Pets & People

An Animal Communicator Told Me My Dog Wanted a Cleaner Water Bowl. She Was Right.

Astrologer and self-described animal communicator Jessica Lanyadoo says she talks to pets. The claim is unfalsifiable. What people actually get out of the session is not, and it's worth understanding.

By Claire Sutton, Staff Writer

August 18, 2026 · 7 min read

Link copied

Jessica Lanyadoo has run a private practice since 1994 and become one of the more recognizable voices in astrology’s modern revival, largely through her weekly podcast, Ghost of a Podcast, where she does live readings for write-in listeners. She is also, by her own description, a medium, someone who connects with the dead, and an animal communicator, someone who talks with pets.

Her clarification on the last one is the most interesting thing she says: it is not like being Doctor Dolittle.

That distinction is worth sitting with, because it points at something real, even if you do not believe a word of the supernatural framing. And you may not. I want to be straightforward here: there is no scientific evidence that interspecies telepathy exists, no mechanism that would explain it, and no controlled test that has demonstrated it. That is the honest starting position, and Lanyadoo’s account does not change it.

But dismissing the practice entirely means missing why people walk out of these sessions feeling like something happened. Something usually did. It just was not what they think.

What she says she does

By her account, animal communication is not symbolic and it is not visual. She draws a hard line between herself and people who say they are animal communicators but mean they are psychic or intuitive, receiving symbolic impressions from animals. What she describes is ordinary back-and-forth: asking an animal how they are, what is bothering them, what they make of a particular person in the house, and getting an answer.

She distinguishes it from mediumship, which is about connecting with the dead. She is a medium, she says, and separately an animal communicator, and that combination lets her communicate with animals living and dead. She has been asked whether that means she can talk to her food. The answer, she says with some relief, is no.

She came to it in her early thirties, and points to one experience as the moment it solidified. She was living in a San Francisco live-work space, boiling water for coffee at the back of the unit each morning and forgetting about it at her computer, ruining kettle after kettle. Eventually, she says, her cat began coming into the studio to tell her the water was ready. She would get up. The water would be ready. After a few days she stopped and asked herself whether she seriously believed her cat was announcing the kettle.

She is currently not taking private animal communication clients, though she does pet interventions on her podcast and covers it in workshops.

Why the story lands, even if the mechanism does not

Take the kettle story apart and something ordinary and much more interesting falls out.

A cat living in a small live-work space with one human learns the routine faster than the human does. Water goes on the stove. A specific sound builds. A specific smell follows. And the human, reliably, does not get up. Cats are exquisite pattern-readers, especially of the humans they depend on, and an animal in a small space with a repeating, twice-daily, sensory-rich event will absolutely learn the sequence.

The cat did not tell her the water was ready. The cat noticed the kettle, went to find her, and did what cats do when they want a human to move. The information transfer was real. The channel was not psychic. It was a cat, being a cat, in a room with a kettle.

And here is the part that matters: she got up. She noticed. Most people would not have.

The thing people actually pay for

Watch what happens in a typical animal communication session. Someone brings a problem: the dog is anxious, the cat has stopped using the box, they seem sad, something is off. They spend an hour thinking about nothing but their animal. Someone asks them careful questions about the animal’s routine, environment, food, water, litter, sleep, and the things that changed recently. They leave with a small concrete instruction: clean the water bowl more often, move the box, stop leaving them alone in that room.

That is a good hour. That is, structurally, a behavior consult. It just has a different explanation attached to it.

A reading that comes back with “she sends her love, and could you please wash that bowl” is not evidence of telepathy. It is evidence that most water bowls in most homes are grimy, that most dogs would rather they were not, and that almost nobody inspects the bowl until a stranger gives them a reason to.

“I have no argument with anything that gets a person to sit down and actually look at their animal for an hour,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “My only rule is that it stops there. A behavior problem that has a medical cause does not get solved by a conversation, and a delay costs the animal.”

Where this gets genuinely risky

The line is not belief. The line is substitution.

Almost every “behavior” sign a pet shows can be a medical sign. A cat suddenly urinating outside the box may have urinary disease, and a blocked male cat can die within a day. A dog who becomes withdrawn and irritable may be in pain. A sudden change in appetite, sleep, vocalization, or tolerance for handling is a symptom until proven otherwise.

If a session tells you your cat is sad, and you accept that as the answer, and you do not take the cat to a vet, the session did harm. Not because the practitioner was malicious, but because a comforting narrative is one of the most effective ways to stop looking.

So: an animal communication reading is not a diagnosis, is not a substitute for a veterinary exam, and should never delay one. If money is involved and the practitioner discourages veterinary care, that is your exit sign.

The useful version, for free

You do not need a medium to get the good part of this. You need the posture.

Watch your animal for twenty minutes, doing nothing else. No phone. Not while cooking. Just watch what they do, where they go, what they avoid.

Audit the boring stuff. Water bowl (when did you last actually scrub it?), litter box (when did you last dump it entirely?), food, sleeping spots, the room they have quietly stopped entering.

Ask what changed. New furniture, new schedule, new person, new noise, a move, a loss. Animals notice environmental change far more than we credit and have almost no way to raise it.

Take the small signals seriously. The flick, the freeze, the turn away, the lick of the lips. These are the sentences. The bite is the last word, not the first.

That is what a good animal communicator is actually doing, whatever they believe is happening. Attention, structured, without distraction, on an animal who has been trying to tell you something in a language you were not reading.

The kettle was always whistling. Someone just had to get up.