If it isn’t bad enough, that we hurt other humans through wars, fighting, emotional abuse and so on, we are even more cruel when it comes to other animals that we share the planet with. But what if we could actually talk to them? What if they could tell us how wrong we are to hurt them?
To learn more about this incredible ability to really connect with animals, please visit Anna’s website. http://animalspirit.org/
We need to become better partners with our animal friends. We share the Earth. We do not have dominion over all animals… that is a fallacy created by man for man. We are abusers of our role on this planet and it is time that we changed!
There is a wonderful one-hour presentation on Youtube given by Anna Breytenbach at Findorn in 2013… a recommended watch and Anna has many other Youtube videos you can enjoy. Perhaps she will change your mind and your perceptions about our animal friends.
Stargazing Futures 
That’s beautiful! Thank you for taking a stand and for sharing💜
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I am trying myself to learn animal communication techniques. It is time to see all animals as something other than just food, slaves, entertainment or pets. They are independent creatures with independent feelings and needs. Thank you so much for your kind comment 🙂
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Wonderful post – Thank you!
So much resonates with my own experiences. And there are so many useful tips and amazing infor there as well.
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Reblogged this on Animalism Blog and commented:
We share the same planet. It’s time we learn to talk to animals.
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Thanks so much! ❤
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What a wonderful connection. For I came here to thank you for your recent decision to follow Learning from Dogs and dropped into this fabulous post. Wow! Want to watch the videos as soon as I can but I am of no doubt that I would love to republish your post over on LfD.
Would you be happy with that?
Even better, would you like to introduce it as a guest post? The readers would love that!
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Hello Paul, I am happy for you to post this however you like. I do want to do more on animals (because I love them so much), but time is a limited resource for me. The videos here are well worth watching. I aspire to be like Anna, and have been called a cat and dog whisperer by people that have had me pet sit for them. It is amazing the responses animals make when you communicate on equal terms!
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Thanks Colette. Will republish this over the next few days!
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Beautiful post … more people need to think like you. I especially agree with the statement, “We do not have dominion over all animals… that is a fallacy created by man for man.”
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Yes, I really think we (humans) need to evolve to become a less selfish species if we are to survive on planet earth. Animals that share the planet have been exploited unfairly during the rise of homo sapiens. We know that if we continue this trend, life will be destroyed on earth. I do wish that people would discover true ‘love.’
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Thank you for bringing me here, Colette. Not only is this a great post about an amazing woman, it brings an unexpected connection. Gail and I are owned by 5 cats at present, each one an individual in their own right. But one has a name which she (the cat) told to me the day we met, “Diabola Blanca,” the white she-devil. She is not pure white of course, but it is her main colour. She also has black, grey, brown, and red (orange) mixed in, but not like a tortoise-shell, more like she ran under paintbrushes. She is a rag doll, fulfilling just about every trait of a rag doll, though her parentage has nothing like that, and none of her kittens was a rag doll. Anyway, she is nothing like Spirit, born Diabolo, except she does have a certain haughtiness to her. She accepts Gail as my girlfriend, but if you ask her, she is my wife.
I am a cat person, and have been all my life. I have known some amazing cats in my life, possibly more amazing because I allowed them to be who they were. Until I was in my 50s I had not met but one cat who was not willing to be my friend. That cat was like Diabolo, mistreated, wary of humans, not wanting to be touched or even looked at. He lived with someone else, for whatever that was worth to him, and I only visited the one time, but I always considered myself a failure that I could not win him over.
But this brings me to the weirdest part of my cat experiences. I always considered myself cats’ best friend–until I met Gail. My whole life I could walk down a street and be greeted by just about any cat I saw. Well, walking with Gail, cats went to her first, completely ignoring me till they had purred for her. Basically, I chose to go with Gail because cats preferred her to me, so not only was she too a cat person, but one who earned cats respect and friendship faster than I could. How could I throw that away? 18 years later we are still together, the longest intimate relationship of my life. And Diabola Blanca, my feline wife. How could life be better?
Neither Gail nor I are cat communicators as is Anna, but I think we do quite well on our own. Still, we will be checking out some of Anna’s videos to see if we can improve on what we already can do. It would be nice to get even closer to our owners, we want to be the best servants we can be.
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Oh, I am so glad you liked this. It was and is important to me. Some years ago I housesat for a couple with a rescued white semi Persian cat called Jasmina (sadly now dead from a poison put down in her neighbourhood). I spent a long time getting to know Jasmina over two or three different housesits. Her owners loved her, but Jasmina was independent and feisty. She would not sit on their lap or even stick around for long. I talked to Jasmina in pictures and gradually earned her respect. She would come and sit on my knee and rub her face up against mine. We were equals and she began to follow me on walks for over a couple of miles from the property.
When the owners came home, Jasmina would be huffy with them (she didn’t like them leaving her). The lady witnessed me saying “Jasmina, go and say hello, they really have missed you.” She watched incredulous as the cat walked first up to her, rubbing her legs, and then her husband, whence I encouraged him to invite Jasmina on to his lap. The people were so impressed that they started a Skype video call to show Jasmina sitting on their lap. From that point on, they called me the cat whisperer. All I did, was to meet Jasmina on her own terms as an individual with rights. That is the power of animal communication.
I hope that you and Gail succeed with your communications with Diabola Blanca. ☺️
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It isn’t hard, actually. She has only one picture to send, and it is of a bag of Temptations. As long as she gets her kk (kitty kandy) two or three times a day, she is happy. But when we leave for a day or two (medical trips to the big city), yeah, she can get huffy like Jasmina, at least to Gail. It is not very often she can be angry with me for even 5 minutes upon arrival home. She doesn’t like me leaving, but she loves me coming home.
