See Spot’s thoughts

Local instructor teaches you how to communicate with your pet on a psychic level

BY KRISTIN T. MCNAMARA

I spent a good deal of my youth sitting in front of the television watching shows like Lassie. I remember marveling over how beautiful that dog was, how regal, how obedient. But what I really remember–what we all remember–is that Lassie could speak to Timmy. "Go find Timmy, Lassie!" someone would cry. "Tell him I’m a mile from the old well, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Oh, and pick up some eggs and milk from the market on the way!" And indubitably, that collie would pull it off. At the end of the show, here would come Timmy, and he would have in tow a cow and chickens as well as an EMT unit.

Just thinking about it makes me want to have a little talk with my dog. I mean, he’s pretty well trained, but I don’t see him going to the market to pick up a six-pack for me. And even if he felt like it, he’d probably come back with something like Natty Ice, and really, you know a dog’s no good when he can’t pick a decent beer.

But there is hope. You and your pets may not have broken down the language barrier like Lassie or Mr. Ed, but according to some, you can communicate with them. In fact, you may already be doing it. As most of us know, communication isn’t completely dependent on language. Pets may not be able to speak to us, but every pet owner still knows when their little creature wants something.

How can you explain your dog knowing when you're coming home, even if it's on an intermittent schedule? Or how come when it's time to give your cat a bath, he’s nowhere to be found?

According to some, the answer is a mental connection, or telepathy. What’s more, this sort of telepathy is lying dormant in everyone. By reinforcing this connection with practice, advocates say that it can develop into full telepathic communication with animals, and even humans.

The teacher

Sigrit Morghen is a SLO county resident who teaches animal communication classes through community education programs at Cuesta and Allan Hancock colleges.

Morghen says that people and animals are constantly sending out telepathic messages that we are attuned to ignoring. She says that the main secret to communication is practicing meditative exercises designed to help people let go.

"Our mind is sort of busy with what I call ‘shoulder-sitters,’" she says, "You can just imagine these little creatures sitting there and just chattering at you in a hundred different ways. You have to learn to just shut that off completely and not listen to them."

Morghen wanted to approach the public with this revolutionary idea, and she’s found that teaching has reached the largest audience. She says of the classes, "It’s easy to learn and that way a larger number of animals will benefit from it."

Speaking with a genuine concern for animals, Morghen projects an air of sophistication and intellect one might not expect from an advocate of such an unorthodox philosophy. "A lot of times, people just look at me and say ‘you look trustworthy,’ and that’s because I can approach people with no judgment and still get a flow from them."

Born in Austria, then transplanted to Argentina, she became involved with horses at a young age. When she came to America, "the love for animals just continued," she says. After graduating college with a biology degree, she worked at the UC Medical Center in San Francisco where she spent half of her time working in the animal labs. "That’s where I really got into the animal world, and in the last 20 years or so I’ve been an advocate for their rights and fair treatment."

Her interest blossomed from there. Today, her home is decadent but homey with her four rescued dogs, and parrots that reside in cages with the doors open.

Morghen says she discovered animal telepathy while studying a behavioral massage therapy known as Tellington-Touch (or T-touch). A student there was also a teacher of pet communication, and Morghen went for it. "I found that I have a natural ability for it."

Now Morghen is passing on that ability to her students, like Sharon Clowdus of Santa Maria. Clowdus says she and her classmates went into Morghen’s class open-minded and eager to participate. "The people in the class were fun. They were really nice, normal people, nobody weird," she said. Clowdus shares her home with three dogs she considers as her children. "I already communicate with my dogs verbally on a daily basis," she says, "so making a connection with them was really not a problem."

The communicators

Animal communicators claim that every child is born with telepathic ability, but as they develop verbal communication skills, they are encouraged to ignore what had previously got them by. Penelope Smith is the author of "Animal Talk," a book about communicating with your pets. Smith is considered the guru of the animal communication world. Based out of Point Reyes, Smith has been practicing telepathy for 25 years. She has established generally accepted principles for her students, and has written a number of books in addition to "Animal Talk."

Smith writes, "Parents and other adults often invalidate any statement from a child like, ‘the dog told me she has a tummy ache.’" She goes on to say that since this is glossed over, there is no reinforcement to believe what adults perceive as solely imagination. "What I teach is for people to learn to listen to the messages that are coming. Some people see it in color, some people will just get a sensation as I take them through the exercises. Some people get a 3-D visual picture. It’s very, very individual."

The key, Morghen says, is concentration, "You need to mentally concentrate because you need to learn to empty your mind. It’s meditation in a lot of ways. If you do Yoga, you’ll learn a lot of the same principles. Just tuning everything out."

What’s so good about being able to talk to your animals anyway? I mean, everyone knows that if your animals talked back, they wouldn’t necessarily be as fun to have around. One perk Morghen mentions: "I don’t have ants. This is going to sound really bizarre, but I actually tell them to stay out. I put that energy out."

Animal behaviorist Dr. David Spiegel, of petpsych.com, has actually tested an animal communicator. He pulled files of 17 animals he had seen in his practice as an animal behaviorist. He asked the communicator to correctly ascertain the animal’s diagnosed behavior. Overall he found that the woman was right 60 percent of the time. The communicator said she was wrong 40 percent of the time because many of the animals didn’t think they had any problems. Spiegel admitted she might be right. "We humans seldom recognize our own problems."

