Intuitive Interspecies Communication: An introductory study

Amid increasing recognition of the natural, or more-than-human world, in co-constituting subjectivities, knowledge and pedagogies, we ask the question: why are more humans not ‘speaking’ with, and listening to, animals directly? Or, perhaps, more precisely, why are more people not admitting they do? Since the 1970s, intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) – animal communication in popular terms – has gained increasing recognition as a way to understand animals’ perspectives, health issues, and to provide vital information to animal owners to help resolve behavioural and other complex problems that cannot be easily addressed using conventional diagnostic tools and methods. IIC involves the sending and receiving of communications shared between humans and other animals, without the need for proximal visual, auditory or other cues humans normally associate with communication, and using mental, emotional, and embodied dimensions. This form of intuitive communication can occur not only when humans are in close physical proximity and mutually visible with other animals, but also from remote locations (Barrett et al., under review). We present a brief overview of the animal communication as a practice, then, using discourse analysis and critical studies in subjectivity, we examine participants’ responses to direct communicative engagements with non-human animals in the context of a 2-day animal communication workshop. We identify how engagement with intuitive communication between humans and animals can simultaneously provoke and support a promising reconsideration of human and animal subjectivities. This study has significant implications not only for human-animal relations generally, but also for multi-species methods and intercultural reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.