Karlene Stange, DVM Interview

Summary

The discussion explores animals as conscious, spiritually significant beings and questions whether consciousness is more fundamental than the brain. It also examines death, reincarnation, scientific uncertainty, and how life’s opposing experiences may foster wisdom and compassion.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What does it mean to say that animals have a spiritual nature?
• Is consciousness produced by the brain, or does it extend beyond the physical body?
• What happens to consciousness or life force after an animal dies?
• Can animals be spiritually aware or more evolved than humans?
• How can suffering contribute to wisdom and compassion?

Key takeaways

• Animals may express consciousness through intelligence, perception, emotion, and connection.
• Science explains measurable matter but may not resolve questions about spirit or consciousness.
• Death may end the body without ending the animating life force.
• Human ideas of spiritual hierarchy can obscure the shared nature of consciousness.
• Opposing life experiences can transform suffering into wisdom and compassion.
• Intellectual ability does not necessarily determine spiritual awareness.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done quite a few—100 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, Batgap, and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll find them all alphabetized and listed chronologically as well. It’s a sort of new feature that I built a few weeks ago where you can just type in a name, and people I’ve interviewed instantly show up. You can sort it alphabetically by name or chronologically—earliest first or latest first—or any which way. So play around with it.

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My guest this week is Karlene Stange, DVM. DVM means she’s a veterinarian, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. She’s written a book called The Spiritual Nature of Animals, which my good friend George Hardeen—who actually trained with the horse whisperer, the person on whom that movie with Robert Redford was based—highly recommended and hands out to all his friends and so on.

Since we like spirituality around here, and we also like animals, she seemed like she’d be an interesting guest on a topic that we haven’t really covered on this show. And I think she will be. I just finished, almost finished, reading the book and found that it really wove nicely between deeper philosophical considerations, as expressed by various ancient cultures, and Karlene’s in-the-mud experience as a veterinarian with various animals having all kinds of emergencies. It was an interesting read, I thought. So welcome, Karlene.

Karlene: Thank you very much, Rick. It’s an honor to be here.

Rick: Well, it’s an honor to have you. So, you’re in Durango, Colorado. A couple of other people who’ve been on BatGap are in Durango: Craig Holliday and Doc Roberts. Lama Tsultrim Allione, who was on not too long ago, isn’t in Durango but isn’t too far from it, in Pagosa Springs. It’s interesting how you describe Durango as being sort of a melting pot of all sorts of spiritual interests, where people can be into a half a dozen or more different things and have no trouble reconciling and harmonizing them.

Karlene: Very true. They’re doing sweat lodge, going to the Dharma Center, and going to church. You know, Agape with Michael Beckwith—they do it all. Yeah, they’re into spirituality. Whatever. It’s a great community.

Rick: Yeah, I think somehow or other, spiritual people are drawn to that area, or maybe something about the area inclines people toward spirituality. I’m not sure which.

Karlene: Yeah, back in the ’60s, was it, they were talking about vortices? One in Sedona and one here? I don’t know. I love it here.

Rick: I was able to interview Joy Sharp, who was up in Ridgway, if you know Joy. In any case, looking at the title of your book, The Spiritual Nature of Animals, I thought to myself, you could have written a book about the spiritual nature of rocks, and I wouldn’t have batted an eye at that title. I think, as I think you do, that everything has a spiritual nature, ultimately.

Maybe we could start by defining what we mean by spiritual nature. Some people would probably disagree that animals have one and would certainly disagree that rocks have one. So how would we define spiritual nature?

Karlene: Well, I go back to science, often being a scientist myself and being a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. Science currently tells us that only 5% of the universe is visible matter. The rest is invisible, unmeasurable, and they don’t know what it is. So, okay, we’re talking about something nonphysical. That, to me, is spiritual.

Where Does Vital Life Force Go?

Plus, when I was in college, I learned that energy is neither created nor destroyed. That’s one of the first laws of thermodynamics. So I asked myself, what happens if someone shoots an elk in the heart and it dies? Where did that vital, animating life force go? It had to go somewhere, right?

Plus, when I was in college, I learned that energy is neither created nor destroyed. That’s one of the first laws of thermodynamics. So I asked myself, what happens if someone shoots an elk in the heart and it dies? Where did that vital, animating life force go? It had to go somewhere, right?

So, you want to call it energy, or… We get all hung up about the words to describe it, when words aren’t really adequate to define it. I think about spirituality as being the nonphysical part.

Science also tells us that the 5% that we do see is mostly empty space as well. Right? The only reason we see a table is because of the ways our eyes interpret the light energy reflecting off the energy between the atomic particles of the table, and our brain translates that information and creates the image of the table. Right? So the world is a mental construct. There, it’s all spiritual.

Rick: Okay, now, some people, to play devil’s advocate, would say, “Well, when you shoot the elk in the heart, its heart stops. So its brain stops getting blood, its brain dies, and now it’s just dead meat. There’s no elk that went anywhere.”

Karlene: But the animating energy doesn’t instantly condense into meat. The meat was there to begin with; it just doesn’t move. So there’s energy that had been created to move that elk.

Even if you search scientifically for “Is there such a thing as death?” you’re going to see posts about how the photons live on. The energetic photons have to go on.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to stay in a congealed spirit or soul. It may be, like Thich Nhat Hanh says, that you just go back to the whole. So it could just be wind, dust, or sunlight that goes back to the whole.

People like Abraham, the channel, say you go back to Source. Near-death experience people go back, and there’s an entire spirit realm. I interviewed a shaman, and he told me that when he goes to the spirit realm, an animal may appear as a human, or a human may appear as an animal.

He likes to put a crystal around the animal’s neck or the person’s neck because crystals are the only things that don’t change in the spirit realm, so you can identify them. I asked him, “So what’s the difference between an animal and a human, then, if they could appear as one or the other in the spirit realm?” He said, “I don’t know. Who says there is?”

From this human perspective, we have this idea that there’s a hierarchy of everything, like a corporation, with mid-level management and CEOs. But the spirit realm is just spirit. Everything is spirit. So there’s no division. It’s our divisive mind, our human dual thinking, that creates all these ideas of the physical and nonphysical.

I was just reading something in my book, a quote from Coomaraswamy, that animals and little children don’t have that understanding of a separation between spirit and body. That’s why I think little children see spirits. They see imaginary friends and such.

Animals see the spirit realm better than humans can. That’s what I’ve read in multiple teachings, from Hebrew sources to shamans to Tibetan Buddhists. They say animals can see the spirit realm.

Animals see the spirit realm better than humans can.

I think there is a nonphysical reality beyond what our minds create, this illusion, this mental construct we create. That is the spirit realm. That’s mostly what everything is.

Rick: Yeah. I think probably most people listening to this are on board with what you’re saying, but just to play devil’s advocate a little bit longer: as I’m sure you’re well aware, there’s a debate between those with a materialistic perspective—which I guess is the predominant paradigm in science—who say that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain functioning. When the brain dies, that’s it: lights out, no consciousness. Then there are those who conversely say that the brain and everything else are emergent properties, or things, of consciousness; that consciousness is fundamental and gives rise to materiality.

I’m pretty sure where you stand on the issue, but is there anything you’d like to say about that whole debate?

Karlene: Well, it’s very interesting to me that scientists who say that consciousness is in the brain, even though extensive searching for decades has not come up with its location, still have faith that they’re going to find it in the brain.

Now, anybody else who has faith in something for which there’s no evidence is considered to be talking baloney, right? You have to have evidence. It’s like saying that there’s no evidence that animals feel love. It’s intuitively obvious that they do.

There are two ways of looking at reality. There’s the scientific, empirical, measuring way, but you cannot measure the 95%. So you have to go with the other way of understanding reality, which is through intuition, or experiential knowing. That’s where all these great spiritual teachings have come from; that’s where they get their information.

That’s why I had to write this book, because science can’t tell me about it. I had to look elsewhere.

Rick: As you say in the book, science revises itself again and again and again. Things that are established science end up being upended, and new theories take their place. Then new theories take their place, and on and on. Anybody who thinks that science has it all nailed down in terms of the way the universe works doesn’t really understand science.

Karlene: Correct. Right. And the most advanced scientists say that. I remember the moment I realized it. I was on the floor of my office, surrounded by old embryology textbooks, studying embryology for this book, when it hit me. I was stunned. I got up off the floor, went to my garage, got my vet truck, drove to Fort Lewis College, went to the Biology Department, found my former embryology professor in his office, and said, “Dr. Summers, I just realized there’s no such thing as a scientific fact.”

He smiled and said, in a slow Southern accent, “That’s right. There’s only the current theory based on the prevailing evidence, which is constantly changing.”

Science as a Changing Search for Truth

I was dumbstruck at the moment. Here I was, I don’t know, 40 years old or something, and I was just finally understanding this. I thought science had the truth: “These are the facts.” But it’s not so. It’s constantly changing.

I was dumbstruck at the moment. Here I was, I don’t know, 40 years old or something, and I was just finally understanding this. I thought science had the truth: “These are the facts.” But it’s not so. It’s constantly changing.

You really can’t put your finger on it. No theory can be a fact because theories are constantly being revised. So that makes you wonder, what is reality?

Science doesn’t have the corner on truth with a little “t.” It certainly doesn’t know the big-T truth. But they keep trying to find it. The ancient scientists had that as their goal. They were using science to get connected with God, to find truth. We get closer every year, but we’re still working on it.

Rick: Ironically, of course, you would think that science did have the big-T truths, because so many scientists are adamantly certain about how right they are about certain things. Someone said science progresses by a series of funerals, because often people won’t change their minds; they just die out, and younger ones come along with different ideas.

Karlene: That’s so true. And so do all the prejudices. There’s financial prejudice, political prejudice, and sexual prejudice. It’s just like everything else.

The Internet has changed things quite a bit because anybody can publish their work now. Before, you couldn’t get published if you weren’t in with the right political and financial group, so your information would never be known.

✨ Animal consciousness and intelligence

Rick: One point you address in your book quite a bit is whether animals are conscious. Maybe we need to define conscious, because it seems to me that anything that perceives or can react to any kind of stimulus is obviously conscious, or it wouldn’t know the perception or stimulus was there.

Karlene: Yeah, right. But here we have this problem of defining consciousness. I mean, nobody’s really come up with a good definition for it. Years ago, Bernd Heinrich wrote The Mind of the Raven, and he did these tests with ravens, who are brilliant. He can never catch them. He has to steal eggs and raise them because they’re too smart to get caught in a trap.

