EMOTIONS, ENERGY AND YOUR PET

Our pets don’t weep or shed tears, and they don’t laugh-but do they feel? The answer is uncategorically yes, though not perhaps with the wide array of nuances and gradations of experience that we do.

Our pets are capable of many emotions, ranging from the clearly observable-fear, love, affection, excitement, joy, displeasure and irritation, to the equally present, but perhaps less easily discernible feelings of grief, sadness, anxiety, shame, jealousy, anger and so on. While, with the exception of some birds, our pets are not capable of telling us verbally what they are feeling, they do in fact communicate their feelings quite well through body language and behavior.

As any pet owner can attest, our animals can be very expressive of their needs, wants and feelings. It is for us, as pet owners, to be able to discern exactly what it is our pets are telling us. Whether dog, cat or bird, get to now your animal’s body language-posture, stance, body attitude, facial expression, tail angle, head positioning-even the eyes (especially in dogs and birds) can tell us a lot. Pay attention to the wide variety in nuance of the vocalizations your pet might make. Begin to notice how your pet carries himself in particular situations-animals are continually expressing themselves to other animals through subtle and no so subtle ways. By opening up your powers of observation you will find that your animal friend is also communicating with you.

Each emotion carries a particular energetic quality or charge. The energetic charge of irritation s very different from that of contentment, anger different from sadness. It is in fact this energetic charge that helps us differentiate one feeling from another. It is easy to feel this within ourselves, a fact we take for granted. Less recognized, perhaps, is how we broadcast our feelings energetically to others. We frequently “pick up” on how others are feeling, especially those we are close to. We can also learn to pick up on how our pets are feeling by being open and sensitive to their body language and the feelings and energies they convey. Our pets empathize with us-we, too, can learn to empathize with them, and in so doing, create a stronger bond of understanding.

Not only do our pets read our emotions, but they seem to react and feed off of our energy as well. We talk of how dogs or horses sense fear, of how our cat knows when we are down. Birds become noisy and rambunctious when we are stressed, upset, or nervous, and might even bite us if we get too close, but calm down immediately when we take a deep breath and center ourselves. In may ways our animals mirrors what we feel. The different species have different ways of showing this, but in one way or another all will somehow act out whatever it is we are feeling. Oftentimes when a animal is exhibiting a so-called problem behavior, the real culprit behind this behavior is ourselves.