The silent cries of animals: Could your furry friend be struggling?| Ep 137
*To watch – click the image above
Disclaimer-I am not a veterinarian, and the information in this article is not to be taken as veterinary medical advice. Please consult with your pet’s veterinarian if you have any concerns about your pet.
It’s a critical topic to delve into—supporting pets through PTSD or grief. Understanding how to aid our furry companions during their emotional distress is intriguing and incredibly important.
After all, they’re part of our families, and helping them cope is vital.
After appearing as a guest on criminal profiler John Kelly’s YouTube channel, I wrote this article to expand upon our discussion regarding animals who have witnessed distressing events and to provide some of my insight as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Telepathic Animal Communicator of over 20 years, and Nationally Board Certified Animal Massage and Acupressure Practitioner, about recovery from direct trauma.
If you would like to skip down to how to use a hands-on relaxation technique – scroll down to the section: Ease pet stress with ear massage of the vagus nerve using the “Click here” button below:
Traumatized pets can suffer from PTSD
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, PTSD is defined as an anxiety disorder. It can develop after a terrifying event and an ordeal in which great physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural and human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat.
And studies have shown that dogs can have PTSD. It’s been estimated that about 5% of 650 million military dogs who work now or are done with working suffer from PTSD.
We can imagine why if they’re in a combat situation, of course, there’s no doubt that they’re going have the potential to develop PTSD. This would also apply to search and rescue canines in highly stressful situations.4
Any dog or cat can suffer from PTSD
Civilian animals can also have PTSD, and a lot of different circumstances occur where that can happen.5 It can happen when an animal has been abused. Or an animal who has been through a natural disaster. For example, I have a relative whose dog, Levy, was rescued from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She would become highly anxious, tearing their home apart if left alone, and even rain without thunder and lightning would trigger this response.
Many pets could fall into this category. Cats, as well. So, it could be being abused or having been abandoned.
Signs an animal is suffering from trauma
Signs of PTSD could be things like elimination randomly instead of going where they’re supposed to go – they go to the bathroom all of a sudden out of nervousness, anxiety, and fear.
Also, an animal could be showing fear and anxiety through vocalization. So be aware of talking, whimpering, and barking—also, sudden or intense responses to everyday sounds such as a door shutting or human movements not intended to be threatening.
Pets also mourn
Many in the animal behavior world have avoided attributing to animals emotions traditionally attributed to humans. However, there’s a growing body of evidence that is beginning to make it clear that many species suffer from not only PTSD but also grief.
We have seen studies showing animals with relatives and close companions whom they mourn; these displays of grief are similar to what humans experience in many ways.
Helpful holistic therapies for your pet
Holistic modalities that can benefit pets suffering from anxiety, PTSD, or grief include homeopathy, essential oils such as lavender, herbs like chamomile, valerian, lemon balm, and nutraceuticals such as L-Theanine and melatonin.
Also potentially helpful are biologically appropriate diets and medicinal mushrooms. Always check with your veterinarian before using these modalities.
I’m a fan of focusing first on holistic modalities, but there are also prescription medications that are sometimes used and can be life-saving
Vagus nerve massage & stimulation for pet relaxation
Vagus nerve massage (or stimulation) has been practiced for a very long time. When acupressure and acupuncture and those sorts of modalities came about thousands of years ago, vagus nerve stimulation was part of the process.
The vagus nerve has been shown to relax a pet or a person in response to the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing fight-or-flight stress responses.
Driven by the sympathetic nervous system, the vagus nerve impacts the regulation of swallowing, vocalization, breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, immune responses, the microbiome of intestines, mood, anxiety level, digestion, and sleep.
Strong vagal tone can improve how well people and pets recover from illness, accident, stroke, or brain injury and improve health overall. It affects physical stability, emotional balance, flexibility, adaptability, recovery, and regeneration after shock and trauma, and the ability to connect and engage with others.
It is the 10th cranial nerve and the longest nerve in the body, and the word vagus is Latin for wandering.