But he had a perch with a piece of meat tied to a string from the perch, and the only way for the birds to get the meat was to stand on the perch, reel up the string, and hold on to it with their other foot. He figured it would take them weeks to figure that out. Some flew at it, and some tried to pick the string off the perch. But one stood there and looked down at it, looked at it, and reeled it up right away the first time.

He said—and he was ostracized for saying this—that that’s consciousness. The raven had to play the scenarios through in its mind and figure out the problem. And look at the octopus. They can solve any puzzle. I mean, they’re brilliant. One marine biologist said, “If octopuses evolved to live on land, they’d rule the world.” They’re amazing. They can change shape, color, and patterns, and get through any little hole because they don’t have any vertebrae or bones. They can taste with their suction cups. I mean, there are so many amazing animals. So, consciousness.

Defining Consciousness Across Species

Rick: Well, regarding the raven, to me that is kind of a semantic question: how we’re really defining the word “conscious,” because that, to me, says the raven is intelligent. But a paramecium is conscious because it will react to some kind of chemical stimulus or something. It is aware of something in its environment, apparently, and behaves accordingly.

Karlene: Well, since we don’t have a clear definition, and no one can actually define it, it’s really hard for me to say. But I can tell you what other people say. Are you familiar with David Hawkins? He uses kinesiology to test truth and falsehood. He rates consciousness on levels from zero to 1,000, with zero being shame and 1,000 being Christ consciousness.

He puts deer above a lot of people. Alex, the African gray parrot, was amazing. He was very intelligent. But Hawkins put him at 400, which is higher than most of the human race. So it’s really hard to say. I’m quite clear in my mind that animals are conscious. They respond. As a veterinarian, I can make an animal unconscious with anesthesia, so it follows that it was conscious to begin with.

Rick: Well, let’s just frame for ourselves, for our conversation, a mutual understanding of the words “conscious” and “consciousness.” I mean, I think you and I would both agree that consciousness is like a universal field, and that individual beings and nervous systems reflect it or express it, much in the same way that a radio, or various radios, reflect or express the universal electromagnetic field.

If you break the radio or pull out a few of its transistors, maybe it loses the ability to do that, but that doesn’t do anything to the field. The field carries on. Right? And so you could have a tinny little crystal-set radio, like the kind I built when I was about ten years old, or you could have a really nice $300 Bose radio. There is a range of abilities among radios to pick up that field and transmit it into something that we can appreciate. But it’s the same field. So, are you with me so far on that?

Karlene: I am, yes. So, if it’s a brain, then any brain can do it at varying skill levels. Right? At the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Humans and Non-Human Animals, back in 2012, a group of prominent neuroscientists said there’s nothing about the human brain that is superior to other animal brains. They can’t find consciousness in the prefrontal cortex, which is what humans have. So the brain isn’t necessarily it.

So I’m with you. I think consciousness is spirit. Aren’t they similar? Isn’t that the same thing—spirit and consciousness? I don’t know. The words are problematic, always. Rick, that’s what we get hung up on. And that’s our divisive, dual mind trying to say it’s this, it’s that, and argue about it. I don’t really know.

I think it’s something we sense. You look in an animal’s eyes. You sense they’re there, and you sense when they’re not. When they’re dead, you bury them. So something was there a minute ago.

I once euthanized a horse, and there was this old cowboy there, digging the hole for the horse with his backhoe. This guy never thought much of me—you know, a woman veterinarian. He wouldn’t say two words to me. So I pronounced the horse dead, and he stood there with his hands on his hips and said:

“Now, I am not a religious man. But I let my kids go to Sunday school because they want to go, and because I think it’s a good education. But those Sunday school teachers tell my kids that animals don’t have a soul. And you can’t tell me there wasn’t something there a minute ago that isn’t there now.”

To me, it’s obvious. There’s something that is gone. If it were just the body, if everything were in the body, you’d keep it around, right? We bury that. So that consciousness, that spirit, that life-force energy is what I’m interested in. That’s the most important part. That’s the only thing we care about, really. I mean, we love the body because it’s our home.

Rick: But we don’t love it when it’s dead. We get rid of it.

Karlene: It’s this eternal thing. There’s something eternal about this life-force energy. And that’s what loves us.

Universal Consciousness and the Eternity of Life

Rick: Yeah. Now, I think there are two ways we could look at the eternality of the life-force energy, as you put it. One is the thing I just alluded to with the radio metaphor, where there’s a universal field of consciousness. And there’s that verse from the Gita: “The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.”

But then there are also all kinds of verses in the Gita, and in many other scriptures that you talk about in your book, about there being something individuated about that field that comprises an individual spirit or soul, and that that soul, according to many traditions, transmigrates or reincarnates from one vehicle to another.

The Gita talks about it as being like, if your clothes wear out, you put on a fresh set of clothes and continue living your life with a new set of clothes. So you cast off worn-out bodies and take up new ones.

Having said that, I mean, that kind of gets us into the notion that life is a journey that is not defined by a single lifetime. And that journey can progress. It is not just static, but there is a sort of learning curve and ever-ascending progression to higher and higher expressions, higher and higher levels of consciousness, ultimately perhaps to enlightenment—whatever we might want to define that as. Are you with me on all that?

Karlene: Yeah. So I recently have been studying some Taoism because I’ve been lecturing at veterinary conferences on the spiritual qi of animals. In traditional Chinese veterinary medicine, there are five spirits in the body. There’s an ethereal soul associated with the liver, and there’s a corporeal soul associated with the lung, and there are three other souls.

Anyway, when you die, the corporeal soul goes down to the earth, and the ethereal spirit goes back to heaven. The Taoists believe that the purpose of life in the physical body is for the spirit to come into this alchemical cauldron of opposites. Through these contrasting experiences, the spirit learns, and the purpose is to transform suffering into wisdom and compassion.

Then the spirit goes back to the spirit realm in bodily form, carrying that information back for spirit, so that it can evolve and expand. So the purpose of life is the transformation of suffering into wisdom and compassion.

The purpose of life is the transformation of suffering into wisdom and compassion.

In the human body, with that dual mind, there’s that really contrasting experience. We’re on the leading edge, as Abraham, the channel, puts it, of suffering. We choose it in a way. We don’t want to suffer, but we choose to come here to experience these yin and yang—the shame and pride, the pain and pleasure.

Rick: Yeah, my understanding of that is that if you’re going to have a relative creation, then there have to be pairs of opposites. If everything were completely the same, you couldn’t have any diversity. And so there’s going to be diversity of all kinds: hot and cold, fast and slow, heavy and light, and, of course, happiness and suffering, and all the range of emotions and everything else. It is just vast diversity in any way you want to measure it.

Karlene: Yeah. The clairvoyant I talk about in my book, whom I interviewed repeatedly, says that there are many different planets that you can choose to go to, and each planet has its game. The game we play on this planet is duality. So it’s not this way everywhere.

Rick: Yeah, some of the Hindus, especially the Hare Krishnas, like to talk about spiritual planets where you get to just hang out with Krishna. It’s all bright and beautiful and heavenly. Tibetan Buddhists also talk about heavenly realms. They talk about hell realms where it’s all dark and yucky. And you go where your karma takes you, I guess.

Karlene: And that can be right here, too. There are hell realms and heavenly realms right here.

Rick: Yeah. Now, Meher Baba and others have charted out this idea. You mentioned hierarchies in a somewhat derogatory tone a little while ago, but they’ve charted out this sort of idea. You also mentioned that guy Hawkins, and that there’s a vast range of stages of evolution—from rocks, through plants, through animals, through humans, through celestial beings, and so on. There is just a vast range.

It seems kind of more fair and egalitarian to say, “Well, we’re all of equal worth.” And that’s true in a sense, and consciousness obviously is the same thing regardless of the light. There’s a line from the Incredible String Band: “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.” One light, but the lamps—some are brighter, some are dimmer, like electrical bulbs. Some are 1,000 watts, some are five watts.

So, in that sense, it’s not unfair or narrow-minded to say that there are different stages of evolution, and that some are at a lower stage and are progressing, while some are at a higher stage, having progressed. Do you agree with that?

Karlene: Well, I know that my horse was more aware than my mother when she was 93 and dying of Alzheimer’s. My horse could see an elk a mile away that I couldn’t see unless I looked where he was looking and said, “Oh, yeah, I see.”

Rick: Well, a hawk could see a mouse from 500 feet up better than the Buddha could if he were 500 feet up. But that doesn’t say anything about the hawk’s level of enlightenment relative to the Buddha’s.

Karlene: Well, how enlightened is a person with Alzheimer’s? Or does it matter? There’s that story about the Buddha: He had a man who was mentally disabled, and he told him to sweep the floor, and he was enlightened.

I mean, I don’t know that it has to do with intellect. If intellect is a matter of enlightenment, what about animals? Also, there may not be just plain animals. Shamans talk about how there are various kinds of animals. There are just plain animals. There are animals who are spirit guides. There are spirits in animal form. There are leaders of the spirit of the animal who are spirits in animal form. So there are all these different kinds of animals.

Just like there are all kinds of different people, I don’t think we can say people are more enlightened than animals. Hawkins was talking about the levels of consciousness, from shame to bliss and beyond, and how to transform your mental shame, guilt, anger, or worry by surrendering to God. That was his classic way to accomplish this.

They say that animals don’t know that they can do this. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist, talks about animals having a level of consciousness, but says they aren’t as conscious as humans because they can’t control their thoughts. But I look at a cat stalking something. If they were just acting on instinct, what’s telling them, “Wait, wait a minute. Wait. Go now”? What’s telling them that?

There’s this internal guidance thing. People like to say animals have instincts, and that all animal wisdom comes from their instincts. So what are instincts? Instincts are intuition, and intuition is inner truth. That’s your inner guidance. That’s spirit.

I can’t divide this all up and say that one is more conscious than another. In certain moments, animals are more conscious than certain people.

Rick: Yeah. But if we think in terms of the soul being something that evolves over a long span of time through a succession of bodies, it could be that someone who’s in a coma or who has advanced Alzheimer’s has a more highly evolved soul that has been inhabiting that body. Even though the body isn’t functioning very well, that soul may be more highly evolved than the soul of some virile young athlete who appears to be in great shape or something.

We’re just taking a snapshot of the moment—an old body, a young body—but in the big picture of things, souls are at various levels, and they go through a succession of bodies as they progress.

Karlene: Well, what about Lama Tsutrim’s cat?

Rick: What about him? Oh, that was her father? Is that the idea?

Karlene: I was having tea in her living room, and he came over. I started petting his neck and head, and he was really enjoying it. She said, “Wow, he really likes you.” I said, “He’s a lover.” She said, “He’s my father.” I said, “Pardon me?”

