A woman in Los Angeles will get on a video call with you, and tell you that your dying Labrador is showing her carrot cake, and you will make a noise, because three years ago that dog got an entire carrot cake off the kitchen counter and ate the lot.
That exchange is one an animal communicator has described from a real reading, with a twelve-year-old Lab named Dexter. And it is genuinely moving. He got his own slice before he died.
The question is not whether that moment mattered. It obviously did. The question is where the carrot cake came from.
Because the answer to that determines whether animal communication is a harmless comfort or an expensive way to get the wrong information about a sick animal, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you bring to it.
What communicators say they do
The people doing this work describe it in fairly consistent terms.
One Los Angeles practitioner casts herself as a translator: an animal is projecting pictures and feelings, and her job is to render them into something the owner can act on, whether that’s a worry, a need, or a behavior nobody understands. A New York-based communicator locates the exchange somewhere past the ordinary senses, in a register she calls energetic, and reports that what arrives is fragmentary. A dim image. A stray word. A scene. Sometimes a bodily sensation, and now and then, faintly, a taste or a smell.
They also, notably, do not present this as a rare gift. The New York communicator’s position is that the capacity is standard human equipment and most people simply never develop it, or never notice they have it.
The paths in are ordinary human stories. One traces it to being nine years old and sensing something she couldn’t name, and gives the credit to a childhood dog for prising the door open. The other spent a decade and a half as an editor and writer, grew miserable in corporate life, felt a spiritual hole she couldn’t fill, and went looking: first Reiki training, then a run of classes in developing psychic ability. Her way in came when her own dog began defecating on the floor for no discernible reason and her teacher suggested, apparently seriously, that she just ask him about it.
Their clients are mostly people with a sick animal, a behavior problem, or a grief they cannot put down. Dogs and cats mostly, but also horses, rabbits, rats, and at least one bearded dragon.
The Temple Grandin problem
The intellectual scaffolding for a lot of this rests on Temple Grandin, and it is worth being careful here, because Grandin is being cited for something she did not say.
Grandin’s insight, which is genuine and has changed how animals are handled worldwide, is that a cow does not reason in sentences. It reasons in images, in smells, in the feel of things, in short high-resolution fragments of memory, and Grandin can follow that because her own mind works the same way. Her instruction to anyone trying to understand an animal is to abandon language first.
That is a claim about observation. Grandin’s method is to look at what the animal is actually seeing, hearing, and smelling, to notice the flapping chain and the shadow on the floor that the humans have stopped registering, and to reason from there. It is closer to rigorous empathy than to telepathy, and it produced things like curved cattle chutes, not a psychic channel.
Recruiting her to underwrite an energetic channel beyond the five senses is a swap, and a big one. The first claim is that animals broadcast constantly in a non-verbal register we are terrible at reading. The second is that a person can receive a specific proposition from an animal across a video call. Only the first has any evidence behind it.
Where the carrot cake actually comes from
There is no scientific evidence that telepathic communication with animals occurs. That’s the plain finding, and it has held up across decades of examination.
What the evidence does support is a very well-understood explanation for why readings so often land: cold reading, and its cousin, hot reading.
Cold reading is the practice of producing statements that feel highly specific but are statistically likely, then following the client’s reactions, the intake of breath, the sudden nod, the correction, and steering. The client does most of the work and remembers none of it. Hot reading is simpler still: gathering information ahead of the session. And notice how these sessions typically begin. The communicator is often given the animal’s name, sex, a photograph, whether the animal is alive or dead, and what the human is worried about.
Then there’s the scoring. This is the part that matters most and gets discussed least. When a reading misses, the failure is explained internally: the animal wasn’t open, or was reluctant to communicate further. That means the practice is arranged so that hits are evidence and misses are not evidence. Nothing can disprove it. That isn’t a knock on anyone’s sincerity, but it does mean the practice can never be tested, and a claim that cannot fail is not a finding.
For years, the James Randi Educational Foundation offered a million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal ability, animal communication included, under agreed scientific conditions. The prize ran until 2015. Nobody collected it.
So why does it work on people?
Because the thing the client walks away with is frequently real, and it did not require telepathy to produce.
Consider the carrot cake. A grieving owner, a dying dog, and a practitioner skilled at holding emotional space produce a scene in which the owner is handed permission to do something loving and specific: give the dog a piece of cake before he goes. Did the Lab transmit a request? There’s no reason to think so. Did the owner need to be given that ritual, and did it help? Obviously.
Same with behavior. A communicator who is patient, attentive, and asks a lot of questions about your dog’s day will often surface something true, because you knew it and hadn’t articulated it. That is a real service. It is also what a good behaviorist does, with a different explanatory story attached and usually a better outcome.
Practitioners themselves report their most profound work is with animals who are dying or already dead. That is not a coincidence. It is the domain where nothing can be checked and where the human need is most acute.
“I’m not interested in mocking anyone who found comfort in a reading, because grief deserves more respect than that,” says Dr. Amara Solis. “What I want people to notice is the swap. If a session makes you feel closer to your animal, wonderful. If it tells you what’s wrong with your animal, you have just accepted a diagnosis from someone with no way of making one.”
The line where it stops being harmless
Two situations, and only two, where this turns genuinely dangerous.
A sick animal. If your cat has stopped eating and you are told she is grieving a move, and you spend three weeks working on that instead of getting bloodwork, the delay is the harm. Cats hide illness with extraordinary competence, and a three-week delay in a cat who has stopped eating can mean irreversible liver damage. The reading did not cause the illness. It bought the illness time.
A missing animal. A communicator telling you your dog is alive and near water, when the dog is a mile the other way, does not merely fail to help. It redirects the search during the window in which finding him is still likely, and it keeps hope in a place where hope is not.
In both cases the mechanism is the same: not a false belief, but a misallocated week. Money spent on a reading is money not spent on a workup. Attention spent on a channeled message is attention not spent on a symptom.
That is the whole ethical argument, and it doesn’t require calling anyone a fraud.
What to do instead of arguing about it
If you want what people actually go to a communicator for, which is to understand an animal who cannot tell you what’s wrong, the tools exist and they work:
A vet, first, always, when anything physical has changed. Appetite, water intake, litter box output, gait, sleep, weight. These are the channels your animal genuinely does communicate on, and they are readable.
A veterinary behaviorist or certified trainer for the behavior problems. The dog pooping on the floor was telling someone something. A behaviorist will find out what by looking at his schedule, his gut, his anxiety, and his environment.
And for grief, which is the real reason many people end up on these calls: a pet-loss support group, or a therapist, or a ritual you invent yourself. You are allowed to give the dying dog carrot cake. You did not need anyone’s permission, and you certainly did not need to pay for it.
That last point is the one worth holding onto. The love in these stories is real. The gift was always yours.
References
- McGill University Office for Science and Society. “Talking to Animals… Telepathically? The Science Behind Pet Communication.” mcgill.ca
- Nickell, J. “Psychic Pets and Pet Psychics.” Skeptical Inquirer, 2002. skepticalinquirer.org
- James Randi Educational Foundation. “The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge” (1964–2015). web.randi.org
- Grandin, T., Johnson, C. Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Scribner, 2005.
- American College of Veterinary Behaviorists. “Find a veterinary behaviorist.” dacvb.org
- Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. “Feline hepatic lipidosis and the risks of anorexia in cats.” vet.cornell.edu
