By: Rose Hayes

I recently spoke with Gail Thackray, a psychic medium and animal communicator who teaches others how to communicate with animals and has written a book, “How to Talk to Your Pets: Animal Communication for Dogs, Cats, & Other Critters.” She said we all have the ability to communicate with animals.
“I actually became a medium first, meaning talking with people on the other side. I had no idea I could do this; I was about 40 when I suddenly discovered I could speak to spirits — it was really a shock to me,” Thackray said. “I thought, well, if i can do this, everybody can do this. It’s really easy. We have these intutions all the time, we just block them, we don’t realize.”
After she had been speaking with spirits for a few months, she visited a crystal shop, where a woman was speaking about animal communication. Some people had brought photographs of their pets for a reading. One of the women in the audience handed Thackray a photo of a dog.
“I was immediately transformed into the body of this dog,” Thackray said. “I can feel my tail wagging and I’m all excited, and I said ‘I’m really good with them; they’ve got two cats. Most dogs are not good with cats, but I’m really good with the cats, except I don’t like them to touch my bone. I took my yellow bone and hid it behind my dog house.’ And the owner said, ‘Wow that’s really strange, we just got two kittens.’”
Another woman handed Thackray a photograph of her cat. “I looked at the picture and I saw right away in front of my eyes, two huge pink slippers with little balls on the end. And they’re going round and round in front of my face and I’m all excited watching them.”
Thackray asked the woman if she has a pair of pink slippers with fluffy balls on them, and the woman agreed that she does have such slippers, and she wears them while working out on her exercise bike in the morning. Her cat watches her while she exercises.
“I thought, this is really strange; how did I do this?,” Thackray said. “It felt very much like mediumship, how I connect with Spirit. So I realized that, somehow, when you open this channel — you know, I had done Reiki healing and I think that’s what started me out — I think once you open up, there is another world out there. You realize that there’s all kinds of things to tap into, and one of them is to be able to communicate with animals.”
Thackray now teaches others how to do this, and said they’re often communicating pretty well within a weekend. “I find that we’re all already doing this with animals,” she said. “Most people say they can tell when their pets want to go outside or when they want a treat. But they don’t realize that our animals are listening to everything we say. They hear everything. We just kind of, every now and then, get a glimpse of what they’re thinking.
“It’s about taking the time. I do exercises with my students because I find that most of the time they have it, they just block it. And a lot of time they think they make it up.”
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