She had talked to a Tibetan lama who read incarnations and asked where her father was. He said—and he only spoke Tibetan—“He’s an animal with stripes on his face.” Then, years later, he came to her house, saw the cat, and said, “There’s your father.”

Rick: Well, that proves my point, actually, which is that the cat didn’t have any significant intellectual capacity, or many of the things that humans have, although it had certain cat abilities that humans don’t have. But the soul of the cat, if that’s a true story and it really was her father, had reached a certain level of evolution that wasn’t necessarily revealed by the nature of that particular body it was inhabiting.

So I guess it proves your point, too, that you can’t make simple judgments about the level of evolution of anything.

Karlene: And if you want to evolve quickly, come out as a high-level spiritual teacher’s cat and hang out on their lap all the time. By osmosis, you’re going to get high.

The clairvoyant from my book—I interviewed her—and she said that a human may choose to come back as an animal for a particular purpose. For example, a man with self-loathing could not heal that pain in a human body, but as a beloved family dog, without the mental judgments of a human, he could heal that emotion in a short, ten-year lifespan.

Rick: Yeah. So I’m sure that’s possible. I mean, I’m not sure of anything, but why not?

Karlene: Right. I mean, I don’t know, either. I can tell you what these people say, and I’m open to that idea. You look at these animals sometimes, and they often remind you of a person you’ve known. People have told me that they believe their cat is their uncle or whatever.

Rick: You know who Ramana Maharshi was, right?

Karlene: No, I don’t.

Rick: Oh, he was a great saint in southern India who died, I think, in 1950. He lived in Tiruvannamalai and is one of the most highly regarded and respected saints of the twentieth century. He’s kind of the gold standard of enlightened people for many spiritual seekers these days.

Anyway, he had a cow named Lakshmi, and there are marvelous stories about this cow and how it interacted with him and everything. Apparently, Lakshmi was the reincarnation of a woman who had tended to him when he was younger and living in a cave on Mount Arunachala. She had been reborn as a cow in order to be around him, and Ramana said that Lakshmi actually did attain enlightenment in a cow’s body.

So there’s an example of a very highly evolved soul in a nonhuman body.

Karlene: I’m open to that idea. I’ve read a few stories like that, too.

Again, when my mother died—she died last December—I got the call around 6:00 a.m. When I hung up the phone, I heard an owl hooting outside my window. I opened the blind, and there was a large owl in the tree right outside my window, hooting. It just cut right through me. The hooting sound was so haunting.

Native Americans believe that the owl is the messenger of death. Birds are messengers in general, but the owl calls death. So I immediately felt like it was my mother coming to say goodbye. I thanked her for coming and said goodbye. The sun rose over the trees in the east, and she flew off into the trees.

So a spirit could inhabit an animal’s body willingly. The channel Abraham said, “They’re willing to do this. They offer themselves: ‘Sure, you want to use me? Okay, let’s go.’” They’re not closed to these spiritual things because they see spirit.

There’s a veterinarian here locally who, when she does a euthanasia at someone’s home, asks that the other animals be present. She says, “Now watch.” Often you’ll see these animals kind of watch them leave.

Sometimes I’ve had an animal look over my head. I’m looking at them in the eye, and they’re looking up above my head, like they see something. I wonder, “Do you see my aura? Is there somebody here? What are you looking at?” Sometimes I wonder what’s going on.

Rick: Yeah. So, just to embellish that point a little bit, what we’re talking about here, again, obviously, is that there’s a subtler level of creation than gross physical matter, and that there’s a whole realm populated by subtle bodies—we could say astral bodies, celestial bodies, or whatever.

Some beings—I know human beings who routinely perceive those levels—just go through life seeing subtle beings attending to people and doing things. So you’re saying that some animals can also.

I just want to make clear that I hope I don’t sound argumentative. I’m just throwing out all these ideas. I completely agree with everything you’re saying, and at the same time, I have a sense of “I don’t know,” and of mystery, and that there’s a heck of a lot more to the universe.

Einstein said that the universe is more mysterious—not only than we can see, but than we can conceive. So it’s good not to be glib and feel like you’ve got it all figured out. But it’s fun to play with these ideas and even to take contrarian viewpoints to see if you can poke holes in them.

Karlene: Let me say that I don’t have any agenda in trying to convince anybody of anything, or of any particular spiritual belief about animals or anything else. I just wanted to know.

The things I saw in my practice, and the things I heard people say about animals’ consciousness—that they don’t feel love, they don’t have souls, they don’t go to heaven—even though they don’t feel pain. Sometimes people said that, which is so obviously not the truth. You put a rocking chair on a cat’s tail and… I have a truck full of analgesics, for crying out loud, people.

But I think human consciousness has evolved to the point where we can recognize this. I don’t know. I just had to explore. So I went through every spiritual teaching, from creation stories up to modern spirituality, to try to find out what the experts say. I thought it would be simple. I thought, “I’m going to find the truth.”

Well, what’s the truth? That was a big, nebulous thing to begin with. Nobody knows what the truth is. Nobody agrees about any of it.

What I find fascinating are the common themes—the common themes from all across the planet, things that you come back to over and over again. Those things must be true. Love, for example.

Near-death experiencers come back and say, “We’re here to love and help each other.” I’ve heard people say forever that there’s no evidence that animals feel love. But there’s a test to determine who loves you more, your dog or your spouse: You lock each one in the trunk of a car for an hour and find out which one’s happy to see you when you let them out.

This is a joke, but it rings so true. The spouse will be bitter for decades, right? “Do you know what he did to me?” When the dog is like, “Hi, Dad,” they’re over it. They might not get in the trunk ever again, but they still love you. They forgive you. They forget. They look for the joy.

We’re in the blame, shame, guilt, pain department. That’s what we can learn from animals: this nondual present moment. They’re like better Buddhists than we are.

That’s what we can learn from animals: this nondual present moment.

That’s what Eckhart Tolle pointed out in that book, Guardians of Being. It’s a little cartoon book, with Patrick McDonnell doing the little cartoons. Some of the best Zen Buddhists I’ve met are cats. It’s a cute little cartoon book, but the animals are here to help us.

The channel Abraham said that the primary purpose of the beasts on this planet is to balance our energy. I did an animal communication apprenticeship, and my teacher said that the animals had told her that horses, dogs, and cats had signed up to help us—to help humans.

They’re here to help us, and we really wouldn’t do very well without them.

Rick: My wife and I experienced that in our own lives. I think that having animals has helped our marriage all the way along, and I don’t know how to explain it. But there’s kind of a joint focus of attention and devotion.

I guess people get the same thing with children. But children are more complicated—and more expensive in the long run, too.

Karlene: Well, the animals really take on our emotions and are excellent reflectors. They’re excellent mirrors. And this can really become a problem. As a veterinarian who’s watched animals suffer in divorce, it’s pretty amazing how they can be used as battering rams, punishment, and tools.

I watched this one—it was a yellow Lab, for crying out loud. It can’t be any happier and gentler than a yellow Lab, but the people kept telling each other what to do with the dog and arguing about it, and the dog became vicious and angry. They would call me and tell me to tell him or her what to do about this dog. And it was… [sigh] I could see this dog feeling all the anger that they had. And it’s hard for the veterinarian to fix their dog, right? To fix the people.

So I think we can all look at our animals and say, “Why is my dog anxious? Why is my dog having anxiety in the car? Why is my dog so worried and needy?” Sometimes you’re at the computer. Here’s an example: You’re at the computer and you can’t remember your password or whatever, and you’re getting really tense. And who shows up? The cat wants to walk across the keyboard, or the dog is pawing at your leg, whining. And they’re trying to say, “Hey, lady, you need to take a walk. You need to pet me; calm down.”

If you just stop for a second and pet them, hug them, say, “Thank you so much. I love you so much. Thank you. Let’s go for a walk,” or whatever, then you go back and you’ll remember your password. You’ll be happier. The dog did its job; they’ll be happier, and there will be less anxiety all the way around.

Animals as healers and mirrors

Rick: Yeah, there are some great examples of dogs and cats being allowed into prisons and prisoners being able to take care of them, and the beneficial effect that has on them. The dogs and cats, of course, are very nonjudgmental, and they just love the prisoners as they would love anyone anyway. And then there was a great movie with Burt Lancaster, Birdman of Alcatraz. You probably saw that years ago.

Karlene: Yeah, but I don’t remember it. And children in hospitals. I once cornered a minister behind a chocolate fountain at a wedding and said, “Do you believe animals have eternal spirits or just souls, lower souls?” And he said, “Well, I tend to believe, with Watchman Nee, that they have a lower soul and not an eternal spirit.”

And I said, “What about Balaam’s ass? That’s a story from the Bible. You know the story? Balaam’s ass saw the angel of the Lord, and the prophet Balaam did not.” The donkey spoke, also. And he said, “Yeah, I have a sign on my refrigerator that says, ‘If the Lord can speak through an ass like that, he can speak through an ass like you.’”

But I said, “And what about how Elijah was fed in the desert by the ravens; how Daniel wasn’t eaten in the lion’s den; and how the whale puked up Jonah? Do you think these animals are just puppets? Or do you think the Holy Spirit works through them?” And he said, “Well, you know, we take animals to see children in the hospital. And we don’t make the kids feel better, but the animals do. So, yes, I do think the Holy Spirit works through them. And thank you for knowing your scriptures,” he added.

I think that there is spirit, there is divine spirit, in these animals. And if you ask for help—here, the clairvoyant told me this the other day, too—she said she had her heart broken and was asking for help: “Help me; my heart hurts so bad.”

And she said that then spirit said, “Who wants to go help Dana with her broken heart?” And “Honey Bear” said, “I’ll go.” So here shows up this dog named Honey Bear who loves her unconditionally. Spirit can take the task: “I’m a spirit that’ll take the form of that dog.” That will come in because she can’t do it with men; men are hurting her.

So here she’s got this dog. I think Spirit just shows up in the form it needs to be. And perhaps we can only see what our minds will allow us to see. Which reminds me of the white owl I saw in the Bisti Badlands.

Here’s this desert in northern New Mexico. I mean, it is barren. There is nothing there. It’s tan and gray, and that’s about it. There’s petrified wood. They found dinosaur fossils there. I mean, it’s a cool, ancient place. It’s Navajo tribal land.

So I’m riding my donkey with two other women in this place. And we saw a naked man. My friend had said she’d seen a naked man there previously, so that was kind of interesting. He was off in the distance, scurrying away.

But we’re riding along past these steely hoodoos and mounds of rock, and all of a sudden, low, a white owl soars over us. And I go, “That looked like a white owl!” My friends go, “Yeah, that’s a white owl.” I say, “There’s no white owls in the Bisti Badlands!” The snowy owls live in the Arctic tundra. What was that?

