Pet Charades: Decoding Problem Pet Behaviors to Deepen Pet Trust

This episode is a must-listen for every pet parent! Learn valuable skills to identify how your pet is trying to communicate with you through an interspecies game of charades (yes, the same game we humans like to play)!.

As you listen, you will discover:

• How to view pet behavior as a type of shared language system
• Different types of charades your pet may play with you
• Why pets choose to play charades with us (and the risks involved)
• A biological basis for pet charades (or why evolution is at the root of it)
• The 4 levels of animal messages (and how they often relate to YOU!)
• A fresh take on pet "escape artists" and what might really be going on
• Options for guessing your pet's charade to resolve family disharmony
• And so much more

Additional podcast episodes mentioned:

• What animals say about enduring trauma and abuse
• How a lost turtle led to a miraculous love story

Additional resources mentioned in this episode:

• 28 days of intuitive pet parenting challenge
• Done for you animal communication
• DIY animal communication

Are you animal communication curious? Have I got something special for you! My new Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery student learning program just launched! This program is designed to be a gentle, yet thorough, serious, yet lighthearted path to interspecies fluency that pairs beautifully with my ongoing live Animal Communication Adventure Practice Circle for developing student practitioners. Visit animallovelanguages.com and click on programs to join us.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Mission Of The Show
• 1:15 Introducing Pet Charades Concept
• 4:22 Intentional Behaviors As Communication
• 8:20 Patterns In The Chaos
• 8:58 The Cockatiel Zoom Story
• 11:01 Resonance And Nervous System Sync
• 14:02 Inner Wild And Instincts
• 16:13 Four Levels Of Messages
• 19:28 Inappropriate Elimination Reframed
• 22:45 Emotional And Mental Layers
• 26:14 Pearl’s Lesson On Identity
• 29:39 Presence Over Multitasking
• 34:21 Simple Daily Bonding Practices
• 38:45 Relational Messages And Boundaries
• 42:19 Escape Artists As Teachers
• 46:27 Integrating Communication With Vet Care

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Welcome back to Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can enjoy together. My name is Shannon Cutz. I am an animal sensitive and intuitive, a Reiki master practitioner, and an animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages.com. And for our purposes here today, I am also your friendly neighborhood hostess and guide through the wild, wise, and wonderful world of interspecies communication. Call me crazy, but I truly believe that animal communication has the power to save, heal, and restore our planet for all species to enjoy and share. When we learn to communicate with one another, we begin to realize we are so much more alike than different. We care about each other. We become friends. On this podcast, we talk about what the animals have to say and share, and why our pets truly are our partners, empathic friends, and teachers. I am so glad you have joined us here for this fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. So let's dive in. Hi, Shannon here. Welcome back to Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can enjoy together. And on the menu today, we are talking about what I like to call pet charades. What are they? Why are they so valuable for you as the pet parent in the mix? And how can you use pet charades to decode your pet's messages to establish clearer lines of interspecies communication within your animal family? So, first up, this is a topic I've been passionate about pretty much ever since I started my formal animal communication learning journey. And I started to realize that I was communicating unconsciously, energetically, emotionally with my pet family members all day, every day. And I had no idea that I'd been doing this all my life, all of their lives, all of our life together. And as I started to dive deeper into the dynamics of living in an interspecies family, a family where we speak different languages. Keep in mind that at the time I did not know the universal language of interspecies communication that I speak fluently today. So when we are in a situation, especially a daily life situation, where we don't speak the same language, we have to find other ways to communicate. We want to find other ways to communicate. If you've ever traveled to a place where nobody spoke your language or nobody spoke it very well, did you not find yourself doing all kinds of other things? Doing pantomimes, using hand gestures, facial expressions, tapping places in your body, pointing to things, doing everything in your power to be understood and to understand. And if you were in a friendly place where people welcome you, where tourism, for instance, is encouraged and appreciated, then you might have noticed that your conversational partners were also doing these things. They were using hand gestures, facial expressions, they were pointing to things, tapping to body parts, acting things out in front of you in an effort to communicate. And that is why I call our pets behaviors, especially the really weird ones, the stuff we simply don't understand, pet charades. It's like our game, the charades game, where we're trying to act out a story or a message or a phrase right in front of the other participants, and they are trying their best to guess what the heck are you talking about? So from this moment forward, especially if this is a new concept for you, of course you're aware that your pets are doing their thing, they're behaving the way that they behave, they're