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The Doctor Dolittles of BoCo


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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.

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