We knew the Navajo believe the owl calls death. Well, it was silent, and it was white. White is the color of spirit, and white animals are the leaders of their kind, according to shamans. So we thought, well, maybe that naked man was a shape-shifting shaman.

But what I came to, after extensively thinking about it and talking to shamans and ornithologists and all kinds of people, was that it was a spirit. I mean, this place is vacant of life. But if I saw a spirit, my mind would only be able to see what I could rationally comprehend. And so the mind creates a white owl.

It was still like, “What?” But it would be not like a ghost, or an alien. It was just out there enough to be, “Wow, that’s something outstanding to see right now.”

Rick: Did your companions see it also?

Karlene: Yes, they saw it too. But we can only see what our minds can see. You know, the observer is the observed. Krishnamurti said that, right? Werner Heisenberg—you know, scientists talk about that—that the observation depends on who’s observing it.

Particles form and disappear in this emptiness, this quantum field of emptiness, but they don’t form without the observer. So we are creating all of this. And we don’t see that we’re all one. We’ve created this separation with our dual mind, which is easy to say and intellectualize a little bit, but to really feel it is…

You know what people like Lama Tsultrim, the Buddha, and the Dalai Lama—those people have experienced this. The Buddha sat in meditation around the year 500 BCE and realized that the world is empty. He saw that everything is interconnected and constantly changing and that nothing is permanent. And that’s what quantum physics tells us. To have that level of consciousness—wow. That’s what we are trying to get to.

I did a little retreat with a Tibetan lama, Lama Lhanang Rinpoche, and he talked about his meditation techniques and how he had been meditating. His eyes were open, and everything was stars and lights, blackness and emptiness, like he was in some kind of electron microscope or something.

And he said, “I went and told my teacher about it, and he said, ‘Okay.’” They’re told not to focus on it, not to make it special. But minds that practice meditation to that level realize emptiness. They realize it. And we—our minds are like, “I see a white owl.”

Rick: Yeah, there are all kinds of cool stories in the Carlos Castaneda books about that sort of thing, and that whole Toltec tradition and their relationship to animals that are not animals, and so on.

Karlene: Right. Yeah. And that’s a reflection. Rabbi Gershon Winkler says—you know, he’s a Hebrew rabbi, but he hangs out with the Apache—he says, “You don’t need to take all these classes and read books. You just need to look at the next animal you see that flies by. There’s your reflection. There’s your message.”

✨ Animals, awakening, and anthropocentrism

Rick: For those listening live, if you want to ask a question during this interview, go to batgap.com and go into the Upcoming Interviews menu. At the bottom of that page, there’s a forum through which you can post a question. And one came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California.

Before I ask the question, I’ll define anthropocentrism, which is the belief that human beings are the most significant entity in the universe. So Mark asks, “It’s widely held that humans are unique in the animal kingdom in their potential to be conscious of their consciousness, or to awaken. Do you think this assumption is just another subtle form of anthropocentrism?”

Karlene: You know, I really like the Bible on this point. Ecclesiastes, chapter three, is a sermon on vanity. And chapter 3:18 says that God is testing man to remind him that we too are beasts.

The argument that animals don’t have spirit is that in Genesis, only Abraham received the breath of life from God. But Ecclesiastes 3:19 states that man has no advantage over the beasts, that we all have the same breath—ruach—which is the breath of life from God.

So if consciousness is Spirit, then it’s saying we have the same breath. And it says, “For all is vanity.” The ego is the one thing that humans have in superior quantities to the other animals.

We don’t have sonar like bats and dolphins. We don’t have the olfaction of a bear or the visual acuity of the eagle, as you mentioned. We can’t taste with our tentacles like the octopus or change the color of our skin. But we have egos, and the egos make us more creative than the other animals. They also make us vain.

So I think anthropomorphism—and some of the authors I’ve quoted have said, you know, why not? Why not attribute these animals with these qualities? They have so many similarities to us. Certainly, they must feel the things that we feel and think the things we think. And who knows how aware they are of themselves?

It used to be thought that animals are not self-aware. That was the test for consciousness. And the test for self-awareness was the mirror self-recognition test, where you put a dot on an animal’s forehead and they’d look in a mirror. Then, instead of touching the dot, they would touch the mirror, which is what children do until they’re two years old. They’ll touch the mirror, the dot on the mirror.

But then they found out that monkeys do it, dolphins do it, and elephants do it. Elephants are looking in the mirror at their ears and their teeth. And, you know, okay, lots of animals can recognize themselves in mirrors. Now it’s just called the “mirror self-recognition test.” It’s not a test for self-awareness. If you weren’t self-aware, you’d be bumping into others.

So, yes. The one reason that scientists—animal behavioral scientists—don’t like to assume animals have these qualities is that we might be making a mistake. And so they look for the evidence. I give them that; let’s not make definite statements. But it’s intuitively obvious, so let’s not say it doesn’t exist. Lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack.

So, you know, we’re egos; we’re egocentric. That’s the bottom line for us. I hope that answers this question.

Rick: I think it kind of does. I have some more to ask you that might help you elaborate on that. I was once in a meeting with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the subject of vegetarianism came up. He said, “If you have to eat someone, eat lesser-evolved life, lesser-evolved life.”

The implication there is that nature seems to have more invested in more complex life forms. As a veterinarian, you would clear maggots out of a horse’s wound and have no compunction about the maggots dying. You’re trying to save the life of the horse because the horse is a more evolved life form than the maggots.

If you had a choice between swatting 100 mosquitoes or saving a child who was dying of malaria, you would kill the mosquitoes and hopefully save the life of the child. We do tend to favor the welfare of more complex life forms, such as ourselves, and perhaps elephants over mosquitoes, or cows over cockroaches, and so on.

That is still not to say that it’s not the same consciousness shining through the eyes of all these beings. But when we consider the expressed form of consciousness—its embodied form in a nervous system of some kind—it seems that the more sophisticated and complex nervous systems, with bigger and more complex brains, have come farther along on the evolutionary scale. So we value their lives more.

Karlene: From this perspective, you know. Is there an evolutionary scale? I suppose I don’t really know. But I know that the animals don’t think there is death because they’re already not separated from the spirit realm like we are. So there is no death. They come and go, in and out, with no big drama. For them, we make a big drama out of it.

The whole notion of killing—this might be a little bit of an aside—makes me think about the Buddhist precept, the first precept, not to kill. The real purpose of the first precept is not specifically to prevent animal suffering. They’re not really concerned about the animal’s consciousness, the animal’s spirit, or its evolution. They’re concerned about their own karma. “I don’t want to kill. I’m not going to kill because that’s my karma.”

I once asked a Buddhist nun, “Whose side is the first precept on? If my horse breaks his leg, I’m going to shoot him. I’m not going to let him flop around until he dies in pain and agony. I can’t fix it. I’m going to let him go.”

She said, “Thank you for what you do.”

They don’t want to do it. Yes, they want to evolve their consciousness and become enlightened, and it is selfish in a way. It is. That’s what I think.

But then some of these spiritual teachings say, “That’s ignorance. You don’t really understand what’s going on.” I remember a story about Sai Baba, who was going through a crowd healing people. Sometimes he passed over little children and healed old people. One of his disciples said, “Why are you skipping over these children and healing these old people?”

He said, “Can you see their karma?”

So I don’t know. Maybe it’s my good karma, or the animal’s good karma, that I came along to relieve their suffering and the suffering of the people who are involved with them.

I don’t find euthanasia to be a problem. As you said, I might have to kill a mosquito, or I have to kill strongyle larvae that are going to make a horse colic and kill the horse. So you are killing lesser-evolved life in order to save higher-evolved life. You’re killing simpler, more primitive biological entities in order to save the life of a more sophisticated biological entity.

Where did these parasites and things come from? They came from the dual mind of man. When we ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, when we got duality, that’s when all the plagues and parasites and stuff showed up.

Rick: There were probably parasites around when the dinosaurs walked the Earth. Well, if you go with the biblical story, fine.

Karlene: It’s not just biblical. That’s what the clairvoyant told me, too. She said that our minds create all of this stuff. That’s why you can manifest a beautiful, happy, peaceful life, or you can manifest hell for yourself.

Sometimes when the prairie dogs show up in my yard, I have to say, “Okay, why are these prairie dogs digging holes through my soul? What’s my deal? What’s my problem? How can I fix it?”

I’ve had people come to me and say, “My horse keeps getting sick,” and I’m working on myself, trying to fix that. Some people look at it like that. I don’t know. Again, as I say, I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything for sure. I don’t have the facts. There’s no such thing as a fact. I’m just dancing around with this information, having fun with it.

Rick: Speaking of fun, it’s time for a Groucho Marx joke. He said, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

You had an interesting kind of evolution in terms of your own career. The suicide rate for veterinarians, you tell us, is four times higher than the national average. As a result of something that people call compassion overwhelm, you end up seeing so much suffering—so much blood and guts and gore, and so many tragic situations—that the stress takes a toll. Veterinarians end up killing themselves more commonly than the national average.

In your case, spirituality entered the picture and helped you in your veterinary practice. It got you to the point where you had ready access to a state of bliss. Do you want to talk a little bit about that whole evolution, and how spirituality gave you a perspective that enabled you to deal with the things you’ve had to deal with?

Karlene: Veterinary medicine is pretty disturbing, really. And I mean, here are these creatures that you just adore, and you see them in the most tremendous suffering. And you’re euthanizing things all the time. Sometimes people can’t afford to fix them, so it’s like, I know I could help this animal. And so veterinarians own a lot of animals because we go, “I’ll fix it,” you know, and you’re poor, and we don’t get paid very well.

And there are people who get angry at you because they don’t understand that you can’t fix their animal, or that you charged them too much, or whatever. And the hours are horrible. You just have emergencies all the time. I was a self-employed, ambulatory horse doctor. When do people see emergencies? When they first get up in the morning, when they feed their animal and there’s a wreck, or when they get home after work. So my emergency hours were always really early and really late, and then I worked all day.

It’s just exhausting. You’re out at four in the morning watching some colic horse trying to die, and you’re trying to save it. So it’s super stressful.

And I had these clients who had ragingly contrasting views about what happens to an animal after death. One was a Buddhist. She had taken a vow, the first precept, not to kill, and she wanted me to help her old dog die. I went and met her, and she didn’t want the dog to suffer, but she believed it was better for the animal to suffer its karma in this life so it would have a better incarnation in its next life.

It took me a while to figure out what to do. I couldn’t euthanize the dog, so I suggested we stop the prednisone medication that was keeping the dog alive, and it died right away. It died that night. So that was nice.