vocalizing the way that they vocalize, they are doing the things that they do, they are interacting in certain ways with you, with each other. But from this point forward, understand that all of that is intentional. It's either proactive or it's reactive, but it is intentional and it is an attempt to communicate with you, with the other members of your family, whether human or non-human. So if from this point forward you can think about your daily life together and the different interactions that you have and the vocalizations that you hear and the behaviors that you see, especially the really perplexing ones, as efforts to communicate, this alone will begin to reshape how you interact with your pet, how you receive their vocalizations, their behaviors. And again, especially the ones that are particularly perplexing, worrisome, or just undesirable. And consider as well, and we'll get into this as we move along in this episode, but consider as well how you might be acting out communications and messages right in front of your pet as well. Because remember, even if you are a seasoned animal communicator like I am, we are still always in a learning curve. Our pets are the masters. And my animal communication students are very familiar with me sharing with them that the animals are our master teachers. They are the fluent ones. We are learning their language, and they've had a lot more practice finding creative ways to communicate with us to at least alleviate the language barrier that exists between us. And sometimes they have things to tell us that we simply don't understand because it's coming from their point of view, from their perspective, from what I call their inner wild, which we will also talk about in this episode. So, right now, what I want you to try on for size, put on this pair of glasses and see how the world that you see changes, is to view everything that your pet does as an effort to communicate. What are they trying to communicate? What they want, what they need, what they observe, what you may want, what you may need, the things about you or within you that you are completely blind to, completely unaware of. And they are trying to communicate most importantly, your bond. They're trying to build your bond. And everything that they do has a reason. Just like even if we're not quite sure what our reasons are, everything that we do, there is a reason for it. We don't always have the luxury of time to stop and dig down deep and go, why did I just say that? Why did I just do that? Why didn't I say that? Why didn't I do that? But just understand that underneath that surface level confusion, what we call the waves of life, there are reasons. And the same holds true for your pets. And so that is our working theory for the rest of this episode, talking about how building an understanding of your pet's behavior and vocalizations as pet charades attempts to convey messages to you to communicate and connect. With that understanding, how can we build on that and start to recognize what I call patterns in the chaos, repeating vocalizations, repeating behaviors? Those are repeating messages. It's like learning Morse code in a way. Oh, there's a pattern there, prime numbers or the difference between a noun and a verb, so that we can learn to reliably tell the difference between the two. We're starting to use this concept of pet charades to look for patterns in the ordinary chaos or waves of everyday life. Wow, my dog always does that when I do this. One of the things that I can share with you really quickly that was it was kind of an easy one for me to decode, you would think, but I was way too close to the situation to realize what was happening, was I would be on Zoom calls with some of my coaches and my mentors. And I'm in some pretty intensive coursework, always, definitely right now. And this actually happened last year. I was in a very intensive coaching program. And everyone on my program, the other students, as well as my teachers and coaches, got to know Miss Pettle, my cockatiel, really well because she loves Zoom and she's always with me. And one day, one of the coaches said, Your bird is screaming her head off. So I'm wondering how you're feeling about what we're talking about right now. And when she said that, my focus shifted from doing my level best to try to quiet her down so she wouldn't drive the other participants and my teacher crazy with her shrieking. And my focus shifted to what is my inner state? And when I tuned in with my inner state, I realized that my teacher was right. I was feeling extremely anxious and resistant to what she was presenting to me. I was scared and I was feeling very worried. And as soon as I tuned into that emotion and took a few deep breaths and became aware that Pedal, who I thought was the reason for this agitation in me, she wasn't the reason. Her vocalizations weren't the reason. Her vocalizations were the heads up that I needed to stop and take stock and calm down. And wouldn't you know when I did that? Pedal stopped screaming. And from that point forward, my coach, who's not an animal communicator, very far from it. This was a completely different. I was learning about entrepreneurship. My coach would always take pedal's emotional measurement. She'd say, Hmm, pedal isn't vocalizing today. So you must be feeling pretty good about that. And it made me aware that pedal wasn't trying to be disruptive. So often when our animals are meowing or barking or neighing or screeching, and we think they're trying to pull us away from something or trying to disrupt what's going on in our daily life, when in reality, often they're trying to alert us to something, something that is disrupting us, our nervous system, our calm, our opportunities in life. And there have been numerous studies that have demonstrated the power of this shared pet charades communication system through what we call resonance, shared resonance. