Ever wonder why your horses act the way they do? Many owners believe professional animal communicators can help you find out what your horse is trying to tell you but you can’t hear. Their work is not recognized by many mainstream veterinarians. There’s no regulation, no licensing and no association that verifies the accuracy of these readings. Yet thousands use them. These are the stories of the believers, the skeptics and the people who say they can connect.

The Communicators

Amy Miller

It is so hard to define,’’ says Amy Miller, of the ability to communicate with animals. Everyone who connects with animals does it differently. Some hear words. This is called clairaudience. Others do it through clairvoyance, receiving the information through pictures. Miller is able to connect using these forms of communication, but the majority of her information comes from intuitive inner knowing, referred to as clairsentience.

“If you ask me questions, I tend to just know the answers and I really, honestly, don’t know how I know or why I know the information,” she explains. “It’s like a box of information that gets downloaded to my head and what I need to know for you is there.”

The 33-year-old’s story started about nine years ago. She had been a professional dog trainer for five years, always gifted with an understanding of animals. But it wasn’t until after her divorce that the ability bluntly presented itself.

With divorce comes change. She was now working full-time, she moved to an apartment, and her daily routine was just – different.

“One morning, I was kind of half awake, half asleep. All of a sudden my German Shepard, Griffin, started asking me all of these questions like, ‘Why did we move?’ I was just lying there asking myself if this was really happening.”

She says she had always been open to the idea, but can’t say she wasn’t surprised when it started. But, she went with her gut and followed this sign, this chance at a new life.

She started to tell her dog training clientele about her discovered talent and they began to call her for animal communication. With her background in training and nutrition, it was an easy transition and a useful tool for those with problematic pets. With practice and reading anything about the subject she could get her hands on, she refined her skills.

By 2009, she opened her own business, Intuitions Animal Communication, in Lakewood, Colorado.

“Animals have auras, energy, and souls,” explains Miller. “I connect with that energy signature.” Over the years, she has learned to hone her skills and is able to connect with auras over long

distances, 95 percent of her sessions are done over the phone. She is also a frequent guest at clinics and a Key Note Speaker at fairs across the country, where she sometimes does in-person readings.

Miller offers either 30 minute sessions for $50, or $100 for an hour. Her first question is to the owner, “I’ll ask them if they want to focus on health and wellness or training and behavior to begin.”

She then connects with the animal and- in an equine case- covers areas of discomfort, tack, and relationships with riders and trainers. She uses 75 percent of her time with the animal sending messages and

information. “You want them to know what the expectation is. You want them to know what they need to do.”

In July of 2010, she was approached by her first equine client, the Mead family out of Cat Spring, Texas. They had called in a panic, their beloved Palomino Quarter Horse, Mr Golden Fella, “Tex,” was suffering from what they thought was a common case of gas colic.

They had rushed him to a vet clinic, but veterinary treatment wasn’t working. Desperate to save their best friend, they started looking for alternative treatments.

“My sister, Kim, said, ‘Let’s call an animal communicator,’” says a member of the Mead family, Erin. Erin says she was skeptical to the idea and thought her sister was talking nonsense, but knew it couldn’t hurt anything.

They contacted Miller and told her what was going on with their favorite horse. “As soon as I talked to Amy, she said, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s not gas.’” She was right.

After closer examination, the vet discovered Tex’s colon had flipped over his spleen. They were able to remedy the physical situation, but he was still pretty touch and go, not drinking, eating or having any bowel movements. They called Amy again.

“She said he didn’t like the water bucket they gave him at the vet clinic, he wanted his pink bucket from home.” Erin laughed, but figured there was nothing to lose. She scrambled for the right colored bucket.

He drank.

“They thought they were going to have to say goodbye to their horse,” says Miller. But she was able to pin point his issues and save his life.

Tex died in February of 2013, at the age of 6, of a brain aneurysm, but Miller is still able to connect to him, even after death. The Mead family has received texts throughout the year of his wellbeing in the afterlife.

The family is now, collectively, a believer. They have become friends with Miller and use her services regularly on their other horses.

