Brian the dog’s musings sound a bit like psychobabble
Maybe Brian the dog is just a better conversationalist than Steve Lopez’s marauding raccoons.
Lopez enlisted an animal psychic to persuade the raccoons destroying his yard to lay off. Psychic Dana Miller is trying to reason with them -- as Lopez relayed in his Wednesday column -- but conversing with raccoons isn’t as easy as chatting with dogs, it seems.
Miller had no trouble connecting with Brian, a tiny white Maltese who disappeared three years ago from his Tujunga front yard.
Shortly after she got a call from Brian’s owner, Miller and the dog had a telepathic chat -- one that persuaded owner Rachel Delacruz to stop looking for her missing pet.
Brian “doesn’t want to look back,” Delacruz said, when she contacted me last month about Brian’s story. “He’s with people who love and care for him. . . . In his manuscript, he mentioned a lot about being OK.”
Yes, his manuscript.
Miller not only talked with Brian, but prepared a three-page transcript of their conversation.
Brian told Miller he “ached” for Delacruz; that his disappearance was “against my wishes.”
But he also said he enjoys his new life. More precisely, according to Miller, “I believe everything was meant to be. . . . I live on and I live well,” Brian said.
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I’m not suggesting Miller is a quack. I do believe people can communicate with animals. I just don’t think the animals sound like new-age sages:
Do not beckon me, nor be disheartened. . . . I can’t account for the squareness that the world brings. . . . I can’t fake where I am at, I can only go along. . . . Evil eyes, twin feelings; no more glances to the past.
These are actual passages from the transcript Miller prepared from her conversation with Brian.
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I admit I have a hard time believing that Brian the Dog is more thoughtful and expressive than Sandy the Columnist.
Miller told me Brian sounded “mature” and wise, unlike younger animals who tend to be all “energy and chatter.” Or feral cats, whose responses are often “jerky and awkward. They don’t have the language skills domestic animals have,” she said.
I guess that’s why Miller is having trouble reaching consensus with the raccoons. Their language skills probably don’t go much beyond repeating Lopez’s middle-of-the-night rants.
Miller made the communication process sound pretty straightforward when I interviewed her about Brian last month: She gets a list of questions from the owner, mentally summons the animal and transcribes the telepathically-delivered responses.
Most animal psychics “get feelings or pictures, but I tend to get the words,” she said. “I’m able to write it down and read it back. I think it’s important for the person to hear what the animals sound like; what they say and how they talk.”
The logistics boggle my mind: What if the animals are busy or don’t want to be found? What if their owners only spoke to them in Korean or Spanish? And if they understand Miller’s questions so well, why don’t they get it when their owners say “stop jumping on guests” or “stay off the bed!”
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Delacruz turned to Miller in January after she dreamed about a starving dog and felt “Brian was reaching out to me,” she said.
When Brian disappeared in 2007, Delacruz spent months plastering the neighborhood with fliers, posting online appeals and scouring nearby canyons. She offered a $1,000 reward for his return. When that failed, she sought out psychics.
Delacruz worried that Brian had been eaten by a coyote. Instead, three psychics told her he’d been stolen by someone who wanted a pet. “They were all hitting one common message. That gave me comfort,” Delacruz said.
But psychics are the province of the desperate, and “comfort” is their stock in trade. My mind tells me that they are either charlatans or nuts.
My experience offers a different perspective.
Years ago, I wrote a about my struggle over whether to euthanize my 3-year-old, 85-pound dog Cookie after she lost the use of her back legs. A reader put me in touch with Lydia Hiby.
Hiby doesn’t do transcripts. But she is known around the country -- by veterinarians, pet owners and rescue groups -- as someone with an uncanny ability to discern the ills and history of animals she has never met.
She asked a few questions about Cookie’s appearance and location, then told me the feeling had begun to return to my dog’s left rear leg.
That was exactly what my vet had said a few hours earlier. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.
When I asked whether Cookie would recover, Hiby said she didn’t know.
Even the best animal communicators “can’t predict the future,” she told me.
And -- unfortunately for Lopez -- they can’t order raccoons to stop wrecking the landscaping in your front yard.
What they can do, though, is put us in touch with our inner psychic. Anyone can divine an animal’s feelings, Hiby told me. “It’s learning to listen and trust what you feel that’s hard.”
A few days after I spoke with Hiby, I held Cookie in my arms and helped her die. I didn’t need a transcript to know what she felt. Something in her eyes told me she was ready to let go.
I admit, I still don’t understand how animal communication works. It falls somewhere between magic and hoax.
But the skeptic in me hears the psychic -- not the dog -- talking when I read what Brian said and Miller relayed:
“It’s a sweet deal and I cannot complain.”
You can find the complete transcript of Miller’s conversation with Brian at www.latimes.com/sandybanks