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake calls this morphic resonance. And of course, the concept is a little broader than what we're talking about here, but intermingled within that is this ability to pick up on the emotional state, the energetic state, the electromagnetic state of the other organisms or life forms we share proximity with, whether that be through local physical geographic proximity or proximity through the information field of quantum mechanics. In other words, we influence one another. Dr. Stephen Porges, founder of Polyvagel theory, talked about the power of the nervous system to sync for two types of evolutionarily advantageous messages, messages of danger and messages of safety and opportunity. So survive and evolve, essentially. And this has been demonstrated. It's been demonstrated in wild communities of animals. It's been demonstrated between owners and their dogs. It's been demonstrated in homes, in interspecies homes with animals and their people, their humans. And we can feel it every single time we enter a space where somebody's feeling a little agitated or out of sorts or especially joyful because it shifts our mood. Have you ever stood next to somebody without maybe even knowing what was going on with them, without maybe even knowing their name, and just start to feel like I really want to get away? Don't like the vibe here. That's syncing. And here I mean S-Y-N-C-I-N-G. We are syncing just like our smart devices sync with one another all day, every day to share information. We are syncing with one another because we too are electromagnetic devices. We sync with one another. Why? Because it's good for us to get the lay of the land. So be absolutely confident that your pet is syncing with your nervous system all day, every day, constantly reading the room, getting the lay of the land, and often getting the heads up about approaching storms, danger, and joys, opportunity, long before you are. This is another reason why I tell my animal communication students that our animals are our master teachers. They have been doing this all their lives because it helps them survive and thrive. Just because they're living their posh and pampered, modern first world lives with you does not turn off that inner wild, that instinct. And this is what I've been teaching in my 28 days of intuitive pet parenting free challenge, where we've been talking about four different areas where you can build your bond with your pet companion. We're talking about sensing their energy and recognizing that they're sensing yours. We're talking about building your awareness of their inner wild instincts and how those wild instincts are still running the show in so many cases, in so many ways, in ways that they aren't even aware of. And you certainly cannot control. We can't shut those instincts off. We can modify and moderate the responses. So that's the epigenetics, the learned behavior, the changing responses to situational stimuli through modification training, but we cannot erase them. We cannot mute them completely, nor would we want to, because it would be like muting an aspect of your animal's expression in this world. So we talk about how to explore and get curious about and interact with and work with your pet's inner wild instincts. We talk about building your bond of trust. It's one thing to love somebody, it's another thing to trust them completely. And trust requires empathy, and empathy requires time and awareness. So we're talking a lot about that. And then we're talking about your soul agreement. Because if we use the example from earlier, maybe you have found yourself keeping company with somebody who is very agitated or very anxious or tends to be highly sensitive or prone to outbursts. That doesn't mean that either one of you is doing something wrong. You are in each other's lives for a reason. And it's most likely to do what Tara Brock says to grow in wisdom and learn to love better. Love one another, love ourselves. So your pets are in your inner species family for a reason. Out of all of the animals alive on this planet, you are together with this particular animal, this particular companion animal. And when I ask the animals, what does the word pet mean? Why do we use it to describe you? They have told me it means partner, empathic friend, and teacher. So we can look at our pets' behaviors, vocalizations, mannerisms as problems for us to solve. That's kind of the danger, danger way of looking at it, or we can look at them as opportunities to expand and evolve. And that's where the role of animal communication comes into the play, comes into the picture is when we're seeking the deeper lessons and we're seeking the shared resonance. We don't play pet charades or any kind of game of charades by ourselves. At least most of us don't. I haven't met anyone who tells me that they enjoy a good rousing game of charades all by themselves. If we're playing charades, we're in community and we're choosing to be in community and we're wanting to be in community and we're wanting to communicate. So it's important to understand that every so-called problem pet behavior, first of all, you invited that master teacher who has that behavior into your life. There's in your family for a reason. Number two, there is absolutely something here for you. There's something to learn, there's something here for them too. When I talk with pets at the soul level, which is really the sweet spot for animal communication, at least the way I practice it, we're taking a deeper look at why are we