Tips From a Professional Animal Communicator to Develop Your Pet Parent Intuition

By Shannon Cutts.

If you’ve been keeping up with my column here at Healthy Happy Dog, you know I am not afraid of woo. In fact, given that I am a professional animal intuitive, it would even be fair to say the “woo factor” is strong in my line of work.

Unfortunately, by relegating interspecies communication and its counterpart, intuition, to woo-ville, most of us miss out on how deeply practical this skill set can be!

In this article, discover why I maintain that intuition is the most overlooked tool in the modern pet parent’s toolkit.

As you read, you will learn where your intuition resides within you, how it guides you and how to use it to make confident decisions on your dog’s behalf.

What is intuition?

Intuition is one of those words that has come into its own only just recently. But intuition itself has a history stretching back many millennia. So let’s take a look at what the word itself means.

From the prefix “in,” we learn that whatever intuition is, it is something that happens within us.

From the root word “tuition,” we learn that intuition likely also has a teaching or learning aspect to it.

The way I like to explain it to my students is that intuition is your inner teacher – a kind of inner GPS that can give you accurate directions in any area of life once you learn how to tune in and use it.

What is pet parent intuition?

Now let’s take a closer look at a specific application for your intuition that comes in very handy when you are a dog parent (or owner or guardian or whichever term you prefer).

I call this application “pet parent intuition.”

Most of us struggle here and there when making choices and decisions on our dog’s behalf.

This is especially true if we have never faced certain issues before, such as canine high sensitivity or puppyhood or aggressive behaviors or our dog’s end of life transition time.

When we don’t feel confident to make a decision, we often look around for somebody else to delegate the decision-making to. For instance, you may feel tempted to give your decision-making power away to your dog’s veterinarian, or trainer, or holistic practitioner, or even the animal communicator you work with.

But here is something I learned early on in my own intuitive training journey. Relationship matters.

What I mean by that – YOU are the one who has the closest relationship and the deepest bond with your dog. Not your veterinarian, not your trainer, not your holistic practitioner, not even your animal communicator has the type of heart-to-heart relationship you have with your dog.

That close relationship translates to a very deep form of energetic resonance. In other words, if anyone is going to get the inside track on what is best for your dog’s needs and wellbeing, it isn’t going to be someone else.

It will be you.

But this only helps you if you know how to use your intuition to detect which way the energy is flowing and make pet parenting decisions accordingly.

The 2 basic types of intuitive messages

Intuition is a function of your nervous system that is as old as your nervous system itself. At its most primitive level, intuition functions to deliver two basic types of energetic messages:

• Messages of danger
• Messages of safety or opportunity

When we humans were still out in the wild with all the other animals trying to eat and not get eaten, we naturally paid attention to both types of messages with great keenness. We used all of our senses to detect threats and advantages and adjusted our choices and decisions accordingly.

As I talked about in last month’s article on nervous system coherence and co-regulation, we also evolved to sync up our nervous systems with the nervous systems of those around us to share these two types of messages back and forth.

While today we are no longer out in the wild food chain, we can still sync our nervous system with our dog’s nervous system to detect what is dangerous and what is safe for them.

Fun fact: our dogs can do the same thing with our nervous system, which is how so many dogs today are able to tell we have cancer or low blood sugar or anxiety before we know it ourselves!

The 3 directions of intuitive guidance

Once you understand the two basic types of messages your intuition is hard-wired to receive from your dog, the next step is to understand how your inner intuitive GPS works to help you identify what to do with the information you receive.

For this next part, I credit my intuitive teacher Sonia Choquette, who likes to teach Intuition 101 using what she calls the “traffic light system.”

Using this system, you can think of your inner intuitive GPS as having three lights: green, red and yellow.

• Green means go, move forward, take that next step
• Red means stop or even turn around and go the other way
• Yellow means wait, more information needed

How your pet parent intuition guides you

Your nervous system is basically a network of electrical channels that are always sending and receiving messages by way of e-motions, energy in motion.

This is a key to understanding how intuition itself guides you. It is a felt and sensed guidance system rather than a thought or analyzed guidance system.

When you are faced with a choice about your dog’s care, whether it is choosing a new toy, a new veterinarian, a new playmate, a new shampoo or something else, it will be tempting to go up into your head to analyze and decide.

But this isn’t where your intuition operates from. If you want to use your intuitive guidance system, you need to go to the place(s) in your body where you feel. For most of us, this is going to be our heart/chest area or our stomach/gut.

Using the traffic light system, you will want to pay attention to how you are feeling in your heart or gut area about each option on the table.

• Green light feelings could include joy, gratitude, excitement, relief, encouragement
• Red light feelings could include resistance, revulsion, fear, anger, discouragement
• Yellow light feelings could include hesitation, overwhelm, frustration, anxiety

Here is a simple example of how this traffic light intuition system might work.

Let’s say your dog has sensitive skin and you need to choose a new shampoo. You have three options to choose from. The first shampoo is one your veterinarian recommends. The second is one your neighbor uses. The third is one you read about online.

When you go to buy the first shampoo, you find yourself hesitating. Through your intuitive training, you now know hesitation is a yellow light feeling. So you don’t buy that shampoo.

You decide to buy the second shampoo instead. But when the bottle arrives and you hold it in your hand, you feel resistance to using it on your dog. You remember that resistance is a red light feeling. So you don’t use that shampoo on your dog.

Finally, you drive by the local pet store and pick up a bottle of the third shampoo. You feel happy and relieved, which are clear green light feelings. You go home, bathe your dog and notice afterwards that you don’t see any of the scratching that the old shampoo used to cause. Success!

Developing your pet parent intuition

Of course, this is a highly simplistic example and not meant as a substitute or replacement for the guidance of a qualified canine veterinary professional.

But it illustrates the fundamentals of a different, stronger and altogether more ancient and thus reliable decision-making pathway that is always standing ready to support you.

My encouragement to you is to start trying out your intuitive guidance system with small decisions you make for your dog, such as choosing a new toy or trying out a new dog park.

As you make small choices and decisions day in and day out, you will inevitably begin to notice e-motional patterns emerging. These patterns will teach you more about how your e-motions, the energy in motion that is represented by your feelings, can be a reliable indicator of what is best for your dog.

Over time, your confidence in your pet parent intuition will grow and strengthen. By the time the big decisions arrive, you will have built up a new and reliable way to be your dog’s best advocate that is grounded in the deep energetic bond of love and trust that the two of you share.

Shannon Cutts is a professional animal intuitive and animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages. To be notified when enrollment opens again for her popular free Intuitive Development for Pet Parents webinar series, join her email community at https://www.animallovelanguages.com/loveletter