Recently, they took a young horse to the Reichert Celebration to compete in a longe line class. “We got there and he just wanted to be a turd,” says Mead. They called Amy to get inside the little one’s head. “She said, ‘I know you’re gonna laugh, but he’s upset about the halter.’”

They sighed. Erin ran back to the stalls to get his old halter. It worked, he calmed down and they ended up fourth in the class.

Joy Mason

When I was 8 years old my family went to the Colosseum in Rome,” recalls Joy Mason, a communicator from Capitola, California. “I remember turning to my mother and saying, ‘It’s so loud in here.’”

There was one tour group in the entire building.

Mason was hearing the past.

But, even with this strangeness popping up here and there throughout her life, she says she is a different breed of communicator.

“I come from a place of pure science,” she says. Mason is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and has shown horses and dogs her whole life. “I personally know how weird this industry, in general, is.”

But this gift was initially seen as a curse to the young doctor. She and her ex-husband started their own veterinary practice together in 1986. It was then that her abilities became overwhelming. “If they were really sick, I would literally get everything they had. If they were vomiting, I was vomiting. If their feet were swollen, my hands would puff up.”

And it wasn’t just the physical pain; she would get the mental thoughts of fear, pain and panic.

It was crippling.

“It was hard. I would get sick and my staff would have to take me home. It would take me hours to recover.”

Initially, Mason would reserve her abilities when a difficult case would come into the practice. Because of her scientific and fact based background, she would always test her “communicated” diagnosis. Without thinking about it, Mason was actually strengthening, trusting, and most importantly, learning to control her skills through this trial phase.

After separating from her husband in 2000, she decided to start her own business, Joy Mason, DVM, in 2002. “I did, what I call, coming out publicly.” In this time between 1986 and 2002, she also learned to connect with an animal over the phone. Now, 90 percent of her business is done through phone sessions.

She started going to dog shows to pick up clientele and learned of other communicators. Many of them were advising the pet owners to stop showing because the animal was unhappy. As a competitor herself, Mason knew that wasn’t an option and tried a different approach with the animal.

“We would work out a deal. The deal may be, we’re gonna show you until you’re a champion and have that title, then I promise we’re done.” Her clientele realized that she wasn’t out-of-the-loop when it came to the industry. She understood that this was more than a hobby. This was a lifestyle for people, and an expensive one.

Not only does she specialize in mood and behavior, but with her extensive background in veterinary medicine, she can easily identify exactly where and why an animal is having pain when she receives the information from them.

To expand her knowledge and skills to further help her clients, she started taking classes for a Chinese inspired massage therapy called Tui Na, which is one of the five pillars of traditional Chinese medicine. While taking classes at the Chi Institute in Reddick, Florida, she befriended one of her instructors, Julie Anne O’Neil. During class, the students were working on a horse that was having problems, but no one could get a read on the physical location of the problem through their massage work.

“Joy said, ‘It’s in his fetlocks,’” says O’Neil. “I looked at her and said, ‘How do you know that?’ and she pointed to her hands. Her knuckles were red.” Her body was responding to the injury and showing the pain in the corresponding human body part. This was O’Neil’s first time experiencing Mason’s talents and she was completely fascinated. She had worked with animal communicators in the past, so she supported the idea, but says she had never seen such a connection between animal and human. The two settled into an easy friendship.

Over the years, O’Neil had her read a few clients’ horses, but eventually, she was calling Mason for matters a little closer to home.

O’Neil’s horse, Autobahn, was in trouble. “She could hardly talk, she said. ‘He has his teeth on the bars of his stall because he’s in so much pain.’”

O’Neil ran out to the barn to load him in the trailer and take him to a vet clinic. When she got to his stall, he was standing there with his teeth on the bars of the stall.

When she got to the clinic in Gainesville, Florida, she called Mason again. “She said he had an impaction that was in an odd place. She said he was going to be okay, but he was severely dehydrated.” O’Neil got off the phone and headed into the hospital to hear what the veterinarians had to say. Their words were almost identical to what Mason had said over the phone.

