Doggedly Promoting Dialogue With Animals

The first mistake came when the student tried to share her lunch with a fly. It prompted a classroom scolding that made every student squirm.

It’s perfectly fine to communicate with a fly. Or a spider, or a dog or cow or any other living creature. That was the assigned homework, after all.

But don’t feed the fly!

“I’m not saying you did something wrong,” said Penelope Smith, softening her tone. “It’s just that people want to do something with animals. If you get quiet with animals, as opposed to putting out energies, that’s when you begin communicating with them.”

Smith should know. She’s been communing with animals all her life, or so her books, Web site and newsletters all say. And since 1971, this child of the ‘60s with a graying mullet haircut, who lives here in Marin County with cats and dogs and chickens and llamas, has made a living as an interspecies communication specialist.

So close your eyes. Put your feet on the floor. Sit up straight and open your heart-center to receive the pulsing frequencies of life bounding around the room in Smith’s Interspecies Communication Training program.

“It’s a primal way of being,” she tells the class. “It’s beyond thinking; it’s feeling. Just open yourself, and the animals will teach you, and it will blow your minds.”

Do this right and you’ll be able to beam messages back and forth with the dog sitting beside you, or, for that matter, the cow in the meadow outside the window or the whale swimming out beyond the headlands.

Telepathic conversations with animals aren’t an entirely new concept to most of the 40 women and four men in the class.

Some come with prior experience--not watching the silly “Dr. Doolittle” movies or kitschy TV pet psychics, mind you--but flashes of insight into the minds of animal companions.

Each student is devoting a weekend and $125 to this basic class on how to communicate with animals. One woman flew in from Switzerland. Others came from the East Coast.

For those students who want more than the basics, Smith sells books and tapes, offers advanced classes and leads excursions titled “Swim With Wild Dolphins” and “Float With Humpback Whales.”

To this class, many students have brought along an “animal friend.” Don’t call them “pets.” That’s demeaning.

Bringing all of them together in an old church on this rainy weekend has filled the air with the unmistakable smell of wet dog.

“How many people have an animal friend who stares at them?” Smith asks.

Nearly every hand is raised.

Now, Smith promises, you will learn what the animal is thinking.

Frustrated by years of one-way communication, the students lap it up.

To tune up their telepathic antennae, human students begin by practicing on each other. The class pairs off, knee to knee, and prepares to transmit images to one other.

Let’s start simple, Smith says. Eyes closed. One person thinks of a color. The other receives.

“Our socialization has told us we cannot do this,” Smith says. “I ask you to suspend your disbelief in yourself. We are blessed with this great mind that is the source of our creativity. It is also a source of confusion. This is a process of letting your mind get out of the way.”

An afternoon of such exercises is followed by homework. Communicate with an animal and report back to class the next morning. If no animal is available, a picture will do, presumably to help with a long-distance connection.

In that spirit, one woman recounts what happened during her homework assignment.

“My whole body felt so warm,” she says. “I was looking at my animal’s pictures, and his eyes were open and then closed.”

Another student tells of a conversation with her cat about their plane ride to California. The student quizzed the cat about how to ease the feline’s fear of flying on the trip home.

Did she want another kitty knockout pill? A half dose? Or simply the calming presence of flower essence in her water dish?

“I just want the flower essence and nothing else,” she reported her cat as communicating.

Smith closes her eyes and holds up her palms, as if to still the class. During the silence, she demonstrates her ability to telecommunicate long-distance with the cat.

“Your cat confirms all that,” Smith says, opening her eyes.

The class bursts into applause.

Not every student has an interspecies breakthrough.

“I asked Lily why she pees on me in bed,” says one woman, cuddling her curly-haired terrier, who is nestled in her arms and wearing a sweater. An answer never came.

“It helps to start with easier questions,” Smith says. “How are you doing? What’s going on?”

“I’m just tired of getting peed on,” the woman says.

“I understand,” Smith says. “You are going to have to do more work on it. You’ll get it.”

Smith explains that such communication often comes in a burst of images--not words--that unfurl like a fast-paced video clip.

“Just download it,” she says. “Interpretation comes later.”

The class is now ready for a live, group interview.

KC, the keeshond, is the first canine Smith invites on stage, along with his companion, Cathy Malkin.

After much eye closing and mind opening, students describe the fluffy dog’s daily routine.

“I’m getting that he’s jumping up and down,” one woman submits tentatively. “I see a red ball, green grass, and he has a stainless steel bowl.”

Malkin nods enthusiastically. “He loves to jump. We have a green grass lawn. Yes, he does have a stainless steel bowl, and he gets terribly excited when I fix his food.”

The class applauds.

Smith waves the class to silence. “Let me check with him,” she says. After a dramatic pause with her eyes shut, she says, “He confirms all that.”

Apparently, KC is talking a blue streak, but it’s hard to tell. He’s slumped on the stage, muzzle resting on his paw, staring into space. Every so often, he unleashes a loud sigh. He looks, well, rather bored.

The woman with the bed-wetting terrier fears she is not “getting it.” How can she tell she is receiving telepathic images? Could she be projecting what she hopes the dog is thinking? Could it be her imagination?

“When people say, ‘It’s only imagination,’ yes it is,” Smith says. “If you open your imagination, you are open to this. But there is a difference between fabrication, projecting and being open to receiving communication.”

How can she know for sure? The woman presses.

Smith does not suffer skeptics well. “All of this invalidation is a bunch of you know what,” she says, sticking out her chin.

“We are born with the ability to telecommunicate with animals,” she says. “I haven’t met anybody who cannot do it. But you have to say ‘yes’ to it.”