“Good health care and illness prevention are essential to the guardianship of another living being.” Claudia Hehr

Health is the natural state of every being and our bodies are constantly striving to keep or achieve this state. Dis-ease, or the state of no ease is not something that just happens to us or our animal companions. Nutrition, exercise, over-vaccination, environmental pollution, and stress can all have an impact on how well our bodies maintain our natural state of being, 'health'.

Even with the right exercise and nutrition, our bodies - and of course those of our animal friends - can still develop dis-eases. This always serves as a wake-up call that we need to take a deeper look at what we are doing and how we are doing it. For example, in my childhood I was exposed to extreme stress and this stress followed me into my adult life. I didn't know how to cope with it until Hera, one of my wonderful animal companions, was diagnosed with Addison's dis-ease. This dis-ease affects the adrenal gland - a gland that helps your body to cope with stress -- and it can turn deadly if your body goes into addisonian shock. Hera developed this dis-ease to help me and made me take a look at my own life and inspired me to make some changes. Every day, I thank Hera for helping me see the warning signals so that I did not develop a disease, or die at a young age. Of course, this dis-ease was also a stepping stone for Hera since it helped her to develop patience, one of her goals in life.

It is easy to just put a name on a dis-ease, but to overcome it, and learn from it, we need to find out why the dis-ease developed in the first place.
Our animal companions can help us achieve this. We need to see our animal friends as very intelligent and sensitive beings with knowledge that goes far beyond our own. If we talk to our animal friends, we might find that they have some insight about why certain things are happening. They are trying to teach us, and therefore to help us grow, or heal. In the same way, our animal companions might have gone through some emotional trauma of their own, and need our help to heal and grow.

In my book, “If Only Animals Could Talk...”, there are many examples of life lessons like these. Growth almost always occurs when we are challenged in one way or another; when anything goes wrong, we always have to look deeper.