together? Why are you and I together out of all the people in the world, out of all the animals in the world, why did we come together? That was set up in advance. So let's find out why. So we can play to our strengths, we can work on our lessons together, and we can both grow and evolve. So when we're looking at these so-called problem pet behaviors or vocalizations, or just the perplexing things, or the why are you so anxious? I wish I knew how to help you. That is a huge driver that sends you to me for animal communication sessions, is I don't know how to help my pet. And I'll give you a little spoiler alert. Now, I'm not trying to make a blanket statement here, but often when we do dive deeper and have that conversation with a level of fluency involved, what we find out is it's not just about that pet's anxiety. Often it's about yours. It's not just about that pet's aggression, it's often about yours. And for we human animals, and especially female human animals, women, it's often about muted or subdued or off-limits aggression. When we look at areas like in what we call, what we humans call inappropriate elimination, the animals have told me over and over again, it's not inappropriate from where we're sitting. P and poop are powerful communication tools, and we use them and we use them to communicate, and they're kind of a go-to, especially in really tough communication situations, because they're guaranteed to get your attention right away. And here's another little spoiler alert. Least when I'm doing animal communication sessions, I can only speak for how I structure my practice and my conversations. We're not just looking for what's going on physically. Absolutely, there may be something. I do have medical intuition training. And in fact, I always encourage my pet parent clients. Run, don't walk to your veterinarian if you have any physical health questions or concern. I went to the vet twice with Miss Petal yesterday. So I practice what I preach. Yes, I talked with her about what was going on with her. Yes, I did an energy healing session as a Reiki master. I'm blessed to be able to offer that right inside the home with my pet family. I also rushed her to the vet twice, and I'm happy to report that she's doing much better today. So animal communication is never meant to be a replacement or a substitute, nor can it be, nor should it be. And so when I talk with my pet parent clients, we talk about building your pet's well pet team that includes different disciplines, different modalities. First and foremost is developing your own pet parent intuition, what I call the modern pet parents superpower, the most overlooked tool in your modern pet parenting toolkit, the tool that can cut through all the crap, all the confusion, all the lack of clarity can get you to the next right feeling step quickly and cleanly. And when I teach my intuitive development for pet parents workshops, this is what we're focusing on. So if you haven't enrolled in one of those yet, be sure to join my free love letters community. I send out a weekly e-newsletter and it offers insights, breaking news, tips, new free resources, and announcements, including the availability of free animal communication sessions with my senior students. And also when I'm running these free workshops, these intuitive development workshops for pet parents. Specifically, there are lots of different kinds of intuition training available to you today, but this one is specific to developing your intuition around caring for your pet, building your confidence and your competence. So you trust yourself. You trust what I call your iOS, your intuitive operating system to guide you. You trust this sinking feature where your nervous system and your pet's nervous system are always trading messages. Imagine you're a wild pack of two, you're out in the greater food chain of life, and you are constantly scanning your surroundings, looking for signs of danger, looking for signs of opportunity and sharing that information. This is the foundations of animal communication, which is why this workshop is also a precursor to actually studying with me inside animal communication adventure to mastery. So rewinding a little bit back to inappropriate elimination, which is another one of the big hot button topics that sends you to me for animal communication conversations. Why does my cat, my dog keep peeing, keep pooping? I thought my rabbit was house-trained. All of a sudden she's not. It's not that she forgot all of her training, it's that it serves her to use her poop to communicate with you. There is something on her mind, there's something in her heart. It may be physical, in which case we've already covered that. Run, don't walk to the vet. Definitely you can reach out to me for a conversation. I can share with you how your pet is feeling. I can sync up my nervous system with your pet's nervous system to receive any messages that they're willing or able to share with me about how they're feeling in their body, what's going on in their body. And we can see if there's anything, any areas of discomfort, things like that. And I always want to follow that up with a visit to the vet if you haven't done so already. So it's really not about me providing veterinary diagnosis or treatment. It's about me stepping in as the interspecies translator to share if there's anything about your pet's body that they want to tell you. They want you to know. Then I also look at any kind of pet charade situation, whether it's peeing or pooping, barking, or meowing, or scratching, or biting, or hissing or shrieking or whatever it is, destroying the furniture. We look at an emotional component. So messages can come through in many different forms, physically, mentally, emotionally, and