The Doctor Dolittles of BoCo

Lucy has no idea what she’s in for. How do you tell an Australian Shepherd it’s being taken to an office in the next town over to be telepathically communicated with, by a human being, of all things? You can’t, of course, which is the whole reason why pet psychics are sought after in the first place—we desperately wish to commune with our pets, but most of us lack the wherewithal to even scratch the surface.

When we get to the office on Niwot Road, Julie Mack is just arriving, leaving her own pooches in the car and introducing herself to me, my roommate and, naturally, Lucy. Mack has a PhD in psychology, and has incorporated animal communication into her practice seamlessly over the last decade.

Lucy paces in the small, cozy office as Mack asks a bit about her background, much as a therapist or doctor reviews a patient’s psychiatric and medical history.
“Typically, when someone calls me there’s some area of focus they want,” she explains. Today’s session will be a general mental intrusion, more to satisfy our curiosity than isolate major behavioral or medical problems. “I’m going to call feeling into her, and see what I notice.”

With that, Mack closes her eyes and begins. Twelve seconds later, she breaks the silence, translating for us snapshots gleaned from Lucy’s mind. “So, three quick Kodak moments. She showed me she has excellent balance, and that she was perched up on something. She showed me moments when she likes to be quiet. She’s near a couch like that”—she pointed at us—“and she’s off to the right, she’s just, lying there. And she showed me moments when she is wiggly looking at you.” Lucy pounces up on the couch and smothers my roommate with kisses, as if prompted by such recollection to do so.

More mental dispatches follow. It turns out Lucy is nervous that her toys will be taken away. She’s also, in fact, been bullied a bit by a larger male dog, and sensitive to the light, and her favorite treat is a chicken jerky strip, which is right on the money.

As the hour rolls on it becomes harder and harder to deny certain revelations, and in my mind, belief begins to vie for space where skepticism had previously reigned supreme.

Mack is good, but she’s not the only practitioner around. So far I’ve found twenty-four in Colorado alone, most going by “pet psychic,” “animal communicator” or “pet intuitive.” Beyond humoring curious dog owners, they provide a vast array of services: identifying medical issues, solving erratic behavior and, especially, making decisions about euthanasia. Parents, now you can explain why you had to send Sparky off to the farm, all the while jumping onto one of the oddest bandwagons in the history of pet wellness.

The blossoming of psychics in the pet wellness community is a recent phenomenon, and one whose origins are hard to pin down definitively. In the 1960s, a Minnesota doctor named John Lilly experimented with human-dolphin cohabitation (not in Minnesota, of course), envisioning that communication would grow out of constant contact and synchronized schedules. The movie Dr. Dolittle, an adaptation of the 1920 book, came out in 1967, but the eccentric animal communicator it popularized still had no real world equivalent at the time. As a coherent profession, pet psychics were years away.

“When I started out in 1992, there were just a handful of us that really said, ‘Okay, we’re doing this,’ ” Lyons-based communicator Kate Solisti told me. “It was like So-and-So is in the west, So-and-So is in the east. Now, there are listings by state and by country. It has expanded dramatically.”

Solisti started out with the energy-based healing practice reiki (pronounced ray-kee), which allowed her to rediscover a gift for communication she had suppressed in childhood. She entered the new profession right as the field was forming itself via traditional psychic practices, a nostalgic reverence for indigenous nature-based religions, and an emphasis on intuition. (Solisti called this “feminine intuition”; a disproportionate amount of animal communicators are women.)

If there is a pioneer in the field, it’s Penelope Smith, who coined the term “interspecies telepathic communication” and still practices to this day.

“There were a few books that Smith wrote,” Solisti explained. “She had a journal, called Species Link, which was really the only place where interspecies communicators came together to kind of share stories.” Smith penned the “Code of Ethics for Interspecies Communicators” in 1990, formalizing the field with tenets of conventional medicine, like psychic-patient confidentiality.

As a general rule, alternative pet wellness trends mirror practices in an area’s human healthcare scene. So the fact that animal communication has outsized popularity in Boulder County is not surprising, given its predilection for holistic human healthcare. Along the Front Range you can find for your pet the following: reiki, aromatherapy, massage, acupuncture, acupressure, Rolfing (a forceful soft tissue massage), essential oil treatment and more. The two exceptions in the human-pet crossover trend seem to be meditation and yoga, which are both understandably difficult to entice your calico housecat into doing. Pet psychics have folded themselves into this world, with great success. (In-person sessions usually run between $125-$200 per hour.)

There are three niche areas of pet health that alternative practitioners and animal communicators have coopted as their own. The first is advocating for a greater awareness of an animal diets, with a focus on natural, non-grain foods.

“Many of the troubles I see with animals—digestive troubles, skin troubles—if you improve the diet, things will get better,” Boulder holistic veterinarian Dr. Pete Rodgers told me. “Try to find wholesome foods that don’t have a lot of byproducts.”

You don’t have to feed your poodle yogurt, but favoring probiotics—found in nature by cats and dogs before domestication—can aid digestion massively. Shopping at one of the area natural pet shops like Struttin’ Pup or Whole Pets will be more expensive than grabbing the generic dry kibble at King Soopers, but according to Dr. Rodgers it’s worth it: “Would you rather spend the money upfront or on medical expenses later?”

Every animal communicator I spoke with mentioned nutrition as a key part of their work, often citing concerns that traditional vets undervalue wet foods and push corporate brand kibble.