Here is a picture of the vagus nerve on a human. I could not find a good picture of the vagus nerve in a pet or in an animal. It’s very similar.
The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the mammal’s body. It’s actually on both sides of the body, but they have it shown on the right side.
You can see it drops down into the digestive tract, so it passes along many parts of the body. And again, this is why the word vagus is Latin for wandering.
The ear is a great place to access the vagus nerve of a pet, and we want to do that because we want to make our sad pets feel better.
Ease pet stress with ear massage of the vagus nerve
Pets can benefit from stimulation of the vagus nerve.
Our kitty video model, Giavanna, is a big girl who doesn’t always like to be held. That’s part of her trauma, too, because she was in shelters, and I feel like she’s probably not handled very gently and well. So, we’re working on it, but she’s resistant to being picked up to some degree.
Vagus nerve massage of Gia, my cat model in video can be found at: Timestamp 20:37
*Video will open in a new window
After the vagus nerve exits the skull, it enters the upper neck and then goes behind the ear. We want to massage the animals behind the ear gently, not too hard, and we come up along behind. And then it’s also nice to go along the front.
We want to just go behind the ear. Then we want to go in front of the ear and then press very gently in the inner flap of the ear but never go down into the ear canal.
The vagus nerve passes along the neck to the throat, to the vocal cords, to the heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidney, spleen, gallbladder, pancreas, and finally, the small intestine and part of the large intestine.
Just massage their ear nicely. You don’t want to push too hard, and you don’t want to just run your thumb or finger along it so that it’s just a gentle pressure. And they have used the vagus nerve stimulation device for dogs with drug-resistant epilepsy.
There has been an 87% reduction in tonic-clonic seizures in dogs where they have used it; it really is an important nerve.
Well-known veterinarian Dr. Marty Becker mentions the vagus nerve:
"Dogs probably like their ears rubbed because, neurologically speaking, gentle massage in these areas is relaxing. The vagus nerve serves a large part of the midportion of the ear, and stimulating this nerve is calming because it controls vegetative, restorative functions. This calming effect also counteracts the fight and flight response associated with the sympathetic nervous system.
Overcoming trauma is a journey – for people and pets
This is another thing about trauma and grief and pets. It’s just like people. It doesn’t necessarily heal overnight. We can be doing everything under the sun to help them, but we have to be mindful that sometimes it’s a process of going forward, and then sometimes you even take a few steps back, and then you have to go forward again.
But a strong vagal tone, which can be helped by doing massage, can improve overall health, physical stability, emotional balance, flexibility, adaptivity recovery, regeneration after shock and trauma, and the ability to connect and engage with others.
Next, we’ll discuss telepathic animal communication and how it can help with PTSD and grief in pets.
How animal communication helps heal pet trauma
Animal communication hasn’t always been regarded highly by veterinarians in the scientific community. However, that is changing, especially among holistic veterinarians. However, even traditional veterinarians are beginning to change their opinions due to scientific studies showing how animal communication works.
They’re not necessarily doing studies on telepathic human-animal communication (that we know of yet). But they’re doing studies on telepathy, including studies with animals to animals. These are scientific studies published in reputable medical journals.
They’re beginning to see things on MRIs. So that’s really interesting. I will get to the scientific MRI stuff in a moment.
Animal grief in the wild
And there’s evidence from the field studies conducted by Jane Goodall.6 She recounted how a young chimpanzee in Tanzania, his name was Flint, died from grief weeks after the death of his mother, Flo.
In Kenya, Cynthia Moss also reported that elephants attend to dying friends and family members and stroke the bones of deceased relatives.7
I interviewed Dr. Mary Francis O’Connor on The Animal Intuitive Channel8. She spoke about the voles’ study about bonding and how the voles reacted when separated.9 It’s like a grief response.
And there is the Rothchild Giraffe project, which also took place in Kenya.10
A baby giraffe was born with a deformed foot, and her herd synchronized their activities differently. Usually, they have synchronized activities in the giraffe herds, so they’ll go out and do things together. A mother giraffe wouldn’t go more than 20 meters away from this baby giraffe.