at the soul level. And they can come through for many different reasons. There might be a physical need, there might be a mental need, there might be an emotional need, and there might be a relational or a soul level need. And so we're looking at that. So we look at the emotional level. How's your pep feeling? How are they feeling when they're engaging in the perplexing behavior or the confusing way that they're vocalizing or responding to individuals in your circle, in your community, in your family? How are they feeling before they start the behavior? How are they feeling during the behavior? And how are they feeling after the behavior has ended? And I'm also looking at this is kind of a secret inside behind the scenes tip. I'm also tuned in with you because you and your pet are a team. And I'm taking a look at is your pet wanting to let me know anything about your emotional state, or maybe even your physical state, or your mental state, or your relationship state? And are they using their behavior to let you know that they're aware or to let you know that they're aware of something that you are unaware of? Say that five times fast. And I look at the mental level. Is there a boredom issue? Is there a bullying issue? My soul bird pearl came to me and he was being bullied by his siblings in the nest. And he was also a really tiny little cockatiel. He was very small. He never got to be more than 80 grams. I mean, Petal outweighed him in her first eight weeks of life. So he was this tiny little runt. He was missing claws and his left wingtip. And for many years before I discovered animal communication, my mindset when I looked at him, every time I had to take him to the vet, even if it was just for a checkup, anytime we had to do anything, I had to restrain him or hold him in any way, I viewed him as this helpless little victim. And I treated him like he was very breakable, very, very fragile. I used to tell people to be very careful with him. He can't get around too well, he can't fly on his own. He's very fragile. He's a very small, fragile bird. Well, let me just tell you, after I started having two-way interspecies conversations with Pearl, he corrected me very quickly and he pointed out, Do you see how much I've survived? Do you see how strong and brave I am? Do you see how well I've trained you? He used to call me his large featherless assistant. I will wear that badge proudly for life. Now I am his reincarnation, Miss Pettle's large featherless assistant. And he presented himself as the boss, as the CEO. And I stopped being afraid to bring him for vet visits because I realized that every single time he would bounce back pretty quickly. You'd give him five minutes or so to shake his body after being handled or measured or weighed or whatever they wanted to do that day. He was fine. I needed a good stiff drink and a night to recover. So his message to me was I'm good. I'm strong. I'm brave. I've got all the skills that I need. I can use them. I've got a beak, I've got claws, I've got wings. Maybe they're not as functional as nature had intended, but I'm not afraid to use them. I'm a survivor. I got myself out of that horrible bullying situation and went home with you, even when your mom tried to talk you out of it. And that's a whole other story. My mom was afraid that he was too weak and fragile. Guess where I got that idea and wanted me to adopt one of the other older, stronger birds in the flock. But my heart said no, and I took Pearl home. And it was the best decision I ever made. And that was my intuition, my heart talking. So sometimes the real reason for the pet charades or the problems in our interspecies family harmony, it's not about our pet at all. It's about we've got it all wrong. We're looking at them wrong. We're not seeing what they're showing us each and every day. We're not picking up what they're putting down. And they want us to know something about who they are that they can't figure out how to tell us. Sometimes it's a situation, especially when we get to the emotional level or the even the mental level of what I call mirroring or modeling, where mirroring is I'm behaving the way that you are behaving, but you don't know you're behaving that way. So I'm trying to show you through my charades right in front of me that you're a crazy hot mess or whatever it is that's going on, or you have no boundaries, whatever it is. I've had cats that peed only when somebody at their workplace, their boss, was taking advantage of them again or piling on more projects. I've had dogs that have aggressed and even bitten when it's been their person who's too afraid to speak up, too afraid to set boundaries, to defend themselves, to put their foot down, maybe to leave. It's surprising. It probably shouldn't be. It can be surprising, especially to new animal communication students, how often our pets want to talk about the toxic relationships we have with other humans, as well as the nourishing ones. And because we don't have fluency in their language, they try to use their behavior. I had a dog once who would pee in the house, but only in the husband's areas. And there were a couple different areas in the house where those areas cross paths with the wife's area. And this dog would routinely drop a puddle right at that intersection. And what came out of that was this is the boundary. We need a boundary here between the energy between these two people. And I have many more examples like that from conversations I've had over the years. Now let's take a look again a little bit closer at the mental level. Sometimes there is a true lack in the animal's life. It may be a lack of mental connection that can be emotional as well. Those two are definitely