IS THIS WHAT YOUR PET THINKS OF YOU?

hen Katy Sainty came home from work one day and asked her husband why he’d allowed their dogs to have cheesecake for lunch, he stood there open-mouthed in astonishment.

There was no way his wife could have guessed that he’d allowed their pets to lick the bowl after a neighbour had given him a dessert while she was at work. After all, the cake was gone by the time she was home, and feeding sweet treats to the animals wasn’t something they routinely did.

It was their 17-year-old terrier Cash who was to blame for revealing the secret. She had enjoyed the cake so much that she excitedly ‘told’ Katy – through a form of telepathy – as she stepped through the door.

‘I could see the cogs turning in my husband’s head,’ says the 39-year-old research nurse from Wiltshire. ‘He’s an equine vet and has always been very sceptical of my animal communication skills – as many people are. Although he still thinks I’m nuts, this occurrence did make him wonder if there’s something in it.’

Katy, who was part of the team who organised the trial stage of developing the Oxford Astrazeneca Covid vaccine, began studying animal communication six years ago. ‘I have always been fairly intuitive with animals and felt that I understood how they were feeling,’ she says. ‘I watched a video of animal communicator Anna Breytenbach, who’s based in South Africa, in which she transforms a very sad leopard into a relaxed cat. It sparked such an interest in me that I signed up for a workshop.’

Katy trained under the renowned communicator Nancy Windheart, who is based in New Mexico, but there are dozens of books available on the subject – including

Penelope Smith’s Animal Talk, which is considered by many to be the Bible of animal communication – as well as accredited courses where you can learn the skill and gain a professional practitioner certificate. Trainees’ work is verified by an expert, who will also communicate with the animal in order to confirm the messages have been correct.

‘Communicators’ use their gift to translate messages from animals to their owners. The method adopted by most communicators involves going into a meditative state and having a conversation – this can be done face-to-face with an animal or by using a photograph. Katy explains animals share words as well as pictures, which she then ‘translates’ for her human clients.

Katy stresses that she is not a ‘psychic’, although some communicators do describe themselves in this way. She says it’s like tuning into a radio station: ‘You just have to find the right frequency,’ she explains, adding that we are all born with the ability to communicate with animals but most of us don’t nurture the skill and so we lose it.

There is no centralised animal communication body in the UK, or indeed the world, so estimating the number operating professionally is hard. But a quick Google search reveals pages upon pages of people offering these services to pet owners who are seeking to find lost animals, fix behavioural problems or even communicate with pets who have passed away.

‘Lost-pet psychic’ Becky Willoughby, 52, has an impressive track record in reuniting animals with their owners, wherever they may be in the world. She charges £314 for the lost pet service and £85 for a pet consultation via video chat. From her home in Devon, she recently used her skill to find a dog missing in the outback of Australia with nothing more than a photo to go on.

On another occasion she was able to give an exact street name and location, including a description of the house, to find a rescue cat who went astray and was about to give birth in Australia. She was also able to find a pet skunk that was lost in Poland, telling the owner how many miles away the animal was, the road name, and describing a garden with a child’s playhouse under which the skunk had been living.

‘Pet psychics receive information by extra-sensory perception,’ says Becky. ‘Everything has a vibration or an energetic field, which gets sent out into the universe. I imagine the universe to be like a bowl of spaghetti with lots of pets’ energies all intermingled with our own. That energy has a vibration and my job is to link into that to telepathically find lost and stolen pets. I

Katy with a bird she rescued and released after finding him abandoned