A whisperer is a person who understands and can communicate with dogs and cats. They can get to the bottom of and reverse behavior or training problems. They can spot problems and give tips as what to do to solve them. As far as I know they don’t actually “talk” using words but by using energy and mood.
A Cat Whisperer in Action
A friend of ours had two cats, after one of them died the other started acting strangely. I think it wasn’t eating, didn’t play and very rarely came out from under the bed.
She told me that she knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who could communicate with animals. She called this person who set up a time to call back and have a session. You read that correctly, this was going to be done over the phone! I don’t believe the cat had to even be in the same room but it had to be nearby.
If you don’t have a cat or dog you might be wondering why someone would go to all this trouble. If you do have a pet or have ever had one, you know why instinctively. These animals love, trust and depend on you. If you see that something is amiss you do everything in your power to correct it. Which is what my friend did, to the point of doing something others might conceive as somewhat crazy.
My friend had told the “cat whisperer” (I don’t believe she called herself that) the problem but not in detail. During the session my friend asked the whisperer questions who in turn somehow asked the cat. The cat answered and the whisperer translated the answer for my friend. The whisperer mentioned things that she had no knowledge about. Things like the layout of the apartment or that another cat had recently died. My friend and her cat “talked” back and forth.
The really amazing part was the cat immediately changed its behavior. He was calmer and less stressed. Shortly thereafter the problem resolved completely. I guess there are some things that just can’t easily be explained.
Dog Whisperer
Our doggies have always had been headstrong and we have always been “softies”. We have often said we could make a lapdog out of an Irish Wolfhound or a Great Dane. Which, of course, is why we never owned a large or even medium sized dog. We stayed with small dogs like West Highland White Terriers or Scotties. Our way of training dogs was if they didn’t do what we wanted, we told them to do whatever they were doing. If they went crazy when someone was at the door we would pick them up before opening the door. Try doing something like that with a Great Dane.
Okay, we love our dogs but we have never been competent trainers. I wanted to change that with our present dog. I was actually able to train him to give me a “high five” and sometimes he even sits when we tell him to. Big achievements. But we still pick him up so he doesn’t go crazy when someone is at the front door. Win some, lose some.
People Whisperers
Thinking about it, I think most, okay, all of our dogs have been “people whisperers”. They look at you with a mesmerizing look and puppy dog eyes. They repeat “food, food, food, hunger, hunger, hunger” until we look at the clock and say “Oh, are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”. More than once our dogs have gotten dinner twice in one day with that.
Yes, they can talk to us and even train us. Just so you know that we are not completely trainable. None of our dogs have ever been able to train us to feed them from the table.
One dog that we dog-sat trained us to hear car horns. Every time someone would blow their horn the dog would bark. You have no idea how many times a day people blow their horns. Many years after the dog was back with his owners we still heard every horn blown. Afterwards we always expected to hear barking.
Home Alone
Most dogs don’t like it when you leave them home alone. Some of our dogs yelled at us when we left, others tried to sneak out with us. Some gave us the cold shoulder when we finally came back home. They all ended up people whispering us in some way or another.
One dog we had was a very competent people whisperer. He taught us many tricks and he told us what he thought of our time management. This dog didn’t seem to mind when we left him home. He would just shrug and say “Oh, okay.” When we came home he was just so happy to see us. Perfect dog manners. Or so we thought. But we must have left him home one too many times. That famous last straw, the one that broke the human’s back. He decided it was time to do something about his people’s behavioral problem.
When we came back home and went into the office we thought something was askew. But what? Then we saw it. Someone had jumped on Ben’s chair and gotten on his desk then tinkled on his agenda. There were other things on his desk, like bills, pictures and his computer but only his agenda was wet. Who could possibly have done this? We looked down at the dog who was smirking back at us. Someone was not amused with our time management and told us so. We had been “people whispered”.
I guess he thought us not pushing our chairs under the desk was just a blatant invitation. From that moment on we always pushed in our chairs. An unconventional way of dealing with your people but correcting behavioral issues and training are an important part of a dog’s life.
-
-