love. I wondered how anyone could say animals do not experience love.
Although most scientists deny there is any evidence that animals feel love, there is a test to determine who loves you more — your dog or your spouse. Lock each one in the trunk of a car for an hour and find out which one is happy to see you when you let them out. This is a joke, but it rings true.
For a veterinarian like me, who observes animals in intimate situations, it feels intuitively obvious that animals love their offspring.
As I drove away, I thought of the many neonates I had saved, and in the warmth of fulfillment, I forgot about my pain and busy schedule. Then I remembered the precious ones that had died in my hands. My eyes blurred, my throat tightened, and the pain returned.
Veterinarians dance with death daily. When the phone rings outside of normal business hours, we get out of bed and go, not for the reward of money — other professionals with our education level earn much more than we do. Rather, we attend emergencies because we love the beautiful creatures and the ugly ones, too. We want to help them all. Their spirits touch us and bring us joy. At the same time, we have to make peace with tremendous suffering and our failures.
Ambulatory veterinary medicine is far from glamorous. Rather, it is blood in the mud, life-and-death decisions made outside of normal business hours, often during bad weather. Even in a hospital, during the day, emergency work is challenging. I faced this gruesome truth immediately after earning my doctor of veterinary medicine degree. In 1985, I began working at Animas Animal Hospital, where late-night and weekend emergencies were common and stressful, and I started my own equine ambulatory veterinary practice in 1988, which made me the sole person responsible for my client’s animals around the clock. I loved my profession, but I whipped and spurred myself to attend emergencies past the point of exhaustion, and I agonized over the suffering of each animal I attended. My body felt like a sagging ridgepole about to splinter apart in the middle. After years of castrating untrained colts, watching horses thrash in pain, filing horse’s teeth, treating bloody, maggot-infested wounds and pus-filled uteruses, and performing too much euthanasia, I needed a mental diversion to help avoid spontaneous combustion from burnout. At the same time, my close relations with animals from birth to death made me wonder how people could make certain statements about animals, such as “They do not feel love,” “They are not conscious,” and “They do not have souls.” None of these made sense to me. I reached a turning point when I decided to research the world’s religious, scientific, and spiritual teachings about the nonphysical aspect of animals. The quest to understand their spiritual nature became my passion and salvation.
I set out to understand the spiritual nature of animals, and in so doing, I discovered my own. Creatures great and small dragged me down a rabbit hole and through sacred tunnels into a world of dragons, shamans, gurus, lamas, monks, nuns, demons, priests, rabbis, preachers, scientists, clairvoyants, channels, mystics, animal communicators, and spiritual teachers. Those adepts schooled me and gave me refuge from the drama and trauma overburdening me. They introduced me to the anima — what Jungian psychology refers to as the animating principal present in all living beings.
Anima is the Latin root of the word animal. It means soul, breath, and life. Veterinarians share a personal relationship with the anima; we watch it drain from a body only to meet it again as a newborn foal or pup. Yet veterinary education rarely mentions it. We learn detailed information about bones, blood, and the other physical components, but little is said of the nonphysical aspect — the animas of animals. I now believe it is the most important part.
Firemen do not enter burning buildings or ascend to the tops of tall trees to grab a hunk of meat known as a “cat.” They rescue a beloved family member, a companion. The incorporeal light in an animal’s eyes reaches into our hearts. It touches us more deeply than any physical thing. We humans have the capacity to connect with the spiritual nature of animals; it makes us happy.
I wanted to be an animal doctor before I knew the word veterinarian. As a young girl in Wisconsin, I remember attending a stallion showing. The handler enumerated the attributes of the handsome, gray Arabian stud as I stared at a gray-haired man in the audience. He appeared humble and placid and wore a vest monogrammed with the veterinary emblem. I learned that he was the local large-animal veterinarian. Although I did not know him, something about his wise, yet nonjudgmental demeanor attracted me, and I longed to be like him. I had yet to learn how the fires of veterinary practice would burn and melt me before forging me into the person I aspired to become.
According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the suicide rate for veterinarians is four times higher than the national average. This may be due in part to the gory wounds and difficult procedures, the death and euthanasia, and the stress of long hours treating emergencies, but it may also be because of something I call “compassion overwhelm.” We care too much. We tend to be compulsive overachievers who sacrifice our lives for the job, as did the cattle practitioner I read about once in the AVMA obituaries who drowned trying to save a calf stuck in a muddy pond. Or perhaps suicide appeals to us because of our familiarity with death.
No matter the reasons, my experience convinces me that an understanding of the spiritual nature of animals benefits the mental and emotional health of veterinarians and animal-loving people who anguish over the suffering of pets and wildlife. Furthermore, veterinary clients may harbor strong religious beliefs that influence their decisions, and we must show them respect and speak to them with wisdom. I hope the insights shared here provide comfort to those who live with, tend to, and love animals. Perhaps, once they learn of their beneficial qualities, some may even come to see and appreciate the simple beauty of maggots and other parts of nature we often abhor.
My goal, then, is to explore the world’s religious, spiritual, philosophical, and scientific teachings about the nonphysical makeup of animals for the highest good of animal care, the human-animal bond, and the well-being of all concerned.
Each chapter explores a different religious belief system and offers three main approaches to the material. First, each chapter begins with a description of that belief system. In order for the reader to fully comprehend the tenets of Hinduism, Judaism, shamanism, and so on, the vocabulary must first be defined. Therefore, each chapter includes some history and definitions followed by an investigation into the religion’s beliefs regarding animals. Then, throughout, I provide stories from my veterinary practice, offering further illustration of the concepts for contemplation. The third element explores the unfolding of my own spiritual growth — a concept I learned in the process — and how it changed me.
The struggle inside me first started in the 1990s and early 2000s when I practiced large- and small-animal ambulatory medicine out of a pickup truck in a rural mountain community in southwestern Colorado. Horses, llamas, alpacas, dogs, and cats were my primary patients, along with other wild and domestic flying, swimming, and crawling creatures. I drove day and night to attend to animals in beautiful places around Durango, Colorado, where the Animas River carves the landscape.1
The majority of my time spent researching spiritual teachings took place on the job in a pickup truck where the only way to learn was from audiotapes. Time off included further seeking by reading, praying, attending church services, meditating, chanting, going on a vision quest, attending retreats with a Tibetan lama and Buddhist nuns, questioning psychics and shamans, pursuing an animal communication apprenticeship, and conducting interviews with experts in numerous fields of spirituality.
During this period, I drove an average of a hundred miles or more a day. Fortunately, the scenery made that part of the job a pleasure, although the dirt routes on winding, mountainous terrain were often treacherous. The views of snow-covered peaks and enchanted valleys, tall ponderosa forests, and aspen groves soothed my stressed mind. Guardian angels held
