THERE ARE THREE REMARKABLE DOGS that I’ve been lucky to share my life with—Lassie, Meg, and the very special Charlie—they’ve taught me about spirit and compassion. I’ve learned that you really don’t need to speak when you communicate with your animals.

I’ve talked a lot about telepathy being an impulse of feeling and one that can jump across time as well as between animal and human consciousness, but what is it actually like to experience that message?

If you’d like to develop a telepathic link with your animals, you first have to forget that it’s something to do with thought. Don’t think, “Come here,” because that won’t work.  You have to really want your dog or cat to be with you. They pick up on your emotions—your happiness, your fear. That’s how they “know” when you need them, and that is the purest form of telepathy.

Even the word telepathy comes from telos, “Far away” or “remote,” and patheia, which means “affected by” or “experienced,” rather than “thought.” We are definitely capable of telepathy—think of how often you can tune in on the fact that someone’s angry for example—it’s just something that’s emitted, even if the person in question is trying to mentally deny that they’re upset.

We all have this telepathic ability, though, so often we try to use logic to explain what we’re picking up, and that doesn’t work. I was on tour in Italy once and had just gone up to my hotel room and put my head on the pillow when I suddenly heard yelping and whining. I sat bolt upright. It sounded exactly like Charlie, my spaniel.

I was almost confused enough to look for him at the end of the bed. It was so loud and so real, it didn’t sound as though it was coming from inside my head at all. I lay back again, wondering what it could be, and then I heard it start up once more. I immediately reached for the phone by the bed and dialed Jim, who was a bit surprised that I was phoning at midnight.

“Is Charlie all right?”
“Well, he didn’t eat his dinner and he’s looking a little sorry for himself.”
“Listen, you’ve got to take him to the vet as soon as you can,” I told him about the whimpering and yelping that I’d heard and that I was sure there was something really wrong with the pup.
Jim wasn’t convinced it was that urgent. “I’m sure he’s OK really. I expect he ate something wrong and he’ll sick it up and be all right in no time. I’ll leave it tonight and see how he is in the morning.”

Reluctantly I let it drop and tried to get some sleep. But in the morning I woke up with an excruciating stomach ache and I knew it was nothing to do with the previous night’s dinner! It was a God-awful feeling, really ominous. I phoned Jim again.

“How’s Charlie?”
“He’s not bouncing around, but he doesn’t look too bad.”
“Look, you’ve got to take him to the vet.”
“I’ve got too much to do and you should see him—he’s really not bad at all. Whatever it is will probably go through his system and he’ll be fine in no time.”
I couldn’t let this happen, “Seriously, I mean it. He’s telling me something is wrong. Maybe it doesn’t show from the outside, but it’s really bad.”

In the end Jim said he’d take him to the vet. It turned out that Charlie had eaten something bad for him out on a walk—two huge stones. He always picked up stones to chew on and this time he’d swallowed a couple whole: there they were on the x-rays, sitting in his stomach like bombs. The sharper one had cut right through the lining of his stomach and his stomach acid was seeping out. The vet rushed him straight to the pet hospital to remove them. Afterwards he told us that Charlie would have died in great pain in a short period of time if he hadn’t operated there and then. He was also amazed at the size of the stones. We kept them for some time and no one could understand how Charlie had managed to swallow them in the first place!

How could I have known that something was wrong from so far away? The psychic connection we have with our pets is strong and it’s no different from the one we have with our human loved ones. If a person is in pain or trouble, even if they are out of our sight, if there’s a connection of love, it allows us to reach out to them in emotional or painful times.

Charlie managed to send his actual voice, so that I could hear him whimpering. And your inner ear is just one of the senses we use to communicate with our pets . . . .