and I practiced sending out telepathic messages to animals to see what would happen. It turned out that over time certain birds would often answer the call and crows and especially magpies would seemingly appear out of nowhere and share messages and information with me. One time, I swear a few of us even managed to call a humpback whale who came to say hello off the coast of Ecuador.
This may sound fantastical to some, but I don’t think that is actually anything special. I’m sure anyone can do it if they put their ‘mind’ to it and truly believe that it is possible. Many people who have had a close relationship with a pet or even a wild animal would have had experiences that could lead them to believe that inter-species telepathy is truly possible. It seems obvious when you see a murmuration of starlings moving as one, or a pack of lions on the hunt that there is some kind of non-verbal communication occurring between these animals. We humans have only relatively recently set ourselves apart from the animal kingdom. A lot of this separation was achieved through the development of language and the subsequent growth of the frontal lobe brain. However, this may have been to the detriment of our other senses, including telepathy, and our ability to communicate with animals directly.
Obviously, this is all something that is quite hard to prove with the Western scientific method, but not impossible. There is much anecdotal evidence that suggests dogs know when a particular member of the household is about to come home, but one pioneering researcher Rupert Sheldrake has scientifically proven that this is the case. He set up cameras in a house and showed beyond doubt that many dogs have the ability to know when their owners are about to come home, even when they return at random times or in different cars. Sometimes even just the owner just thinking about coming home is enough to elicit a noticeable response in the dog.
Many of you reading this will be highly sceptical that telepathic communication with an animal is possible and I’m also sure that there are many of you who practice it successfully every day. Either way, getting to know and trying to understand our feathered and furry friends can only be a good thing for all involved.