THE REAL-LIFE DOCTOR DOLITTLE
Psychic Susie Shiner claims she can ‘dial’ into the soul of any animal – alive or dead – and communicate with them. JANE WARREN discovers what’s on her pets’ minds
APPARENTLY my twoyear-old spaniel Maddy feels “quite sad” that I spend so much time working in another part of the house, but loves “snuggles” on the carpet with my nineyear-old son when he plays with his Match Attax football cards after he gets home from school.
Meanwhile our cat Lilly is enjoying my 12-year-old daughter’s new passion for sketching and our black tom Jolly – who died four years ago – is busy “protecting the perimeter” of our Sussex property in spirit form. Jolly is even able to communicate its layout, including the new treehouse built two years ago.
Quite what to make of this information is baffling, especially as it was recounted by a woman living 125 miles away in Chepstow, Monmouthshire, who has never met my pets or seen my home and has no knowledge of my family relationships.
Yet, having scrutinised photographs of each of my animals in turn, and being told only their name and age, Susie Shiner appears able to describe in detail my domestic setup – including the shingle driveway, old wooden playhouse pond surrounded by shady trees and an overhang with “logs and boots” by the front door.
Susie, 50, also told us that we used to have an Aga in the kitchen of our home, a house accurately described – by our cat no less – as “not particularly big but cosy”.
How is it then that a “pet reading” can reveal so much – particularly as she had no idea whether we actually lived in a flat?
According to Susie this is because she is merely a “conduit” for our animals’ thoughts and uses a skill that she insists lies dormant inside everyone. With just the name, age and a quick look at a photograph of any pet, alive or dead, she claims she can “dial” into its soul and hold conversations, which prove all creatures are sentient.
NOW the animal communicator is on her first UK tour helping animal lovers get to know their pets better. In village halls she and her partner, fellow psychic Paul Braithwaite, 43, charge £10 a ticket to provide evidence, a piece of information that is so specific the owner is in no doubt that she is communicating with their pet.
“You need courage to do this but I wanted a challenge,” says the medium, who has a degree in political science but spent much of her childhood peering into rabbit holes near her Derbyshire home hoping one of the inhabitants would talk to her.
“I was always aware there was another world,” she says. But it wasn’t until 10 years ago she had her first conversation with an animal.
“I was working as a human medium when my pony suddenly asked me, ‘Will I ever see my family again?’
“Now I know that animals are communicating all the time. My job is to translate the images from these ‘thought conversations’ into English. I like watching the faces of my audience changing from disbelief to amazement.”
She aims for 80-90 per cent accuracy. “When it becomes inaccurate is when I get in the way and try to make too much of a story out of what I see.”
This week she put her skills to good use when she and Paul found a tortoise that had been missing for six months after he communicated that he could be found in a burrow under a tree in a wooded area. “I’ve looked everywhere but in that hole is where I found Rocky,” says his owner Mel Everett, a presenter on radio Heart Wiltshire who shared the story on her breakfast show on Thursday. “I can’t believe it. It’s mindblowing.”
Another time, a horse told Susie about a bereavement in its owner’s family by sending an image of the owner crying into its mane.
Shortly after tuning in to our spaniel, Susie accurately described the only two “injuries” Maddy has ever had.
“She is showing me a thorn in her foot in the fluff between her pads, this thorn was a big deal to her” – indeed it required a trip to the vet and a course of antibiotics. She adds: “She also might have hurt her throat when she was younger.”
Could this refer to the radio tracking collar around my dog’s neck which gives an audible warning followed by a small “correction” if she strays over the invisible dog fence boundary wire around our woods? A single training shock a year ago proved so effective she has never strayed since.
Hearing how the pain of this led to “a bit of sadness and a mood for a while” I feel guilty, although I’m relieved she has not run on to the nearby lane since.
Apparently guilt is a standard reaction once you start listening to animals. Susie herself turns off her channels of communication whenever she sees a lorry load of pigs being transported. “To think they are twice as intelligent as my collies… I say a prayer instead,” she says.
After interviewing Susie I decide to share her insights into the minutiae of our lives with my children. Perhaps I am imagining how spookily accurate some of them seem?
I tell them that Susie has said Maddy vividly remembers “going bonkers on a beach, a mix of shingle and sand when she was young”.
We all agree that this tallies with her first time off the lead in Bognor Regis when she nearly bolted on to a main road.
MADDY also “told” Susie how excited she gets when she sees “a young man on the doorstep with a round face, he’s got a bag with him, he’s not fully grown. He lies on the floor, she snoofles up to his face, he collects some kind of card, her nose is right near the cards.”
Willem leaps up from the table. “It’s me, with my Match Attax cards!” he says triumphantly. And indeed he routinely lies on the floor laying them out with Maddy in affectionate attendance.
“I knew animals had an inner life but I never realised how big it was,” Willem exclaims.
Bea is equally happy to hear that Lilly has noticed her love of art after I read the words: “Someone is sketching pencil drawings, it feels like a new hobby.”
Then there are the cat’s eerily accurate descriptions of our two most frequent visitors including “a grey-haired woman who comes to the house a lot” and is “always laden with things”.
Could this be our stylishly grey 40-something friend Louise who feeds Lilly while we are away, always makes a fuss of her and is famous for sweeping in with large brightly coloured bags and leaving things behind?
Bea adds that the more detailed insights feel “scarily accurate”, while shorter snippets such as “Thompson”, “compass” and “a woman called Hazel” mean nothing to us – apart perhaps from the hazel woodland that surrounds us.
Stopping the children in their tracks is Lilly the cat’s “mention” of a song: Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water. I can’t work it out until the children remind me it is their favourite. For more information on Susie’s tour see www.shininghorse.co.uk