An Invisible Language

Yes, animals feel. Yes, they can talk to us. So, what do they have to say?

By Juliana Roth

May 19, 2022

I carried the black-and-white film still with me as I moved throughout my twenties, sorting the artifacts of my life over ten times as I transitioned to yet another home. And another. About halfway through my decade of relocations, the framed photo went missing: Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, in a top hat, smiling with abandon at the portrait balancing on the ledge of a fireplace of him and his púca, Harvey, a 6’3’’ rabbit. To me, this moment demonstrated the greatest best friendship, a photo destined for a locket. To the community observing Elwood, he’d lost his damn mind.

Púcas, meaning ghost in Irish and in particular those spirits that incarnate a domesticated animal body, are often described with foreboding: don’t trust the animal who speaks. Yet many see the púca matching the intention of the person encountered. Some have positive experiences with a púca in whatever form they take and others…not so much. As a lifelong vegan and protector of animals, I challenge the idea that animals aren’t already imbued with their own spirit. To me, it speaks to an anthropocentrism in our thinking that would be helpful to eliminate.

As a person who wants to believe deeply in a karmic and divine balance, I do like the idea of intention mattering and that the encounter with a nonhuman animal may simply be a mirror to reflect back one’s own energetic state. I like the reverence for animals inherent to the púca myth, that we shouldn't take beings for granted just because we don’t understand their way of speaking. And, in the case of the movie Harvey, I like Elwood P. Dowd and his whimsical adherence to fantasy, his faith that what’s unseen is worthy of attention, that other modes of perception are often written off too quickly as insanity. To me, the film is ultimately about what it is to write, to create. To take one’s vision seriously. And to love all the animals around us.

***

I was also drawn to Harvey because I love the ethereal. My favorite movies always had a magical realism twist, Christmas Every Day outranking all other holiday classics because of the karmic loop Billy is trapped in. At sleepovers, I often petitioned for another rewatch of 13 Going on 30 or Freaky Friday. Perhaps my fascination at divine intervention came from the fact that my life was webbed in supernatural tales. The novel my dad wrote before he died followed a father who guides his children from the grave as a ghost. After he died, I experienced a series of my own uncanny synchronicities related to his life (his best friend, who I never met before, appeared in the literary magazine from the graduate school I’d been accepted to on the day I needed to make a decision if I’d attend, and later learned my dad had writing in the first issue. I also found the name of his protagonist scrawled on a notecard used as a bookmark for a recently purchased used book). I couldn’t help but feel that there was an otherworldly hand in these occurrences. 

I also grew up in a town with a legally haunted house and with a mom who’d been raised in a family with a funeral home business much like the one in Six Feet Under. The taboo of the afterlife was quite present in my own, especially as I visited my dad in hospitals and assisted living facilities throughout my childhood. I spent more time with the dying than most children I knew, and some adults. I worried it made me strange, tinged with something people would rather not see. The creature in the corner. The invisible full form.

***

When I was a kid, my mom and I often went on ghost tours together. At bedtime, we’d play psychic games, seeing if we could send images telepathically to each other (usually of animals). Her best friend owned a craft shop in our small town that had a ghost and liked to unscrew their light bulbs. She also gifted me with my first tarot deck in high school after I used my savings to buy Astrology for Dummies from the Barnes & Noble at the megamall outside of town. Meeting one of my mom’s old friends in L.A. as an adult, she asked if my mom still practiced energy healing. I didn’t know this part of her life, only vague stories of how she scared herself during a training session to be a licensed healer once in her youth when she identified cancer in a person she was practicing on. After the encounter, she decided to become a talk therapist instead.

When I asked her about her belief in spirits, she told me of a visit to a medium in the town over from ours, a homemaker who used her living room as an office, and the conversation she had with her ancestors who made accurate predictions about her life. It made me feel less odd, less like I’d wasted money throughout graduate school as I visited the psychics who lived next door to me in Philadelphia.

But did I really need to look for ghosts and psychics to communicate with nonhuman entities? Weren’t there experiences in the physical realm that could allow me to question the limits of my knowing and perception? As the daughter in a ghost story, I wanted to find my way out. I needed to become my own guide.

***

In the French documentary, Dans la Peau des Animaux, animal communicator Laila Del Monte journeys to a farm with dozens of rescue dogs. She explains her process to the owner, an older man. He wants to know why his favorite dog bit part of his finger off during a fight with another dog. 