interwoven and tied together. There can be a lack of enrichment, of stimulation, of new opportunities, of sensory stimulation, of sensory experiences. Our pet companions live much more from their connective right brain. We alone, out of all the animal species on this planet, seem to default to and often actually prefer living in our left brains. Our left brains are extremely individualistic, extremely logical, rational, analytical, very much focused on the past and the future, never right here, right now with who I'm with and what I'm doing in this moment in time, which is why our left brain minds are not intuitive. It can be very hard to parent our pets from the left brain mind, because we're missing the information that our pets are giving us that's right in front of our eyes and right in front of all of our senses in this particular moment in time. We're often parenting our pets from past memories, like the experience I just gave you with my Pearl of meeting him as this tiny, vulnerable, nest bullied chick and carrying that impression forward for 15 years before I discovered animal communication and started on this path. That's 15 years where I missed getting to know the real Pearl. And I don't want you to miss getting to know your real precious heart animal right here, right now, with who they're showing you to be right here, right now. That's a lot of the motivation for this podcast and the work that I do is wanting to pay it forward from everything that my master teachers, Pearl, Bruce, Jacob, Perky, Red, all of my beautiful past master teachers, as well as my present master teachers, two of whom are reincarnated. I must be a good student or else I'm a really terrible student. And they came back for more because two of my animals in my family right now reincarnated and came back with a new fresh set of lessons for me. So often we'll see this as well. So going back to the mental level, sometimes there can also be just a lack of connection. A lot of the enrichment that our pets crave the most isn't coming from the$150 billion or so we spend every year on pet products and pet care. What they're really craving is connection with us, the excitement of sharing experiences together. So this is where we see the emotional and the mental are tied together. But we have an epidemic these days of people who say their pets are their best friends, but really we treat our smart devices like our best friends and our pets kind of like our occasional sidekicks. And so here often what I'll see is that the pet charade is arising because their person won't put their phone down. They won't pull their awareness here and now into this present moment to explore life together, to just be here now, to have a cuddle and not try to do anything else. And as I mentioned before, anytime any of this stuff is coming up in your relationship with your pet, there's always a deeper trigger or reason or motivation. For me, I noticed that when Pedal is wanting to cuddle with me and I'm trying to quote unquote multitask, which is absolutely not possible, it's context switching. So we're not multitasking, we're context switching. We're actually trying to move our mind back and forth in micro moments, and it works really poorly. And it happened to me again this morning with Miss Pedal. She hasn't been feeling that well, and she was sitting on me wanting to cuddle, and I was trying to upload of all things her veterinary documents to our pet insurance. And she was nibbling on my neck and I couldn't type because it was painful. And I found myself in this moment of choice. Am I gonna continue to push through and try to treat this task like it has to be done right now? I think we have 45 days to submit the documents and push her aside, or am I going to stop doing that and have a cuddle right here, right now? So then the dynamic shifts from why are you being so annoying? Why are you biting my neck? You know I don't like that, you know it's painful, I've told you that, to oh, I'm taking myself too seriously again. I'm thinking all this stuff rests on my shoulders and I need to do it yesterday. And where does that come from? Comes from a lifetime. I'm in my mid-50s now, so it comes from a whole indoctrination period, what Don Miguel Ruez, the Toltec shaman and best-selling author, calls domestication. Growing up in a time period where busyness was the gold standard. Now we have all of these opportunities to practice mindfulness and meditation and somatic release and breath work. I don't remember hearing anything about any of that when I was growing up. We do not waste a moment. And somehow my poor, overanxious brain categorized taking time for a cuddle with the dearest soul in the world to me as wasting time. That points to deep, deep, deep inner healing work that I need to do and that I am doing, and I'm actively doing that. I'm actively working on that, where I'm telling myself it's dangerous to take a break, to cuddle here and now there are things to do. And if you don't do them and you don't do them now, there are consequences. So there's that danger message from my nervous system that coded in taking a moment right here, right now, in real time to breathe deeply and snuggle with my love. That's dangerous. Well, that's what we call a bug in the software. Our intuitive operating system doesn't have any bugs. Our mental hardware, our logical, analytical, left brain operating system has lots of bugs. And so that's what I'm talking about, where we're having an issue sometimes with your pet's mental state. They're genuinely, legitimately bored sometimes. They don't have enough stimulation, whether that means getting them into nose work or building one of those really cool cat trees on your walls, or adjusting your