She also does what she calls “real time” sessions where she actually has someone ride the horse and can then pick up any problems that only occur during work. She can easily communicate the problem the horse is having to the humans and then send messages to the horse as well, making a world of difference to trainers because she can speak their language.

The Clients
Holistic horse crap.”  That’s what Rhonda Cory, of Brooklyn, Wisconsin, says she had always thought of animal communication. “To me, that’s what it was. It was all these people that are pushing their herbs, their chiropractic, their acupuncture, all this crap on you to sell you something. It didn’t work. You couldn’t tell me that it worked.”
Then a draft horse named Lacy entered Cory’s life.

“She was very big and she was very pushy,” she says.

Cory was jumping from trainer to trainer, trying to fix the mare, with no luck and was fed up. The 47-year-old shared her concerns with a friend who suggested she use an animal communicator.

She finally broke down.

“I sent Amy (Miller) a picture of my draft horse with the question, ‘I wanna know why my horse is such a bitch.'”

With only this information, Miller went to town.

Her first question was “Was there a sister involved?” In fact, there had been. Just a few weeks prior, Cory had rescued Lily – Lacy’s sister. Miller then went on to talk about special flooring they had put down in the barn for Lily.

“But I never told her I had other horses! How did she know that I had other horses?”

In that moment, Cory did a 180 and never looked back. She was a believer.

Over just a few sessions, Cory went from almost taking Lacy to the meat market, to selecting her as one of the horses that would move to Georgia with her when she made the move to be with her husband.

The two kept in touch and continued to have readings together and by May, Cory experienced an unexplained urge to help Miller get the word out about her abilities and talents. Ever since then, Cory has been writing the monthly newsletter for Miller’s clientele.

Spotting and Avoiding Frauds The success stories are fun, but there are still frauds out there and even though they may be easy to spot after the fact, you still may be throwing away $50 (or even more) before you realize this person is pulling your leg.

 
BJ Whitworth, Houston, Texas
BJ Whitworth hails from Houston, Texas and says he’s always been a pretty open mined guy.

“I’ve used animal communication for many years. I’ve had some really good experiences, and I’ve had one bad experience.”

A few years ago, the now 35-year-old worked in an alternative veterinary clinic, where they worked with herbs, essential oils, acupuncture, as well as animal communication. Many times, communicators would contact the clinic and do a few sessions with the staff’s pets in order to get recommended by them.

Whitworth was able to sit in on one of the trial sessions with a woman who claimed to have the “gift.” “This is the only time I’ve ever used one in person. Usually people are from a different state, town, they do it over the phone, or from a picture.” Needless to say, he was excited to experience this first-hand.

“She came to our clinic. We used my boss’s dog, who was a nervous dog. He had some issues and we were trying to figure out what was going on.” The staff gathered round to be thrown into the roller coaster of emotions, opinions, and health problems that seemed to be the protocol whenever a communicator was on a roll.

“She was just like, ‘Well, your dog’s really nervous,’” says Whitworth. The staff collectively responded with, “We already know that, she sits there and shakes all day.” They wanted to know why and how to fix the problem.

The woman claimed the dog was having a hard time talking to her because of the nerves, but the staff knew she wasn’t the real deal. They politely ended the session and told her they wouldn’t be recommending her services.

His recommendations when looking and using animal communicators boil down to three points;

• Get a personal recommendation from a trustworthy source when it comes to communicators. “I’m not sure I would call somebody out of the blue that I didn’t know and nobody else had used.”

• Just because something is vaguely correct, doesn’t necessarily mean the communicator is doing well. He says you want someone who knows very specific things that they have no way of knowing, other than the fact that the animal is telling them.

• Don’t be discouraged if your first experience isn’t the best. There are people who are truly gifted who can help. Keep looking and talking to people who have had success. The benefit may outweigh the cost in the long run.

To learn more about Amy Miller and the services she offers, visit her website at www.intuitionsllc.com or call (608) 302- 9818.

Mason’s sessions are 20 to 30 minutes at $2 a minute. Visit joymason.com to learn more about Joy Mason, the services she offers, and to book an appointment.