All animals are important in my life, all living beings to be exact. I have an ethical problem taking anti-biotics, because of all the murders that happen inside of me, but I have to balance that with the fact my immune system does not work well without a colon to control it. I am much more prone to infections now. Life is not easy for me, not because of the infections, but because of the wholesale slaughter the anti-biotics and anti-virals cause. People tell me I’m crazy, but all life is valuable to me. I try to comfort myself by thinking that the lives I am taking only last a few hours anyway, but it doesn’t work well. Those few hours to me are a lifetime to them. And my life is no more valuable to me than their lives are to them. I am not saying this as lightly as it might sound, but I am glad I do not believe in karma, because my life would be so far on the minus side I would never catch up.
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Well, it is difficult to keep from killing everything as some of it has to sustain our own life. It is a balance and one has to be pragmatic when it comes to eating a lettuce or killing a bacterium that might harm us.
We have to make a moral decision. What is easier, is to imagine that somehow we incorporate those life energies I to our own. Sort of inviting them into their own cosmic soup of conciousness inside of us.
I think that maybe why people began saying prayers of thanks for meals. I am pretty sure that most native North American tribes have always honoured the spirit of the animal that is taken for food, and gratitude given for its gift of sacrafice.
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That is a correct observation, and I know life lives on life, no matter what you eat–unless you only eat fruits, nuts, and berries. (I always forget about berries.) I do not look at this as a moral problem, but a life problem. Morality means nothing to me. Everything is a choice, and I have to choose what choice I am to make. That is my responsibility as a living being. Morals put me in bad positions. Either it is wrong to kill, or it is not. If it is wrong to kill, what do I do when I encounter a life that is suffering and beyond help. I cannot just walk away, but nor can I make myself a god and end its life prematurely. Every situation is different, and I must make my choices based on the facts as I see them. There is a third choice to walking away or mercy-killing, and that is be there to ease the dying process. Obviously, a being must die alone, dying with them helps no one. But being there just to be there is a real option.
I am sure saying grace began as a heart-felt tribute to the spirits of the food people ate, as far back as humans believed all living things had spirits. But religions, esp. abrahamic religions, co-opted that into giving thanks to a god for providing that food. That was part of the “dominion” problem. We stopped respecting the spirit, and started respecting a “provider”. We stopped taking responsibility, and started giving responsibility to someone else. It took away our spirit, our humanity. I have to admit even I usually forget to respect the spirits of the food I eat because I have become distanced from the killing, never having been in actual contact with the being whose spirit was sent away from its body so that I could sustain myself. Buying food in a grocery store one cannot know how long ago the killing took place, whereas having to kill to eat you knew how the being died, and why, and when. You could respect the spirit before it went away. This modern way of “hunting” is detached, and therefore easier on us, But I fear it is harder on our own spirits for not communicating with the parting spirits, and paying our respect.
I would hate to have to kill for my own food, I don’t know that I could do it now. But the old way was more personal, more real. You may be right about absorbing the spirit of the dead being into ourselves, but I don’t personally believe that.Spirit absorption happens at a different level of existence for me. But that should not preclude having to communicate with that spirit and sending it on its way. That would respect the spiritual connection between killer and killed.
War cannot make that connection at all.
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Yes, I see your points here. I too have a very real inner battle over moral decisions and have cried buckets if I caused accidental death (like when I inadvertently stood on a baby gecko because I didn’t see it in the dark). But I also have put an insect out of its misery when it is damaged beyond anything beyond slow lingering death. I argue to myself, that I would want my own death to be quick and if in the same position would not want to die in an agonising, slow manner. But that does not make me right.
I could not kill for my food, and actually, I think early hominids only did so when droughts and lack of vegetation forced them to scavenge the kills of large carnivores.
But we are capable of being gentle and life giving too. I met a British woman the other day who lives here in Thailand. I asked her how she came to here. Apparently she was a drug addict and when her husband left her, she decided to take her 2-yr old son and leave for a better life. She says that it probably saved her. She works odd jobs to support herself (I am not sure of she is legally in Thailand, but her son, now twenty and at a British University, did receive his schooling in Thailand) . The lady, a drop-out, not well educated, and an admitted alcoholic, spends a lot of her time looking after the stray dogs and provides the money for a vet to treat them when they are sick. She has 5 rescues of her own. I met one of them. She is a brusque, no nonsense woman, but she has a heart of pure gold. What she does for the dogs, is not recognised by anyone, she pays out of her own meagre resources just so that they don’t suffer. She understands that moral balance and she gives those dogs a life when no one else will.
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There is a woman like that in the small town where I live. She is not easy to be around, but she rescues dogs and drives ghem 800 kms to the city to put them up for adoption. I defend what she does, even wrote a letter to the ecitor supporting her, because she is the most hated woman in the town. She is regularly arrested by tne RCMP for having too many dogs at her residence while she awaits a shelter in the city to take them. She does nothing but good for the dogs, living on the donations of people who appreciate her, but the town fines her, so she cannot afford to feed herself, let alone the dogs, and sometimes cats. Without heg the town would be overrun by pets gone wild, but they prefer to have the bylaw officer shoot them, than let her rescue them. And most of the townies prefer it that way. They are cruel people, and white racists too. There are a number or reserves around here, and those townies would prefer to never see an aboriginal person, though they take their money quite willingly. I just said in my last comment, written to the Common Atheist but minutes ago, hypocrisy at its finest. That same phrase works jyst as perfectly right here.
If you see your dog lady again before you leave Thailand, p,ease tell her thank you from rawgod. The name will be meaningless to her, but hopefully the gratitude for what she does will make her smile. (Unless she would get angry with you for telling someone halfway around the world about what she does. Then silence is the best policy.)
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