Solvang resident Monty Roberts, a published equine behaviorist whose gift for communicating with horses was written about in "The Horse Whisperer", said he does not consider himself a telepath.

"I’m interested in anything than can help horses and people, but I haven’t seen it to be effective," he says of telepathy. Roberts says his methods of communication are scientifically based, reproducible, and 100 percent successful.

During a recent Discovery Channel program that he took part in, the show’s producers lumped him in with people he considered a bit "out there." "They had people on the show who could take a piece of dog hair and swing a pendulum over it to tell its likes and dislikes."

Roberts says he’s been told he is the only animal communicator who comes across with any credibility. This, he claims, is because nothing he does involves "mystics, hypnotism, or telepathy." He compares his methods to teaching two people to gesture in the same manner.

The skeptics

Morghen admits that skeptics attend her classes, but they don’t try to succeed. "They have a sort of block, " she says. "You will find that they haven’t exactly walked out, but they’ll sit there and get real fidgety, and can’t get into that ‘empty your mind’ kind of state and allow any new knowledge to come in."

When asked if there was a way to unequivocally prove her abilities, such as making a specific one of her dogs come to the door at any one time, Morghen admits that that much specificity is not within her power.

However, Morghen said that "Animal Talk" author Smith is capable of being that specific. "She had a chicken that she could get to do all sorts of things," says Morghen. "She would take it into her classes and she would ask her to go sit with a certain person when she felt that a person was apprehensive and had difficulty with this whole process."

Morghen said the chicken was so responsive, "It made you not want to eat chicken anymore."

For people, validation is a major key to acceptance of any unorthodox practice, says Dr. Ruth Corbo, a veterinarian who has attended Morghen’s class. Corbo says she feels that the ability is definitely there, and hopes she can cultivate it. "The problem is that it’s hard to validate things you see in your head," Corbo said.

In one class exercise, Corbo said the group had to visualize the color of a dog bowl used in the demonstration. Her group had almost completely decided on an off-white shade, but two people said it was blue. She said that when the bowl was held up, it was off-white with blue inside. She was floored. "Maybe that’s the key, though, finding physical things that you can validate and work from there."

Corbo sees many possibilities for telepathic ability in her practice: A lot of veterinary medicine is detective work, since she can’t ask her patients questions about their health or history. She said it would be nice to take some of the guesswork out of it. And as she’s often called upon to put animals to sleep, there is one thing that she’d like communication to allow her to do. "I would love to ask them, ‘Are you ready to die?’"

Jean Mitchell, a Nipomo dog breeder and trainer, took her dog to Lydia Hiby, a communicator in Southern California. She says she was skeptical of the "pet psychic" idea until she had a dog that she felt that she’d known before, perhaps in another life. "I know that makes me sound really bizarre, but that’s really what it felt like," she says.

When she took the dog to Hiby, the communicator claimed that in another life he had been a very large dog. (In this life, he is a "real small dog with a Napoleonic complex," says Mitchell.) She admits the answer she received was pretty generic, until Hiby told her something off-hand. Mitchell feeds her dogs a raw meat diet, and at the time was feeding her dog chicken wings.

"As I was leaving, Lydia told me, ‘Oh, he doesn’t like the chicken wings, he’s more of a beef man.’ I never said anything about feeding him raw meat!" That was the clincher for Mitchell.

Mitchell called on Hiby once again when one of her dogs had a spell of bad luck. When her dog was anesthetized, he had a heart attack and had to be revived. Later that week he went missing. Mitchell was distraught and after more conventional methods of finding her dog had turned up nothing, she called Hiby.

"She asked me if I was calling about a chain-link pen." Hiby continued to describe the area until Mitchell realized that she knew the location, as well as the person who owned the house where her dog was supposedly penned. "Finally she said, ‘He feels he did something really bad and followed someone he shouldn’t have, oh, and he’s worried about his heart."

Mitchell was aghast. She’d not told Hiby about her dog’s previous ills. When she went over to the place that Hiby described, she found her dog.

The animal telepathy movement is growing slowly within animal-lover culture. Will it ever become mainstream? "If things are good and the economy’s doing well and everything else is doing well, people are going to be more open to it," Morghen said.

She knows that what she does is billed as "weird," but then again, she says, "Yoga was weird 10 years ago, and massage was weird not too many years ago. Even acupuncture is now quite mainstream. Some years back you could sort of watch the evolution of it. The chiropractor and all of that was the ‘odd,’ the ‘alternative.’ As people felt the benefits ... they started to seek it more and more. The same with animal communication."

Even skeptic Roberts seems to think this might be a possibility. "I don’t want to say I don’t believe in it yet because sure as hell someone’s going to come along and prove it."

Meanwhile, Morghen’s class has been so successful at the community colleges that they call her every semester to invite her back. "At first they said, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting, we’ll try it,’ and now it’s been ‘What else can you do?’"

Kristin T. McNamara is almost done being a New Times intern. But she promises to send stories telepathically whenever she can.