By M.V. Moorhead
“Did you ever look at her and wonder what she was thinking?”
A friend of mine used to ask me this about my Chihuahua Lily, with whom he was infatuated. And the answer, always, was yes.
Lily’s face is so soulful that I have no doubt that all sorts of deep thoughts pass through it, and I have often wondered, staring into her bright, reflective eyes, what she was thinking.
If I really wanted to know, I suppose I would take her to see Terri Wallace on Saturday, Nov. 19, at Woofstock at Tumbleweed Park in Chandler.
Wallace will be giving people a clue about what’s on their pets’ minds at the event from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
“I interpret the language of different species of animals,” explains Wallace.
“Cats, dogs, birds, rabbits,” although her abilities extend, she says, to “Plants, insects and people.” She refers to herself, variously, as an interspecies communicator, an animal communicator or, simply, a pet psychic.
Along with her day job at Acura of Tempe, Wallace freelances at interspecies communication.
The commonest reasons for which people hire her, she says, are “behavioral or medical issues, or what we call the transitioning process, the death and dying process.”
Thus Wallace will also pass messages between people and their departed pets.
“Sometimes people will feel guilty about behavior before the animal died, or they put them down and they weren’t sure it was the right thing to do. Stuff like that.”
At Woofstock, Chandler’s family-friendly free-admission event for dog lovers on Nov. 19, pet owners can line up “and I do 10-minute sessions with them and their pets. Or they can put their names down and come back.”
Wallace, who has lived in Tennessee, Florida, Illinois and Maryland as well as Arizona, has been practicing animal communication professionally since she was in her early thirties.
But she says she’s been aware of her rapport with animals “Pretty much my whole life. My earliest memory of it was when I was about five and I was walking to school. There were three sparrows and a butterfly and a bee that were always hanging out with me. For me, it was just normal. I always think of animal language as my first language and human language as my second language.”
Asked what she means by animal language, Wallace has a hard time defining it precisely.
“Some of them have different accents, or tones,” she says.
“Sometimes I just know what they’re saying. The biggest thing is, the other being wants to have a conversation. If the other being doesn’t want to have a conversation, I can’t make them.”
Insects, for instance, are much concerned about environmental imbalance, says Wallace. “Everything is out of whack,” says Wallace.
“Like the pollinators. If they ever stopped pollinating, there wouldn’t be enough oxygen, or food. What it’s doing is it’s hurting us. A lot of people just don’t think it’s going to happen, or not in their lifetime, so they don’t worry about it.”
So what was the most unusual conversation she ever had with animal?
Wallace chuckles. “With a snake,” she says.
“I’m not really fond of them,” she explains. “I have a healthy respect, but for whatever reason they haven’t been my favorite. But I had been helping my parents out, my mom had been having some health issues and she has two goldfish and koi ponds back east, and in the winter they put netting over them to keep leaves and stuff out.” One day, Wallace recalls, she saw a five- or six-foot black snake badly entangled in this netting.
“My mom wanted me to just kill it, but that’s not what I believe in. So I said to it—it was a female—I said to her, ‘I will be happy to help you out of this, but I don’t want you to bite me. So Just keep your head down.’”
While cutting the reptile free, Wallace says, she could feel that it trusted her.
“After that, she came up onto the patio and curled up. So I took her to another pond in the back, and said ‘don’t come back, because if she sees you she’ll kill you.’”
For details on Woofstock, go to chandlerazgov.
For more information on Terri Wallace, her practice and her foundation, go to earthhealing4animals.com.