Then, shortly thereafter, this Baptist woman called me early in the morning and asked me to come euthanize her old horse. So I went out and euthanized this horse, and she had told me how her husband had died in her arms a few years before. I said, “Well, now the horse and your husband are together.”

She screeched at me, “No, they’re not! My husband’s in heaven, and that horse is just dead.”

I said, “Well, where did the energy go that was just there?”

“I don’t know. It’s just gone,” she said.

She started quoting Bible verses. Well, I can quote Bible verses, too. So we had this really long, really interesting, respectful conversation. Then I said, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

She said, “No, that’s when you come back as an animal.”

I said, “Well, not necessarily.”

She quoted the Bible again. She said, “There will be a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem, and body and soul will be reunited.”

I said, “That sounds like a definition of reincarnation to me.”

“Well, maybe it is,” she said.

I’m thinking, you know, what is it? Is the animal reincarnate, or is it just dead meat? I wanted to know. I’d heard these things that animals don’t have souls, animals aren’t conscious, and animals don’t feel love.

Here I am at Durango Animal Hospital one day, and this woman walks in with a fishing basket. I come into the exam room, and she starts out by saying, “I’ve never liked cats. And I’ve noticed these feral cats living in the woods near my house.”

She explained that it was a warm spring day and she had the sliding glass door open to her deck. She was talking on the phone when she saw these two cats come onto the deck. Before she could react, they poked their heads through the door and “…dropped this,” she said, as she opened the fishing basket.

Inside was this very tiny, very fuzzy, butterscotch-colored kitten.

I said, “Looks like you got yourself a cat.” I gave her some kitten milk replacer.

She said, “Yeah, I might have to keep it.”

Imagine my confusion. What kind of unconscious, unloving, soulless being would drop their starving baby on the doorstep? It was an emaciated little fuzzball, really hungry. They had to know what they were doing, for crying out loud. So I’m going, what is this? What is this spiritual nature of animals?

I had to figure it out, so I just started doing research. I kind of asked the universe as I went along. I needed some help with Buddhism, and a woman would call who worked at Tara Mandala. I needed help with this, and I’d get a story. I’d get a prairie dog story.

The woman prayed, “God, help me get rid of these prairie dogs. They’re ruining my pasture. I can’t even irrigate; the fence posts are falling in. I don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t shoot them. I can’t hit them, and they hide.”

And what shows up? A badger. A badger shows up, right, and kills and eats all the prairie dogs. Ask and you shall receive, right?

It’s been just a wonderful thing. Early on, I met this clairvoyant client, and I wanted to talk to her about the spiritual nature of animals. When I told her how badly I felt when a patient didn’t improve, when an animal didn’t get better, she laughed. Then she laughed some more. She laughed until she cried and nearly fell off her chair.

I felt offended and said, “Well, I’m glad I can be a source of entertainment for you.”

She wiped her eyes and said, “I’m sorry, but it’s not your fault if an animal doesn’t get better.”

I said, “Really? Well, what do people pay me for?”

She said, “Well, you help, for sure. But there’s a lot more going on than just what you do. Maybe the animal had other plans. Maybe the animal and the people are trying to learn something together.”

I thought she was nuts. But then I started to realize how egocentric it is of me to think that I can go and heal every other animal, every animal. This took some pressure off.

I asked, “What do I do, then, if an animal doesn’t get better?”

She said, “Just pray that the people and the animal get the healing they want.”

Now I put it back in their court. I’m doing the best I can to help you heal. Now go forth and be well; go and sin no more, right? All right, learn your lessons, and then be well.

I didn’t know animals had plans. Really? Animals have plans?

“Yes, animals have plans,” she said.

Oh, okay. From a higher perspective, from a spiritual perspective, there’s probably all kinds of things going on that have nothing to do with me, other than I’m there.

Sometimes I think these animals come to me to bring the people to me so I can say, “You need acupuncture. I’m acupuncturing your dog; it’s helping your dog. Maybe it would help you,” or something like that, or to get some spiritual lesson that I’ve learned shared with them. I’m just a little piece in the co-creation. I’m not the responsible party.

That was huge for me, not to feel so responsible for dying and not healing.

Then I started studying Buddhism. I quit drinking so I could meditate. That was huge. I’d come home every night and drink because I was so stressed out—half a bottle of wine. It didn’t help, and I was exhausted. So that would be dinner, wine, and chocolate. Okay, I’m good. No, you know, it wasn’t good. And so I got healthier.

Of course, I’d meditated off and on for many years, and I’d earned a black belt in karate, so I was into Eastern philosophy, and I always enjoyed meditation. I just developed a stronger meditation practice, which, of course, as you know, is key.

I was raised Christian, and so I prayed. We prayed all the time. I was very used to praying, so I mixed prayer and meditation together, along with contemplation.

I had this most amazing contemplation at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, down near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sometimes you get in a spiritual place where there’s been so much connection with spirit, and you just boom, hook in—like meditating with Lama Tsultrim.

The first time I meditated with her, she’s like, “Okay, we’re in the white light.” I’m like, boom, I’m in the white light. It’s like a contact high. It’s super cool to be with you.

Here I am hanging out with these most wonderful spiritual teachers and hooking into their energy, and constantly reading spiritual books from every walk of life. You have to read a whole book to get two sentences about animals. That’s how egocentric we are; we only care about us, you know, so I had to really dig.

I did a vision quest. I went on a vision quest, which was fabulous. That’s where I hooked in again with my inner guidance. That was huge. That’s where I got the bliss: hooking up with my guidance, which you could call God, you could call Buddha-nature, you could call it whatever you want. I don’t care about the words—divine love.

I do that all day long, every day. And now I listen. When I’m treating an animal, doing acupuncture, and I’m puzzled—what do I do?—boom, I’ll get it in my head: “Do this.” I hear it. I know it.

It’s funny how you just have always known things. This is what makes me kind of believe in reincarnation: sometimes you just know things, right?

I remember being the youngest girl at an all-girls camp one summer. Another girl found a mole, a little mole like a mouse, and she was carrying it around. I said to her, “You shouldn’t handle it so much.”

She said, “How do you know?”

And I was like, how do I know? So I lied. I said, “Well, my neighbor is a nurse, and she told me.” I needed some credibility behind me.

Of course, the mole died. She handled it all day until it died. I even see that with livestock people. They think animals are toys or something. These animals get stressed out by people handling them. Let them be.

Anyway, how do we know? How did I know that? Well, that’s guidance. That’s spirit. That’s perhaps knowledge from a previous life.

Rick: Yeah. And even from this life, I think that we sit atop a vast reservoir of intelligence, the way a boat sits on the surface of an ocean. We can access that reservoir of intelligence and all the wisdom and knowledge it contains, and as we go along, we improve our ability to access it.

We can be guided more and more by the vast intelligence or the wisdom that governs the universe. It can be the motivating force in our individual lives if we attune to it clearly enough.

Karlene: As a little child, here I am, seven years old, and I know I want to be an animal doctor. People asked, “What do you want to be?” “An animal doctor?” I didn’t know the word veterinarian. Why did I want to be an animal doctor? I just did. That’s who I was. That’s who I am.

🩺 Animal communication and intuitive healing

Rick: A bunch of questions have come in from around the world. Dan, that’s good that you’re sending me all those—all these questions. Keep sending them, Dan. Don’t worry about it. Dan is a guy in London who fields the questions and sends them over.

I’m going to ask you these, so probably our topic will jump around a little bit as we go from question to question. This one is from someone in Mumbai, India, which used to be called Bombay, whose initials, I believe, are K. P. He or she says:

I totally agree with you about animal intelligence. I think humans have intellect, but everything here has intelligence. In India, the village folks here have deep relationships with cows. Cows will sometimes cry if something is wrong in your family. Most people who own them say they feel emotions, and if you are kind, they yield more milk. What are your thoughts on this? Also, do you think injecting animals with hormones to yield more meat or milk affects them?

Karlene: Okay, so animals have a limbic system. That’s where our emotions come from. To say an animal doesn’t have emotions denies the fact that they have a limbic system. They have a limbic system; they have emotions. So yes, they have emotions.

And the other part of the question?

Rick: About injecting them with hormones.

Karlene: Definitely. I think that everything we do affects them. And yes, you’re affecting their personality and their emotions with hormones. If we get injected with hormones, boy, we know it. It does affect us.

And yes, if you’re kind to them, they yield more. So there’s a built-in karma to animal husbandry, and any good animal producer, any good livestock producer, knows this. And as a veterinarian, you see the good producers, and you see the bad producers.

The good producers know that if you love an animal, it will make more eggs, milk, meat, wool, or whatever. I’ve had clients in my office who say, “Oh, I have a pen in my living room where I bring the calves in when it gets cold.” These people love these animals. Even though they raise them for food, they love them, and loving them makes them produce more. And if you don’t, they get sick, and that costs money, and you lose money.

Rick: Oh, I’m here in Iowa, where I think there are about 22 million hogs and 3 million people. Most of the hogs are confined in CAFOs—1,200 head in a relatively small building with great big fans on one end. If the fans break, people have died because of the fumes.

I don’t know how much love there is going around in an operation like that. Most of these things are owned by multinational corporations. Most of the meat is shipped to China, and the people who are raising the hogs aren’t making a heck of a lot of money. It ruins the environment here in Iowa, so it’s rather a deplorable situation. It’s a little bit off the BatGap theme, but I had to vent that.

Karlene: Thanks for venting. I think there’s a karma. It will get them. If it’s bad, the animals will die; the animals will not reproduce. And so the housing of animals is controversial, for sure. Veterinarians are in charge of animal welfare, and so we are honestly very concerned about it all the time.

So let’s look at chickens. Chickens. What is the number one problem if you raise chickens outside? Predators. Everything on Earth eats chickens.

Rick: Well, if they are in a safe enclosure?

Karlene: Well, they go under them; they go through them. My husband just had to beef up a $10,000 chicken coop because the bears were going through it. There are owls and hawks, so you have to put them in at night, for sure.

So housing works. The other problem they have being outside is parasites. The other housing problem they have outside is social pressure. They pick on each other; they peck on each other.

So we find out that laying hens do better if they have their own little apartment, with their own little house where they can lay eggs, where there are no predators or parasites, and there are no other pressures from social peckers.

So you dance with it, and it’s like, okay, what do we do? Meat production is a huge deal; it’s not going to go away. And so we try hard—veterinarians do, I promise you—to find the best way. They’re constantly doing research, trying to figure it out.

