“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. Wrong nutrition, incorrect exercise, over-vaccination, environmental pollution, physical stress and emotional 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. She made me take a deeper 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 dis-ease, 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 her 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 what most people think is possible. 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 release it, heal and grow. We also have to keep in mind that many of the ‘health issues’ that we see in our animal companions are often a reflection of what is going on in our human lives.

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.

I am not a veterinarian and cannot diagnose illnesses, but I can translate for you how your animal companions are feeling and what they are experiencing, making your animal health care provider's job that much easier.

To learn more about this subject, please check out my workshops in the Events Calendar, my new cookbook "Breakfast, Dinner and Everything in Between" and my CDs on the Merchandise page.

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