Unfortunately, the giraffe did die, and many of the females in the herd changed their behavior significantly in the wake of the infant’s death. They were watching over this baby giraffe that was ill and died.
There are a lot of videos out there you can find about grief-like behavior with dolphins and whales. Some of the mothers have been seen carrying their infants that have passed in their mouths or on their backs for a week or longer. In addition, there’s this: everyone’s heard of the movie “Hachi, a Dog’s Tale.”
The remarkable Hachi – faithful forever
It has been many years since the movie came out. But this professor died suddenly in his university office, and his dog used to walk him to the train, and then he would wait for him at the train station when he returned home. Hatchi would return to the train, and he waited faithfully for him until the dog died.
Hatchi obviously didn’t seem to understand that the professor wasn’t returning. And this is where animal communication could come into play because we can help animals better understand what’s happened.
Barbara J. King is a professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, and her studies of monkeys and apes have led to examining emotion and intelligence in a wide range of animal species.11 Dr. King believes that from her studies, the animal who loves will suffer in some visible way.
How to help grieving pets
What we can do, in addition to communicating with them, and we’ll talk more about that, is maintain a routine and exercise regime. Give them toys to play with. Anything that brings joy back into their lives, like spending time together.
And it might be more than usual playing with them, cuddling, massaging – they are pack animals. We’re talking about dogs here. With domesticated dogs, their human companions are as much a part of the pack as other dogs. So, it’s essential, especially if they’ve lost a human, to help them through that process.
Again, sometimes, in more severe cases, they may need help with traditional and non-traditional medical interventions. And you also may notice behavioral changes if they have lost another being that they were close with.
If we ignore this, it is a big deal because many animals suffer. Because we care so much about them, we try to help them live long lives, meaning at some point, they’re potentially going to experience the loss of another being they love.
Dr. Frank McMillan, a research veterinarian and director of Wellbeing Studies at Best Friend’s Animal Society in Kana, Utah, states that a traumatized animal is at a higher likelihood of becoming re-traumatized if she re-encounters major stressors:
“This profound loyalty is also found in dog-dog friendships. The ASPCA’s Companion Animal Mourning Project reports that two-thirds of dogs show behavioral changes indicative of emotional upset, lasting up to six months when another dog in the same household dies.”12
Understanding your pet’s stress triggers
Understanding their triggers is beneficial in helping to prevent episodes. And sometimes, we do know what the trigger is. We can see very easily that it has something to do with the weather or someone similar that is triggering them, or they may be having a reaction, and we can’t figure out what’s going on exactly.
For instance, I work with people who often tell me their pets sometimes act fine when they go on a walk. And then other times, they’re having these aggressive or fearful displays of behavior and frantically pull on their leash to return home. Or they may see an unfamiliar dog and react significantly with one dog but not another.
There can be a lot of different ways that we see the triggers displayed in their behavior. However, the cause of these responses can be unclear.
Where telepathic animal communication can help
- Telepathic interspecies communication can help us understand and connect with the animal, allowing us to feel what an animal is feeling.
- Telepathic animal communication is received from the animal or sent to the animal.
- Telepathic animal communication takes place as a visual impression, auditorily, through emotional feeling, physical feeling, scent, taste, or simply a “knowing.”
- Visual telepathic animal communication comes through as a photo or a mini-movie in the mind’s eye; auditorily is like having a sentence go through your mind or words you know are coming from the animal. Physical telepathic communication is feeling something on your body, such as a sore arm, because the animal has a sore arm.
- An example of telepathic animal communication involving smelling can be smelling something that could trigger an animal because they associate it with a traumatic event, such as a fire. The taste might be a food they like or dislike and could be associated with a negative memory of a previous lousy home environment.
- It could be simply “knowing” something about the animal.
- Those are all the different ways telepathic animal communication can come through.