And then there’s disease. With hogs, they have an all-in, all-out process. You have to bring all the pigs in at the same time, because if you bring a new one in, it could have a disease, and they could all get sick and die. So you have to take them all in at the same time and butcher them all at the same time.

I am not a meat-producer vet. I didn’t want to do that. But I tell you, these veterinarians who care about these animals do care and get very upset. I know of one veterinarian who died trying to save a calf from drowning in a pond. Next question.

Rick: Before I read that question, I’m going to read a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, who said:

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be constantly asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

I thought I’d read that. Here’s a question from Paulo in Santa Cruz, California. Paulo asks:

Last May, my dog passed away. She was 15 years old, a flat-coated retriever, and was the brightest light of my life. She was ravaged with lymphoma and kidney disease, so I decided to euthanize her. I’m wondering if I made her passing more difficult for her by demonstrating so much emotion during the process. I wasn’t hysterical or in a state of resistance over her passing, but rather I expressed a combination of gratitude, sorrow, and an upwelling of love. Needless to say, I was a blubbering mess. How does Karlene feel about this? Should I have remained calm during the euthanasia and saved my tears to be shed away from her?

Karlene: No, you can’t do it wrong. We can’t do it wrong. So, flat-coated, 15 years old—that’s excellent. Really, a lot of them don’t make it that long. So good job for that.

In the last chapters of my book, I go over this. One of the things that’s really helpful is in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. They talk about a meditation you can do, and you can still do it now. You visualize the animal as completely healed physically, mentally, and emotionally. So maybe get a picture of the animal in their prime and focus on that, and then visualize that animal turning into white light and dissolving into the light. You can do this now and at any time.

It’s nice if you can be calm, because it’s such a special moment—death. It’s the transition, right? It’s saying goodbye. And so it’s wonderful if you can be calm and cherish that moment, but the animals don’t do blame, shame, or guilt. They are never going to be angry or upset about your decision or how you act, right?

You can lock them in the trunk of a car and let them out, and they still love you. It doesn’t matter. Your dog knows your heart; your dog still loves you, is still with you. And you know, you didn’t do anything wrong. You can’t do it wrong. You have to be true to yourself.

If you’re a blubbering mess, that’s because you loved her so much, and you didn’t want to say goodbye. But you didn’t say goodbye because she’s still there. You can access her, or you can snuggle in your dreams, or you can just think about her at a happy time—when you were on some trail where she liked to run, or fetching in the river.

You know, those flat-coated retrievers are mad retrievers, right? So see her swimming and how joyful she was. And you connect with her then.

Rick: Yeah, we run into people that—I think I mentioned to you before we started the interview that my wife ran the dog adoption program at the local animal shelter for about eight years. We run into people who say, “Oh, my dog died, and I was so sad. I don’t want to go through anything like that again. Therefore, I’m not going to adopt a new dog.”

Meanwhile, there are all these dogs being euthanized because there aren’t enough homes. Irene’s attitude is—we just adopted a new dog because she thought, “I have to adopt at least one more because they need that. They need it. They need homes, and I feel guilty not having at least two.”

Karlene: Well, don’t feel guilty, but do bring them home. And you know, your dog might come back as another dog, come see you, and want to be with you again and make you happy again.

Animal welfare, meat production, and compassion

Rick: I didn’t notice this question when we were talking about factory farms, but I think I’ll just loop back to that topic for a moment and see what you have to say about this. Irina from Somerville, New Jersey, asks:

How about the millions of animals suffering in factory farming? Shouldn’t the fact of eating them contribute to bad karma for humanity?

Karlene: The best thing you can do to eliminate factory farming is not to buy that meat. But guess what? If you buy dog food, where do you think that meat comes from? Or cat food? Where do you think that comes from?

So we all contribute. If you put butter on your toast, eat yogurt, buy any kind of meat, or buy pet food, you’re part of it. The consumer rules. If you want something…

I remember going into the health food store, and the yogurt that I usually buy wasn’t there. I said, “How come you don’t have this yogurt?” The clerk said, “Because they weren’t treating their cattle humanely.”

“Oh, okay.” Well, I appreciate the stores that care about that. How many do? That was Natural Grocer. So I go to Natural Grocer because they care about it. And I don’t buy that kind of meat. But when I travel, what are you going to get? And I do buy pet food.

So it’s a tough deal. And again, I think that we have a little bit of a skewed opinion. Yes, we see all these millions of animals in factory farms. But let’s look at cattle. Ninety-seven percent of cattle are raised on small family farms with an average of 40 head. People don’t believe that, but it’s true.

Now let’s do the math. What kind of cattle are in the feedlot? What sex? What sex of cattle are in the feedlot?

Rick: Males?

Karlene: Steers, yes—castrated males, typically. Sometimes they’re not castrated, but it’s young males.

Okay, so all these cows and bulls are out in somebody’s field somewhere, or in the National Forest. They’re eating grass, they’re living a happy life, and they’re making more calves. The female calves are going to be cows to make more calves, and the male calves—some become bulls, some get castrated and get butchered.

Some are sold locally. Some are shipped to the feedlot for fattening for an average of 90 to 360 days. They are fed intensively. “Factory farming” is the derogatory term; it’s intensive feeding operations. They’re fed grain to put a lot of marbling into the meat, so you have these choice cuts of meat.

Grass-fed meat doesn’t have all that fat in it—all that marbling, all that fat that comes from feedlot meat. So that’s that.

Okay, now chickens. Well, everything, like I said, eats chickens. If you raised chickens outside, hawks, owls, badgers, foxes, raccoons, skunks, bears, bobcats, mountain lions, dogs and cats, and people—everything is trying to kill your chickens.

And they don’t do it humanely. The skunks just eat the eggs out of them and go. They eat the eggs and the chickens alive, right? It’s cruel. So nature is cruel. Okay?

As I mentioned, wolves take their prey down live and eat them. They don’t kill them first. So veterinarians want to have humane production and humane slaughter. Temple Grandin has done more for cattle than anyone by creating more humane slaughter facilities.

As I said, these cattle, chickens, or whatever, if they’re not fed well, if they’re not fed the right food, or if they’re too stressed out, they get sick and die. So yes, it looks horrible, but I don’t think it’s always as bad as we imagine it to be.

Unless you’re going to eliminate it altogether—which is impossible, because it’s millions and billions of dollars and the livelihood of billions of people—truck drivers, butchers, and everybody’s involved in this. Leather, furniture—I mean, it doesn’t stop.

So all we can do is choose what we want to eat that is humanely treated and slaughtered, and find ways to support the humane care and slaughter of these animals. That’s the best thing I can suggest.

Rick: I think that, obviously, people can become vegan if they want to, and many people do for the kinds of reasons that you just described. They don’t want to participate in all that stuff.

Karlene: But even vegans have dogs, and they’re buying dog food. The vegans I know have dogs.

Rick: I think that maybe a society will someday exist in which the killing of animals is not such a huge industry. But if so, perhaps it will be just a reflection of a predominantly higher level of consciousness in the world. And yet, I know some spiritual teachers whom I respect a great deal who eat meat, including beef and whatnot. The Dalai Lama, for instance.

And there is actually one—I don’t know if I should mention his name—but one of them said he tried being vegetarian for a couple of years, but he was really having health problems. He was getting sick all the time, so he came back to eating meat. What are you going to do? You can’t judge. I mean, you can do what works for you, but don’t get too heavy on people who are eating meat.

Okay. All right, I think this is the same person, Irina, asking a related question:

“As a person being very compassionate toward animals, but also being realistic about the growing demand for meat and animal products, I’m a big proponent of lab-grown meat. Do you think it’s something which could help effectively end all the suffering?”

At this point, I think lab-grown meat is kind of working out slowly but surely. It’s like $400,000 a pound right now, but they’re thinking they might get it to the point where it could be a viable alternative to the killing of animals.

Karlene: Well, I like Star Trek. You just go materialize it—boom. It’s synthahol and synthetic meat and fake protein. I mean, you can do that. Now, the biggest problem with that kind of thing is that it’s all soy-based, and I can’t do soy.

Rick: Well, lab-grown meat isn’t. Lab-grown meat is supposedly like real meat that’s grown through some kind of process in the lab, where actual meat cells are reproduced.

Karlene: Oh, really?

Rick: Yeah, I read a whole article about it.

Karlene: Well, now, I think cells are conscious, so I don’t know if it’s any better or not. Cells have a respiratory system, and if you breathe, you have the breath of life. So I don’t know.

Rick: It gets you back to the argument that if you have to eat somebody, eat lesser-evolved life.

Karlene: Let me mention one other thing. There was a group of animal communicators that tackled the subject of meat, food animals, cattle, milk production, and also vivisection. These animal communicators were mostly in England and other countries, but they asked these animals, and the animals said that they offered themselves. They felt honored to give themselves to the whole in this way.

There was a group of swine that were used for some kind of research project for surgeons, to practice surgery on their bones or something. They felt very honored to be a part of this, and they reincarnated back into this same herd so that they could do it again every year.

And the cattle, too. I mean, if you’re going to come back as a chicken, you’re food, right? Maybe you feel guilty about something you did and want to offer yourself. “I’m going to come back as a cow and give them milk for ten years.” Who knows? I’m just throwing it out there. This is what the animal communicators said: These animals offer themselves, just like Dana’s dogs saying, “I’ll come help.”

“Who wants to go feed these starving people in Africa?”

“I’ll go, and I’ll be a deer.”

That’s what the shamans would say. The shamans would pray, and they would ask the spirit guide of the deer, “We need a deer. We need some meat.” And the spirit guide would say, “You can have one; it’s in this clearing.” The shaman would never take more than was offered. They had an agreement with the Spirit: “Okay, we get that deer for the tribe.”

It’s just the Spirit coming and going, but the meat is being offered. That’s the bear sacrifice of that Japanese tribe, where every year they catch a bear cub, raise it, lovingly feed it, and adore it. Then they butcher it and eat it, and have this huge celebration. They thank it and say, “When you go back to the spirit realm, tell them how loving we were so that you can come back again as our little bear god, and we’ll honor you with such love again.”

So there are a lot of different ways of looking at it.

Rick: Yeah. Which is not to say that a lot of really nasty, cruel things are done to animals in this world, which are quite indefensible and aren’t really helping anybody, such as those bears that are kept in captivity and have their bile drained off, and that kind of thing.

Karlene: We definitely have to look at the way we treat animals, but also the way we treat each other. I mean, we’re not very nice to each other or to animals. If you see cruelty and you can change it, you can do something about it, you’ve got to. If you can’t, then you have to pray.