schedule once a week to go out and do a trail ride for an hour before you get back to your regularly scheduled whatever it is that you're doing. Or if it just means setting an alarm on your phone every hour, which is actually one of the prompts that I offer inside 28 days of intuitive pet parenting, the challenge I'm running right now, where we just set an alarm on our phone for every hour and we stop once an hour and we just go and sit with our pet and just be there for whatever it is that they're doing. Just go and sit with them or observe them, marvel at them, notice one new thing about them. Another challenge that I offer that's available, and I'll link all this up for you below in the show notes, is seven days of noticing practice. And this is a great thing to do. You can do it over the course of a day, you can do it over the course of seven days, you can do it over the course of a lifetime. I try to do this every single day with my animals to notice one new thing about them that I have never seen before. So that is a great place to start offering your pet more mental as well as emotional enrichment and connection to stop all the things, to put down the little electronic pet and to arrive in this present moment simply to be with them, to step inside their world and play their game of pet charades with them. And at the relational level, when I look at pet charades, here's another fun little sneak peek behind the scenes. More often than not, after I've talked with your pet, when you come to me for these kinds of situations where we're talking about a vocalization or a behavior or a way of being with somebody else in your family or community that isn't working as well as it could, or maybe isn't working at all, it's amazing how often I find out when I talk with your animal and I share their perspective and their reasons, you will say to me, I kind of suspected that. So here's where we really see our pets, our partners, empathic friends and teachers teaching us actively through their behavior, through their pet charades. The number of times I have had a pet parent client of mine say, This is what I think is happening, or I knew that she would say that. Okay, awesome. What aspect of you knew? That's the part your pet wants to see more of. That's why the lesson is being delivered, that's why the lesson is being offered up in the first place, and understand it takes a lot of courage for our pets to offer these lessons because they know there are consequences for behaviors that don't work well in our modern human-centric lives. They know that there's a potential consequence every time they pee or poop or bite or bark or snarl or act out or destroy something or run away. These escape artists, and we say, Oh, my pet is lost. Are you sure about that? I'm not saying that millions of pets don't get legitimately lost every year. It has happened to me personally more than once. And I've also experienced not being able to find an animal that had so-called gotten lost. And when we talked with him, this was my box turtle Bruce, he explained that he did not get lost. He meant to leave. He wanted to try Life on the Wild again. And I have a whole set of podcasts episodes where I unpack that for you. So I'll link those up in the show notes for you as well. So you can learn more about his story. But just understand, I say that with all of the empathy and compassion in my heart. If you have an escape artist in your family or you have a pet that keeps quote unquote getting lost, there's a message for you there. It's unbelievable to me the number of pets that I have talked with who have come from situations of hoarding or abuse or even puppy mills who had the opportunity to escape those situations and chose not to. I did a whole episode on why our beautiful perfect pets would be willing to endure mistreatment or even outright abuse at the hands of our species. So I'll link that up for you below so you can go and listen to that. Because I realize this is a very tender and tough topic. But the too long didn't read version is if you were a perfect empath with unconditional love in your heart, if you lived from your connective right brain, where you recognize 24-7 that we are all connected and we are all one and we all want the same basic things. That whole mass lives hierarchy of needs, we want protection, safety, security, resources, connection, enrichment. And at the highest level, we want self-actualization. If you came into this world with that kind of heart, might you not be willing to endure a bit of mistreatment or abuse if it gave you the opportunity to shift things for other animals and the humans who are mistreating them? That's what the animals have told me. So understand that if your pet is escaping repeatedly, there's a message there. I'm not saying somebody just got out once and got legitimately lost. I'm saying if you've got an escape artist on your hands like I had with Mr. Bruce, that is a pet charade. There is a relational message there for you. There may be many messages, but there is a teachable moment there. And if we can address the teachable moment, we can often stop the escaping. So this is what I want to share with you today about pet charades. They happen for a reason, all kinds of reasons. Those reasons may be singular, as in it's physical, it's emotional, it's mental, it's at the soul level, what I call relational. There may be more than one reason. Often those levels are very intertwined. And this is where formal animal communication can make a world of difference in your daily life with your pet. To be able to do more than just guess at the meaning. And maybe you win the game, maybe you don't. But unlike family game night charades, pet charades can have some real