- Sometimes, animals don’t wholly understand the finality of death. Sometimes they do. They know that, for instance, an animal friend has gone onto another plane, and some animals don’t get it completely and sometimes not at all.
- It’s like people. There are just different levels of understanding experiences.
Brain-to-brain telepathic communication studies
An article by the National Center for Biotechnology Information titled “Brain to Brain Communication” delves into the potential role of brain electromagnetic fields as a hypothesis.13
It’s a pretty detailed article. I’ll offer a my general summary of what’s depicted in this material.
In the article, they display an image of two brains facing each other. The article explains how information is transferred through the firing of neurons, and this magnetic field and the other brain pick up on it.
What if training doesn’t help?
Training can also be helpful for animals who are experiencing stress, anxiety, grief, or PTSD.
Sometimes, people need help figuring out why training isn’t working. And that’s where animal communication can be helpful as well, to understand what is going on here. What are you feeling? What are you experiencing? So that we can better help you and figure out a plan that will work.
As I mentioned, scientific studies point to certain areas of the brain that provide tangible evidence via MRIs of how telepathy works through mirror neurons and magnetic fields of the brain.
So, there’s some kind of receiving going on in the magnetic field, and they’re saying that this should be examined in its potential role in direct brain-to-brain communication. They have to do more research on this. However, the present study suggested that extremely weak magnetic fields of the animal’s brain could transmit vital and accurate information to another animal’s brain.
They also say a previous study revealed the involvement of the hippocampal region in telepathy. These findings raise the question of whether the subconscious regions of the brain play a central role in telepathy. I’ll put a link in the end notes if you want to go in deep and read this article.
Hopefully, more researchers will help explain how telepathic animal communication works. Of course, those who practice animal communication have been doing this for a long time, just without the financially backed formal research studies.
Experienced animal communicators and pet lovers know that animals are sentient beings. We know that we can intuit what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and what they’re experiencing.
How I have proven that telepathic animal communication is real
That’s why I started doing my channel years ago; in part, it was to do things like live animal communication so that people who aren’t so familiar with it can see it happen.
Many people in the past, (I no longer do live communication on the show due to logistics) called in without me knowing anything about their pet, and we had beautiful, confirmed, telepathic communication live on the spot. Those shows are still available and can be found in my live animal communication playlist.
My YouTube channel has many playlists with other demonstrations of how you can help your pet with massage, acupressure, and animal communication.
If you want to try animal communication, take advantage of my FREE class: Unlocking The Secrets Of Animal Communication please use the QR code or go to that page, Animal Intuitive® Academy, on my website.
You can also sign up for live or private classes. If you want to start your training right now, my full-length introductory course, Telepathic Animal Communication, Acupressure, and Mindfulness For You and Your Pet! is available for download by clicking here. This class can also be used to qualify as the first level needed to earn Animal Communicator Certification through Animal Intuitive® Academy.
Final thoughts on the importance of telepathic animal communication
Animal communication is a beautiful way to help pets deal with trauma.
Telepathic animal communication can accelerate healing because you can understand what animals are experiencing through their eyes and feel how their body experiences it. This provides us with added insight into how to better support them in their own healing.
Interspecies communication can also reassure animals that you are committed to helping them feel better.
I encourage you to get that free class from Animal Intuitive® Academy. Also, grab the free tools I have on my podcast, such as acupressure, massage, and energy work, to help your pet relax.
References
1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw-3WMVefRQ&t=510s
2. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd/what-is-ptsd
3. https://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/military-dogs-can-also-suffer-from-ptsd
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7503916/
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4694552/
6. https://news.janegoodall.org/2015/09/29/the-famous-chimps-of-gombe/3/
7. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-not-the-only-creatures-who-mourn1/
8.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLOO_kq4uFs
9. https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983777/
10. https://www.girafferesearch.com/
11. https://www.amazon.com/How-Animals-Grieve-Barbara-King/dp/022615520X
12. https://www.petmd.com/dog/behavior/how-heal-emotionally-traumatized-pet