Responding to Animal Neglect Without Judgment

A woman came into my office one day sobbing. Her neighbor had a dog on a chain, and it was winter and cold. She went up to the man and said, “You know, this doghouse you have for this dog, made of plastic, is not adequate. You really need to give this dog coverage and better care.”

He grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and shook it in her face, which really upset her. So she called every government agency, the police, and animal cruelty authorities, but nobody could do anything. There was nothing they could do, or nobody was willing to intercede.

So I told her to pray for the dog’s karma to be forgiven. The next time she came, she said, “You know what happened? A pit bull came and killed that dog.” I thought, well, there you go. Karma was forgiven. The dog got to go back and get recycled. I don’t know; it made me feel better to know it was done.

Rick: It might also make us feel better to say, at the same time, rather vindictively, that the dog owner who treated that dog that way isn’t going to have it so easy next time around. I mean, we don’t know, but if there’s any justice in the universe, things kind of balance out, perhaps.

Karlene: But we don’t know what was going on with the guy. His kid brought home the dog, and he couldn’t tell his son he couldn’t have it. The owner of the condo he was renting allowed the dog to be in the house. He’s losing his job, and his wife’s pissed at him. I mean, he could be so stressed out about trying to do the right thing. We don’t know his story.

So judging him as being a cruel beast is a little bit egotistical, too. I think we can just pray for the whole situation. That’s one of the things I learned that really helped me: not being so judgmental. Every time I judge something, I feel pain. Pain doesn’t help me, and then I go around being a crappy puss. I don’t really know what’s going on.

So judging him as being a cruel beast is a little bit egotistical, too. I think we can just pray for the whole situation. That’s one of the things I learned that really helped me: not being so judgmental. Every time I judge something, I feel pain. Pain doesn’t help me, and then I go around being a crappy puss. I don’t really know what’s going on.

As Carolyn Myss said to somebody, “How do you know God didn’t send that guy to you to make your life miserable?” Maybe there is a purpose behind these things that we don’t know. If I can help, I will help. If I can’t, I can pray. That’s all I can do.

Rick: Nice. You’ve kind of already addressed this point, but it would be nice to have a few words for this fellow. Mario from Mexico City asks:

“My best friend, Bruno, who was a basset hound, just passed away this Tuesday. It goes without saying that it’s difficult. Do you have any words of comfort?”

Karlene: Oh, many. Read my book; there’s a lot in there.

We attract these friends, and they come to us because they love us, and Spirit loves us. If you connect with your inner guidance—you know, a shaman told me that animal language is just a variant of spirit language—you can communicate with these animals when they’re alive and when they’ve passed.

So if you want to talk to him yourself, tell him anything you want to say: “I’m sorry for the time I yelled at you. I apologize. I forgive you for chewing up my shoes,” whatever. “I love you. Thank you.” Most importantly, “Thank you for being my friend all those years, and for communicating with me now.”

That’s all we can do: be so grateful for their help and friendship. Then, as I talked about with that Tibetan meditation, imagine the animal completely healthy in every way. See the animal turn into white light, and then dissolve into the white light. You can do this over and over again, so you don’t have that image of those last moments when they were suffering. Instead, you have this memory of them.

When you visualize them in their perfection, that’s how they are in the spirit realm. You can connect with that and enjoy their company still. You can’t snuggle with their physical body, but you can still feel their presence.

I’m sorry you lost your buddy. It’s the hardest thing. And, like Rick says, there are so many wonderful animals that would just adore a wonderful, loving owner like you. I see it happen all the time, because I go through the whole life of an animal with my clients, from puppyhood to death. They don’t live fifteen years, right?

Then they’re sad, they’re sad, and they come with a puppy, and they’re euphoric. The puppy is just this joyful—ahh. Maybe you’re not ready yet, and that’s understandable. But at some point, giving another animal a loving home is a wonderful thing.

Rick: Nice. Here’s a question from my friend George Hardeen, whom I mentioned at the beginning. He’s the guy who trained as a horse whisperer with the man about whom that movie was made. I taught George to meditate in 1971.

George asks a question about animal communicators. He lives on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, and he says:

“As a cowboy for twenty-five years and a meditator for much longer, I’ve had amazing relationships with my four horses. Ever since Dr. Laurie Moore, who has been on BatGap twice, communicated with them for me a couple of years ago, they convey their feelings to me every day and really like me giving them attention. Laurie just communicated with my niece’s cats, and Jade described it as a powerful experience for her.”

I guess Jade is his niece. Two of my ranching friends seem to communicate with their cattle. Karlene, could you talk about your experience, understanding, and knowledge of people like Laurie and other animal communicators communicating with animals?

Karlene: Hi, George. Yeah, when I first started writing this book, I was completely skeptical about animal communicators. I think it was because a lot of times people would come in with a health issue with their animal, and an animal communicator would have said, “Oh, the shoulder hurts.” And I would find a broken pelvis. Or I’d find a sole abscess when they said it was in the shoulder or whatever. So I didn’t have much confidence.

But I think, just like any healer, it’s not perfect. It’s not a perfect deal. Communicating with animals is just like interviewing. Rick is very good at interviewing, and some people are not as good as he is. So you have to ask the right questions, and then you have to listen. We’re really good at asking questions. We’re not so good at listening.

And so this is what I learned. I did an animal communication apprenticeship with a woman by the name of Kate Solisti. She lives up near Boulder. She says, “You put yourself in the white light. Get yourself in a meditative state. You open your heart to the animal’s heart.”

Interestingly, that’s the same way I learned to do pulses from my spiritual acupuncture teacher, Are Thoresen. I open my heart to the animal’s heart, and then I feel my pulse on myself and I get the pulse diagnosis.

So it’s communication. You can either hear words, hear sensations, feel pulses, get fragrances or odors. You might see images. So I think it works really well.

One example I can think of is my neighbor lady, a friend of mine. She has three horses, a gelding and two mares, and she brought in this younger mare. This younger mare is really pushy, and she was pushing the gelding off the food, being a bully, and so my friend was worried about him. She told me, “I’ll get rid of her if he doesn’t like her. So would you ask him if he likes her?”

So I asked him, “What do you think of this new mare?” He said, “Yeah, I like her.” I could feel and hear him say, “I like her.”

And so I said, “Well, your person is concerned that she’s bullying you and being mean to you and taking all the food. She’ll get rid of her if you want her to.”

I could feel how upset he was. He said, “That’s my mare!” And I thought, “Oh, I’m talking to a horse here.” In the wild, the mares are the bosses. These are matriarchal bands, and the stallions just argue about whose mares are theirs. Mares are territory, for crying out loud. “Don’t take my territory.”

So I said, “Okay, you can keep her.” And I said, “Is there anything else you need?” And he said, “We need more food.”

That’s the thing about animals. It’s the wholeness, right? “This is our family, our group,” not “me.” We’re the egocentric ones. So, yeah, he’s egocentric about “That’s my mare.” But “we, my group, my family, my compassionate bunch, we need more food.”

I find animal communication to be very interesting, educational, and humorous because each animal’s personality comes showering through.

I was talking to a Labradoodle, and I could barely get the question out. He would just start blabbing. I always doubt myself, but then things will come back that make me think it’s true. For example, I said to him, “Do you have anything you want to tell your mother?” And he said, “I love her, love her, love her, love her, love her.”

So I told her that, and she said, “Ahh! That’s what I always say to him.” So I feel it is valid.

Rick: Have you ever heard of the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali? In the third chapter, he lists all these siddhis, which are supposed to be extraordinary powers or abilities—levitation and invisibility, all kinds of things. But one of them is being able to understand the language of all animals.

So, theoretically, if you mastered that siddhi, you could understand what a squirrel is saying, or a crow, or whatever. And I just thought I’d throw that in. And trees—trees, too.

Irene was telling me this morning about several experiences she had where she was kind of in between sleeping and waking, just kind of waking up. One or another of our animals said something to her that her mind translated into actual English, even though obviously the animal wasn’t thinking or making noises in English.

So perhaps a yogi who has that siddhi has learned to reside at that level that we touch on when we’re in between waking and sleeping, some deeper, intuitive level, and they can just routinely, at will, understand the language of animals.

Karlene: You know, that twilight time is magical. We get some cool dreams then. And, like I said, you can have clairaudience, where you hear your translation of what they’re saying. You might see things, actually get visions, or smell or feel.

I think we get in trouble with the feeling part because that can be kind of painful sometimes. One of the very first communications I did was with an animal that was having separation anxiety. It was not separation anxiety; it was destroying the home. The lady had been gone, she came home, and then left again. When she got back, the dog had eaten the molding around the door and torn it apart.

So I communicated with the dog, and I said, “Are you afraid of something?” And she said, “No, I’m bored and lonely.”

I asked the woman, “How long have you been gone?” Well, she’d been gone for days, and then she came home and went to the grocery store for an hour.

I said, “You know, it’s not a stereo system that you can turn off. It has a brain. Not only does it need physical exercise, it needs mental stimulation. You need to either get another dog…”

So I asked the dog, “Do you want another dog?” She liked little dogs. “How about a cat?”

“No!”

So I told the lady, “She doesn’t want a cat.” She said, “No, she hates cats. She’s afraid of cats.”

Anyway, she ended up taking the dog to doggy daycare a couple of times a week and eventually got another dog, and that ended the problem. They come to me wanting me to calm my dog down, calm my dog down, give it some kind of herbs or a ThunderShirt or whatever to make my dog calm. I’m like, the dog needs activity, physically and mentally.

Rick: I know Cesar Millan always says that—the Dog Whisperer, I think he calls himself—but, you know, first… How does it go? First exercise, right? And then discipline. The dog has to burn off a lot of that extra energy before it can be expected to calm down and behave.

Karlene: And so, feeling that dog’s… When I tapped into the feeling of being bored and lonely, being so bored and lonely that I wanted to eat the molding and rip it off the door, I felt that, and it felt really bad. Really bad. So, yeah, the clairsentience part of it can be something worth skipping.

Rick: It’s interesting how some ancient stories attribute very highly evolved behavior to certain animals. The Ramayana, for instance, is, I think, supposed to have taken place about a million years ago, according to some accounts. One of the main heroes of the story was Hanuman, a monkey, but a very intelligent monkey. There was a whole army of monkeys and also an army of bears that helped Rama fight this battle.

And in the Yoga Vasistha, there’s a crow named something like Kakbhushundi, who is said to be immortal. He actually survives the pralaya—the dissolution of the universe—and continues on in the next universe. This has been going on for, you know, trillions—I guess billions—of years through the various cycles.

You can brush these things off as just myths and wild legends, but, again, coming back to the field-of-all-possibilities way of thinking, who knows? Maybe a time will come when these exceptional abilities that animal communicators have are more routine among human beings, and we’ll communicate with all sorts of species as readily as we now do with other humans.