Sitting between them, Del Monte closes her eyes. She taps into the frequency of the animal’s mind. Moments pass, and Del Monte shares that often the animals who enter our lives are bound to our own psychic wounds (some might call them familiars). Del Monte explains that we are in constant intuitive communication with the creatures in our lives. The reason the man felt so attached to this dog, and concerned about the aggression over all the other dogs on the farm, is they shared a history of abandonment. They were here to heal each other. And the dog was deeply remorseful. He hadn’t realized the man’s hand was in the way. He stopped fighting as soon as he felt his finger.

It’s true, the man says, laughing. That’s exactly what happened.

***

I imagine the first kick was tepid. Perhaps even a broom was used instead of a foot and it was more of a push than a shove clear across the room. But the next had force. The waters were tested and it felt good. Pap. The mud clad toe of the brown leather boot made contact with the hind leg of the puppy, a mutt who knew he was a mutt and stayed hidden in the corner of the barn until a wide shield of light opened on the hay scattered floor to reveal the shadow of two human bodies. They were new. These two were here to rescue him.

We had approached a three-story house anchored to the bank of the Hudson River. A pack of dogs followed a woman who lumbered towards us as we walked up the drive. I was six. I followed my mother inside, pleased that I’d finally won and we would get a dog, but I was unsure of this strange woman, her assertiveness, the way she mastered the dogs with a breed of harshness, unaffectedness. I didn’t want to be a master. I wanted to be a companion. 

When I first met him, he was hiding. He’d been named Buster, and was under the table when we went inside the barn, away from all the others. I followed my impulse to get down on my hands and knees and crawl over to him, to be like him. Later, I’d follow him around our house like this — a mime, a shadow. I’d drink from a bowl on the ground next to his and sleep on his bed at night. But at first, he edged away from me. I loosened in my body, confident, assured that my outstretched finger and steady gaze — not at him but near him — would subdue the fear and win his affection.

He was ours.

More and more, I was home alone: my dad in the hospital, my mom at work, my brother off at college. I hoped the time I spent with Buster would heal him somehow, make it so we didn’t need to lock him up when my friends came over. But he didn’t improve. He was scared of everyone. My mom decided to try a pet psychic who spoke to us over the phone. She said he was scared. Yes, he’s been abused. He doesn’t like when men hold brooms or vacuums. He is very smart. He doesn’t like when we scatter. He doesn’t want anyone to leave the house.

My best friend tried the psychic with her dog, a nervous poodle. The psychic said he could read and he wanted everyone to make it easier for him to do so. Over a decade later, he still sits on the laps of anyone using the computer and props his chin up on the desk, eyes fixed on the screen. 

***

Del Monte says each species has a different way of thinking, a totally distinct energy when she taps in. She says crows see things in very organized images, one after the other, an assembly line of steps. For apes, it’s like being at the opera. Their emotions are in a heightened state, most of what they think about is social order and they are deeply affected by their past. An employee at the primate sanctuary seems to want to test her, asking if she can describe the employees from the point of view of the apes. As Del Monte rattles off their names, their personalities, his face bursts open with a smile. That’s right! That’s spot on. 

Earlier in the film, a man with two cows wants to know how to get closer to them. A horse jockey says he’s never felt so attached to an animal before and fear over losing their connection is making them both have performance anxiety. As she works, more and more the human-animal love becomes clear. The lines continue to blur.

For a world with over 800 million companion animals, mostly cats and dogs, I wonder why the idea of animal personhood leads to such a need for proof. Sure, food is personal, and cultural, and rooted in systems of oppression, but the question of animals feeling pain, of being worthy of protection, feels as though its largely been answered. The same year we adopted Buster, I refused to eat meat again. I taped a PETA poster to my bedroom door that read: I AM NOT A NUGGET. My six-year-old brain marked it as unfair. As I study Del Monte at work — her eyes loosely shut, her serene posture — I think again of Elwood’s smirk.

***

Are all of the 800 million pet-owning people living with familiars unbeknownst to them? 

While living in a small studio basement apartment one summer in Michigan, I was reading Kelly Link’s story “Catskin.” Just as I lost myself in the images of the cats leaving the witch's house, a cat appeared at my window and pawed their way inside. A week later, I found a stray cat outside a dorm for a summer camp I worked for. The encounters reminded me how, as a child, I was often asked by neighbors to find missing animals on our block.