Secondly, animal communicators have become savvy enough to build phone consultations into their practice. Remote psychic readings are usually at least half of a communicator’s workload, which means they can eliminate travel time and get more clients due to the reduced rate.
“In telephone work, distance doesn’t seem to matter,” Nancy Bruington of Longmont told me.

Is there a limit to the distance between pet and psychic? Bruington once did a reading for a couple on vacation in China, so apparently not.

“I have done it a lot, depending on how much time and how much money people want to invest,” said Jenny Key, who works in Boulder and Denver. “I usually ask for a picture and three or four questions they want to look into,” to clarify things like age, temperament and personality.

Finally, communicators offer medical advice when an owner’s vet is stymied or at a diagnostic impasse. To do this, practitioners like Mack and Solisti can “scan” the body like an x-ray to identify areas of pain.

“I can feel how they feel, so I can ask her how she feels. If someone says, ‘I think they might be in pain,’ I’ll just sit and I’ll tune into her and I can feel it in my body where she feels it.”

In Lucy’s case, Mack scanned the body quickly and, finding no major maladies, found that her eyes were sensitive—not groundbreaking information, but good to keep in mind when planning a day out in Mother Nature.

The popularity of over-the-phone pet psychic readings and medical body scans brings up obvious questions about the process—and credibility—of telepathically receiving information, regardless of whether it’s from a human or a shih tzu. If distance doesn’t matter, why aren’t psychics bombarded with the thoughts of millions of others around the world at all times? How is physiological information formulated—then transmitted—via telepathy? Is this where full-blown skepticism takes over?

Animal communicators insist that the process is so foreign to linear, language-based human speech that it can’t be compared. It is a combination of intuition and telepathy where thoughts (not words), images, ideas and feelings are transmitted instantaneously.

“Different animal communicators would get their information in different ways,” explained Julie Mack. “I’ll sometimes see stuff, I’ll sometimes have a flash or a picture—but usually I’ll just know stuff. It’s like I get a download.”

If you think this all sounds like an unverifiable pseudo-science, you’re right and you’re wrong. Animal communicators take verifiable information incredibly seriously, since getting it right is what keeps them in a job. Most were wary of the trade before they tried their hand at communicating, and in each career there was usually a defining moment—a moment of conversion, if you will—involving verifiable information. For Julie, it was a conversation with a horse that told her detailed information about other specific horses, which turned out to be true. For Kate Solisti, it was a golden retriever named Chauncey that described a particular—and traumatic—moment in its youth, which was then verified by the owner.

On the other hand, the extrasensory nature of telepathic communication by definition resists scientific inquiry. Anecdotal evidence can be verified, but the actual process of transmitting information has so far failed to conform to the scientific method.

Accordingly, a healthy dose of skepticism exists in the veterinary community. One common concern is that pet owners will put too much stake in the statements of animal communicators, and make medical choices based on unfounded information. On the financial side, the rise of pet psychics could mean a decrease in business for others in the field.

For its part, Boulder County’s veterinary community has adapted—albeit in a guarded fashion—to new alternative practices.

“Boulder is one of those communities that looks for alternative modalities,” Kat Burns, the Director of Veterinary Services at the Boulder Humane Society told me. Burns added that four of the six doctors on staff are certified animal acupuncturists, signifying a modest crossover between alternative and traditional medicine.

“I wouldn’t dismiss it offhand,” Burns replied when asked about pet psychics, adding that consulting with a communicator is often best for owners with questions about behavioral, not medical, issues. “Is my dog lonely? Is my dog worried? Is my dog frightened? Why is my dog scared of the vacuum?”

Burns’ colleague Jennifer Bolser, the Chief Clinic Veterinarian at the Humane Society, acknowledged the role of pet psychics in adding another path to the treatment palate. “Our philosophy is about providing options,” she said, adding that it could be effective for “people looking for other opinions, or if it seems like all other outlets are exhausted.”

Ironically, pet psychics themselves are an incredibly skeptical breed. A common theme in becoming a communicator is a deep hesitation to show one’s gift, for fear of reprisal or simply for a lack of confidence. They are not deluded quacks who boast of superhuman powers, but rather reluctant caregivers aware that their stated profession will raise some eyebrows.

Along with this self-criticism, communicators are adamant that veterinary care accompanies any psychic evaluation concerning medical issues.

“I have such a low tolerance for people who don’t go to the vet,” Jenny Key told me. “I make very sure not to contradict the vet. What I do is I can offer insight.” This credo is engrained in the founding document of the profession itself, Penelope Smith’s code of ethics: “We acknowledge our limitations, seeking help from other professionals as needed. It is not our job to name and treat diseases, and we refer people to veterinarians for diagnosis of physical illness.”

All the nuts and bolts aside, a pet psychic’s main goal is to increase the animal’s wellness while simultaneously helping the owners understand their pet better, and the health benefits are often tangible. Diet improvement, favoring natural non-grain foods, can prolong a pet’s life. Physical information gleaned from a body scan—whether verifiable or not—has in numerous cases caused owners to tell their vets to X-ray unexplored areas, often with beneficial results.

Curious whether owners themselves could cut out the middleman, I asked the communicators about learning the trade. The wording changed, but each one gave a similar answer: trust your intuition. Follow hunches where they lead. More than once I got the analogy of learning an instrument: some are naturals, and some need a bit more time.

Either way, take some time with your pet—you can close the blinds if you need to—and try it out. As Jenny Key put it, “There are people who can just hear the music and play it.”