Karlene: Well, we do it all the time. Anyway, your dog goes, “Eeh.” You know what it means.

I walked in the back door of Durango Animal Hospital one day, and there was a yellow Lab lying on the floor. He was obviously paralyzed. He could only lift his head and one forelimb. He looked up at me and went, “Eeh!” And I knew the dog had to pee.

I said, “I think this dog needs to pee.” Everyone was busy. They said, “We know, but we’re all busy.” I said, “I’ll help.”

I took him outside, and his bladder was like a volleyball. He was paralyzed, and I couldn’t express it. The dog had jumped an irrigation ditch, hit its neck, and was paralyzed from the neck down. So I took him back in, and they catheterized the dog.

But, you know, one “Eeh!” I know what that means. As a veterinarian, because we hang out with animals all the time, we learn the subtle clues. We don’t have the vocabulary coming to us like we do with humans, such as, “My knee hurts.” We have to figure it out.

A flinch to a pinch, whining, a tail flick, the way they look with their eyes—we learn. We get used to reading the symptoms. But you know your own animal. People know all the time what their animals are telling them, and the animals understand you really well.

My cat knows I’m getting cheese out before I even open the refrigerator.

🩺 Chinese veterinary medicine and end-of-life care

Rick: That’s funny. I could tell you stories about our animals, too. So you’ve kind of slowed down a little bit. I mean, you’re not quite on the killer schedule that you used to be on, going out in the middle of the night to euthanize horses and stuff. And you’re focusing a lot more on Chinese veterinary medicine, as I understand—acupuncture and things like that. So you still have a pretty full-time practice, but you’re doing this kind of subtler, alternative kind of treatment.

Karlene: Correct. I mostly practice traditional Chinese veterinary medicine, which is acupuncture, herbal medicine, nutrition, and massage called “tui na.” I use essential oils, things like that, instead of antibiotics and steroids and so on.

So I work well with all the veterinarians in town. They’re used to me, their clients see me, and I send them back to them for blood work and X-rays. And then they come to me.

I’ve had really great success with things like paralysis. With traditional Chinese veterinary medicine, electroacupuncture has been proven to be more effective than surgery—much more effective than surgery—for thoracolumbar disc disease. So if you have a paralyzed dog or a dog that’s got hind-end weakness, go get acupuncture. I mean, it works for everything.

I love it: eyes, vision problems, wounds, infections, respiratory, heart, you name it, kidney. It’s a different way of looking at the medical condition.

I learned from a man, a third-generation Chinese veterinarian named Dr. Xie, who’s the teacher at the University of Florida Veterinary Teaching Hospital. And I’ve also studied with lots of other people, including a man by the name of Are Thoresen, who’s a Norwegian, and he’s a clairvoyant and has a very spiritual approach.

He likes to treat using one acupuncture point, sometimes two. But the one point he calls the “Christ point.” And he’s a Rudolf Steiner sort of spiritual, very esoteric guy. So I kind of incorporate both.

I’ve lectured at the Qi Institute to a group of veterinarians at a palliative care and end-of-life conference—six hours of lecture on the spiritual qi of animals. And I’m lecturing September 7 at the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society’s annual Congress on the Spiritual Qi of Animals.

As I mentioned, the organs each have a spirit. And so your emotional and mental conditions are associated with those spirits. There are acupoints and herbs that treat the spirits, and I really enjoy that part of it.

Chinese medicine is great because I get all these really messed-up problem cases, and yet 85 percent of them seem to improve. I treat cancers, too.

A lot of times, people come to me and say, “They gave me two months for my animal to live.” And they’re crying. I say, “It doesn’t look like he’s dying.” They say, “I know. That’s why I came to you.” It appears like we’ve got something to work with here. He might die, but we can always kill him later.

A guy came to me the other day, and he said, “They found a tumor in my dog, and they said I could come back tomorrow and have it euthanized.” And he said, “What? I’m not killing him.” So he came to me. I gave him some herbs, and here are some acupoints we can treat. Many of these animals live for months to years. I’ve seen it. I’m not going to pronounce it dead.

You can always kill it later.

“You can always kill it later” is my motto. When the animal seems really bad and they’re not having a good life, we let them go. But until then, let’s keep them happy.

Rick: Do you ever dispense advice long distance, such as herbal recommendations and stuff, or do you mainly have a local clientele?

Karlene: I try to, but it’s fraught with failure. Here’s what I recommend: hook up with a veterinarian who does traditional Chinese veterinary medicine.

You can go to one of two websites: tcvm.com, for traditional Chinese veterinary medicine, or ivas.org, for the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society.

There’s a “Find a Vet” place you can click on. You can put your town in there, and it will give you all the vets and their locations. You can contact somebody who can examine the animal, take the pulse, look at the tongue, ask questions, and do a real, proper job.

Rick: Great. Maybe I’ll include the links to those on your page on batgap.com so that if somebody is listening to this while they’re driving or something, they won’t have to stop and write them down. And, of course, I’ll include a link to your website and a link to your book on Amazon. Anything else you want me to put?

Karlene: Ah, no. Just connect with your animals, man, and enjoy them. Love your animals, and they’ll love you back.

Rick: Good point. All right. Well, thanks, Karlene. This has been a lot of fun. Some people might have gotten their hackles up when we were talking about factory farming and this and that. People have strong opinions about that kind of thing.

I have friends who just have a pretty militant attitude about vegetarianism. And I have another friend who’s a longtime meditator who’s into being 100 percent carnivore, and he actually has a whole Facebook page about that.

I’ve actually pitted people at both extremes of that thing against one another and watched them battle it out in emails. I certainly can’t resolve or judge any such arguments. But it’s good to keep an open mind, ponder these things, and work out what works best for you.

Karlene: You have to honor your body. You have to love your body. And some people have to eat meat, such as the Dalai Lama.

I am not able to eat grains. Corn, soy, and wheat make me very ill. So I am paleo, but I am very selective in my paleo.

In addition, if you are a vegan and you have pets, then you’ve got to look at that. What are you feeding them? Cats are obligate carnivores. So if you decide you can’t have a cat for your own karma, then okay, fine. Killing cats isn’t the answer.

I know people who hate cats because they kill birds. I can’t regulate 600 million cats. There are birds that kill birds; fish eat fish; birds eat birds; mammals eat mammals. I mean, this is nature. We are part of nature.

I commend you if you can do a vegan thing. Great. I was a vegetarian for a long time after I toured Oscar Mayer back in pre-veterinary school. I had to do meat science class.

It wasn’t really that the animals were being treated cruelly. It was the quality of the animals that ended up in those places. They’re the sick, the cull, the weak, the old. That’s meat byproducts. That’s “What can we salvage from this decrepit beast?” It’s the kind of food that’s not healthy meat.

Rick: And you still don’t eat cold cuts?

Karlene: I do not. It depends if it’s organic chicken. I try to be very selective.

Also, Baxter Black, who was a cattle veterinarian and a cowboy poet for a long time, told a poem at a garden club once about “how you rip the heads off the lettuce.” He had this whole poem about how brutal it is to “squish the eyes out of the peas.”

I go in my garden, and I thank every single plant that feeds me: “Thank you.” I thank every single animal that I eat, everything on my plate, and every being that went into the creation of that meal—the truck driver, the producer.

I just had a book signing in Wisconsin recently. Afterward, people asked questions, and then a man came up on the sly. He said, “I have a question. I don’t want anybody else to hear.”

He said, “I raise Longhorn cattle, and I butcher them. And it’s hard. And it’s getting harder.”

I said, “You love them, don’t you?” And he got all teary-eyed. He said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, if it’s getting really hard, maybe you shouldn’t do it anymore.” He said, “Yeah.”

But the thing is, you don’t understand. They love the cattle, they love raising them, and they love feeding them. They love interacting with them. It’s their lifestyle, okay? But he doesn’t have carte blanche. He’s not some billionaire who can own hundreds of acres and let all these animals live free until they die of old age.

You raise them because they’re for meat. And that makes it economically feasible for him to interact with these animals. So I told him, “They know you love them. Just be grateful. Just thank them.” And he was nearly crying.

So it’s not like people who raise meat—and I go over this in my book. I tell several stories about local people who raise animals for meat. They love these animals. And it’s a dangerous profession.

When a cattle truck flipped over in downtown Durango recently, who went in to get the cattle out? Now, that’s dangerous. You could die in that truck. Who went in?

Rick: The owner? Or the truck driver?

Karlene: Cattlemen were driving by, stopped, and went in there. One steer died. They got the rest of them out safely. The vegans weren’t running in there to help.

I mean, as Temple Grandin points out, there wouldn’t be these animals, these food animals, if we didn’t raise them for food. So maybe they shouldn’t exist. Okay, but they do.

And so loving them and caring for them, buying from producers who produce healthy meat, who care for them, who raise them humanely and slaughter them humanely—that’s what we need to do to stop the factory farms. Support the local producers. It costs more; organic meat costs more.

Rick: Sure, like organic vegetables cost more.

Karlene: Right. And so that’s my goal with it: let’s focus on helping these local producers survive. They can’t compete.

Rick: So it’s nice talking to you. I can keep going, trading stories and stuff, but we might as well wrap it up. Thanks, Karlene. I really enjoyed this conversation. And if I’m ever down in Durango—which it’s been a long time since we went through there—I’ll look you up.

Karlene: Please do. It’s really been fun talking with you, Rick.

Rick: So let me just summarize. I’ve been speaking with Karlene Stange, and she wrote this book, The Spiritual Nature of Animals. I’ll have a link to it on her page on batgap.com, as well as a link to those websites she mentioned. Send me an email with those links, would you, Karlene, so I have them?

I hope everybody enjoyed this conversation. I did. And I think it kind of stretches us to consider many of the points you made. For me, at least, it sort of knocks me out of certain comfort boxes that I ordinarily dwell in and gets me to contemplate different perspectives than I ordinarily entertain.

I find that a valuable thing to do in life. It’s like trying to do something left-handed that you ordinarily do right-handed. It sort of builds ambidexterity. And this kind of ambidexterity of the mind, the emotions, and the philosophical perspectives lets us play with the kinds of topics we’ve been discussing.

Karlene: Our awareness. Very good.

Rick: Good. So thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time.

If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are put up, there’s a place on batgap.com where you can sign up for email. And there’s an audio version of this thing—an audio podcast—on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, and whatnot.

There’s a page to sign up for that if you wish, and a bunch of other stuff if you explore the menus. So do that, and we’ll see you next time.

Karlene: Thanks, Rick.

Rick: Thank you.