“You were always doing that,” my mom remembers as I told her about the cats finding their way into my life. “Whenever the cats got out of our house, you found them. And when Candy [my grandma’s dog] ran away, you could always find her first. You got so much poison ivy growing up, running through the woods after her, you always knew exactly where she would be. Animals have always loved you, and you loved them.” 

Years before I decided to finally adopt a dog, I began to name the dogs, no matter the breed, in my short stories and novel manuscripts Ziggy. Though I worked at a vet in high school and volunteered at a Philadelphia animal refuge in between my graduate school classes, I never came across a dog with the name before, though I’d later learn it was common.

After I finished school, I told a friend from the program that I thought I wanted to adopt a dog. For months, I looked in shelters, responded to ads, hoping to find the right one. Nearing giving up, my friend and I went to a shelter, and she yelled over at me, “It’s Ziggy!” and there was the dog from all those years of writing, a light brown Chiweenie instantly recognizable to us both, a little white heart on his back and the name written in sharpie on a sign underneath his snout. I’d later learn he was sent to a shelter within a mile from my graduate school the month I left, when I started my search, until recently being moved just around the corner from me.

Adopting him during the final months of a long distance relationship, what I valued most about Ziggy was his assertion that he belonged everywhere I went. He’s taught me that it is not asking too much for closeness in a relationship, only asking the wrong people.

Ziggy’s adoption wasn’t the first time I had a serendipitous encounter with animals. During a month-long backpacking trip in the La Sal mountains when I decided I didn’t want to go to college after all, I came close to giving up on the journey, my body already at its limit after the first 50 miles. I was unsure if I could endure 50 more. That night as I gathered kindling, a field mouse missing one eye came and sat on my leg. I couldn’t move, just sat with them until they eventually scurried off. As I watched them leave, I felt peace. I knew I had to stay. 

Throughout the past few years, I’ve had even more intense animal encounters: chickens appearing on my path in a hike as I worked on a story about a chicken farm, a lost parrot who found their way to my doorstep, a pet goat approaching me during a walk on Yule, my student who accidentally called me Professor Fox, the dog who “works” at the neighborhood coffeeshop, or even the simple pleasure of watching Ziggy bond with our second family dog, Emma, before she died. I realize the power of embracing my everyday encounters with animal life.

***

The night my dad died, a black bear snuck down from the mountain in our town and into a tree across the street from my best friend’s front door. As I was chatting with her on AIM, she talked me through my heartbreak, apologizing that she was delayed in answering because of the creature outside her window. A crowd had gathered. They petitioned to pardon the bear, luring them out with food instead of the tranquilizer gun.

Despite my panicked grief, I felt a bit of relief. The truth was I felt the most at ease with animals and the safest with humans who loved them. Over a year and a half ago, a former roommate assigned me to read Women Who Run With Wolves, a book that acknowledges the need for awakening our own instincts, our own animal selves, and I quickly blasted my discovery to my small presence on social media, encouraging everyone to read the book as fast as they could. A few days later, I deleted my account for the second time, realizing I actually wanted to protect my fascinations, my invisible language, that in fact I didn’t actually trust everyone who had access to my life to be careful and precious with the small seeds that made my heart sing.

Perhaps this is why I’ve always felt safer with my animal companions and wanted to protect the nonhuman animals who I thought could not speak for themselves. But of course they did, through sound. Through their own subtle energies. Animals are always finding their own way.

***

During the heart of the COVID lockdown, I started writing poems about animals appearing on talk shows. I got lost in unnerving videos of lion appearances on Johnny Carson, cultural criticism of Dr. Doolittle, clips of Sonya Fitzpatrick, a pet psychic of early 2000s fame, telling Steve Harvey his dog wanted the whole house to have beige carpet and Ryan Seacrest to spend more time at home with his lab. I found comfort with the ease in which these pop figures made themselves vulnerable by bringing their beloved pets onstage, that they performed public evidence of what many seem to already know: yes, animals feel. Yes, they can talk to us. So, what do they have to say?

Juliana Roth is a writer, filmmaker, educator, and performer. She’s worked for the World Animal Awareness Society, the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, Vegan Outreach, and the Ecology Center and formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine and out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains. She now teaches writing at NYU and the School of the New York Times. Learn more at julianaroth.com