consequences if we don't guess properly. I've even had situations where there's been a bite or a serious behavior transgression of some sort, and there have been consequences. So just know with all the love in my heart that I take the work that I do very seriously and I see its value and its place in your pet's whole pet wellness and care team. And if you are struggling through a pet charade situation with an animal in your family, or with an animal that you are rehabilitating, or an animal that you've rescued and are trying to find a forever home for, or a wild animal, even who is entering into your home space and there are interactions that are unwanted and maybe even unsafe. There are so many different applications for it, but just understand these vocalizations and behaviors, they're messages, often they're lessons, and they are always attempts at connecting and communicating something. And if you do not have fluency in the language of the one who's trying to communicate to you, you have two options. One, you can have a done-for-you service where you come and schedule a session. And I'll put the link in the show notes for how to do that. And I will talk with your pet, serve as your interspecies translator. We will connect and chart a course forward towards a more workable family life situation for all of you. You can do it yourself by joining my student program, Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery, coming to my live. Animal communication adventure practice circle and honing your skills, talking with your own pet and going deeper, going deeper with your pet side of the conversation by learning their language so that you can accurately decode, translate, and receive their messages, going deeper with your own soul awakening journey. So you can decode, translate, and receive the messages from the inner you and all the versions of you, all the way back to when you first entered this world, who may still be a lot like your pets, inner wild instincts, often still are running the show for you. So I hope that this episode today has been educational, enlightening, wildly encouraging, excuse the horrible pun, I couldn't help it, and reconnecting for you and your pet family, re-establishing that yes, there's communication happening. This is deliberate, there's a reason for it. And when I am able to understand my pet's messages, we can then gain the power to work through it productively together so that we can return to that state of harmonious flow that we all want. It's why we joined our lives together in the first place. We didn't join our lives together so we would have more problems to solve and disharmony to untangle. We joined our lives together for the sake of love, for the sake of our bond, for the sake of growing in wisdom and learning to love better. And so that's what I bring to you through this podcast. Let's talk to animals through the private sessions I offer, through the free tools that we've talked about today and others through the formal learning journey and the practice circle that I offer is a chance to live your best life with your pet. Not just a life you can tolerate, a life that you have to troubleshoot and navigate through, but a life that you love with your pet. Thank you so much for listening or watching today, depending on if you're listening to the audio podcast or you're watching the video version over on YouTube. I deeply appreciate your love and care for your animals and your willingness to set an hour or so aside to step inside my world, the world of interspecies communication. And I look forward to hearing from you. What landed today? What was your biggest aha moment takeaway? Like, oh my goodness, maybe it was something that was right in front of your eyes that you already knew but didn't know, if you know what I mean? I'd love to hear those. Please take a moment to share them and also post a review. It really helps our little podcast get seen and noticed and shared and listened to. And I deeply appreciate it. And just know that I will be back with you in two weeks. I endeavor to release a new fresh episode every two weeks. There are also seven beautiful seasons now that you can enjoy while you're waiting for me to release a new episode. Feel free to go back and browse through the archives and find the titles that capture your interest, the ones that get you curious, those are the ones you need to be listening to first. And I will see you right here back in a couple of weeks for a fresh new episode, sending you and your animal family all my love and bye for now. I have so enjoyed sharing this episode with you. If you're new to the Let's Talk to Animals community and you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a review on your favorite streaming service or drop a comment wherever you'd like to listen. I love to hear from you, and your feedback truly helps me shape future episodes based on your interests and needs. If you're not already in my weekly love letters community, head over to Animal Love Languages.com to opt in. Your welcome email will include$25 off your first pet session with me, and you'll be the first to know when a new podcast episode drops. If you're interested in learning more about the work I do communicating with animals, offering pet Reiki, and teaching animal communication, please visit me at Animal Love Languages.com. Click on Schedule for Pet Sessions and Programs for all the information about my new Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery Student Program and the live animal communication practice circle I run for student practitioners. And I look forward to welcoming you back here very soon for a fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. Okay, all my love. Bye for now.