This week on The Talk Tracks, Ky sits down with Anna Breytenbach, an inter-species communicator who bridges the language divide between humans, animals, insects and plants. From tracking wild creatures across remote landscapes to helping captive lions return to the wild, Anna has been a help to organizations, vets and conservationists around the globe. Anna’s profound insights grow not only from the questions she asks other species—but from truly listening to the questions they ask us.From elephants to insects, Anna reveals how deeply attuned animals are to the human condition—and how many express concern that we’ve lost our way. This conversation explores what it means to truly listen across species lines, and what we might remember—about ourselves, and the Earth—if we did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Anna Breytenbach and what is interspecies telepathic communication?
Well, hi everybody, this is Anna Breitenbach, and I'm delighted to be here to share a little bit today about the field of intuitive interspecies communication, which might sound like a mouthful, like most words do, perhaps more commonly known in the world as telepathic animal communication. Although it does actually literally apply to all species, not just the more than human animals.
But we humans come to the party mostly by connecting with other animals and relearning and remembering these skills that are actually our intuition. It's actually part of the blueprint of our brain and how we are designed. And nonetheless, when I hacked upon this about 25 years ago, it was a complete surprise to my logical left brain.
I was living and working in Silicon Valley at the time, fully into the mental IT world. And I was finding ways to satisfy my love for nature and animals through volunteering in conservation education programs. And that was all still quite worldly and orientated around nature. activism and education and volunteering at wildlife shelters and becoming a big cat handler and the like.
But when I started doing my tracking training with the Wilderness Awareness School, based out of Washington State, I started to have experiences I couldn't explain. Because I grew up in my native South Africa and I didn't have a clue what the North American animals were, much less what their feet or their footprints would look like.
So the perfect track in dried mud was still completely mysterious to me. And luckily through the mentoring model that they employed they weren't there just to tell us how to learn to identify certain tracks but rather to help us see through native eyes or become deeply connected and to feel what was going on.
And I began getting spontaneous information that would later prove to be true in ways that my mind had no involvement with. It was not a rational or thoughtful process or anything at all. So I thought one of two things is happening. Either I'm just going completely crazy and hallucinating, or there's something to this I need to investigate. I did the latter.
I came across the work of Rupert Sheldrake and the entire field of quantum physics and new physics. And in the US, there are hundreds of teachers of animal communication. I carefully chose to embark on studies through the Assisi International Animal Institute because of their three-pronged approach, which was...
looking very deeply into the physics of it, but also engendering and living from that place of the more Buddhist principles of compassion and reverence for all life. And the third angle in our research was all around the original peoples and how natural this was for them and the ways they used to live and move with their more-than-human kin on the earth.
So over the next couple of years, in between my day job, I used my grand total of 10 vacation days a year to do various courses to advancing levels and did a whole bunch of case studies to get coaching around that and to pursue certification. In 2002, I moved back to South Africa and began offering workshops and consultations.
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Chapter 2: How does Anna define and experience telepathy with animals?
Immediately, I got a very brief mental flash of a bald eagle flying through the sky and then the upper part of a man's arm. And I sort of shook my head, rubbed my eyes and asked again. Nothing, just deafening silence. Embarrassed, I wrote it down.
I didn't want to write it down and get a prorating from my mentors for such rubbish, but I wrote it down and gave feedback to the lady who burst into tears. Apparently her young husband had died a year before in a car crash and he had had a tattoo of a bald eagle's head on his bicep.
And that was the dog showing me that, of course, who he was missing was the other man in his life, by those unique identifiers. And after that, I thought, goodness me, okay, I'm just going to trust. And I don't always get it right. It's a matter of fine-tuning and practice. And if I don't understand it, that doesn't matter.
A lot of this work, quite frankly, is work on self and continuing to get my ego out of the way, my desire to know, my attachment to the outcome, my hoped-for answers. Which is why it's often the most difficult to connect with our own animals, because we have such a vested interest emotionally in what their answers are.
No matter what your home language is as a human, you can connect with any being, no matter how large or small, and have a fully conscious exchange. Sometimes I find it very refreshing when the animals ask me some questions also, or give retorts to things that I'm saying, and that's when I know it really isn't a live communication. There are two parties in it.
Perhaps one could just say essence to essence, and in that moment you are deeply related and you are knowing each other. This is not just doing a psychic reading or remote viewing.
This is so powerfully emotional. just thinking of how beings can merge and connect across species. And I wonder, when you've had animals ask you questions, what are the type of things they inquire about?
Well, there's kind of the good, bad and the ugly, you know, on the emotional continuum, let's say. So sometimes I get asked questions that are quite humorous, and sometimes, a lot of the time, given the nature of my work, I'm asked questions to which there is no positive answer. Like, you know, can you help us? Can you open up the enclosure and let us run free?
Can you stop my children being hunted and slaughtered for sports? Because they know that I can deeply hear them with empathy. And they want to know, can things change in whatever their setup is? Will the ecotourism business where the animals are, will they prioritize the animals' welfare? in their management decisions.
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Chapter 3: What challenges and doubts did Anna face early in her telepathic journey?
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I mean, I would never think about explaining to an animal why we rearrange and like cut up the food we eat. Huh, it's cool. I want to talk about being open to this sort of communication. You know, I hear often from communication regulation partners who work with non-speakers that if you want to hear them back or the times they have received telepathy back from them, they were completely empty.
They didn't have an agenda. They weren't attaching their own words or ideas or thoughts to it. And they really had to be totally tuned in to them yet empty. And I'm just wondering if you can comment on that from your point of view with your work.
It's so, so important to be as empty as possible, which is another reflection of the fact that this is not a superpower or some mystical skill that one goes to a mystery school to attain and achieve. And I've been facilitating workshops on that now for over 20 years, and it really is just a remembering journey. And we need to be still and just get out of the way.
And when spontaneous communications happen on the incoming, it's often when we are in that state. We may be wandering around a bit of an alpha brainwave state. We're a bit more calm and open, and then we perceive things that are always there, but just we perceive them.
And when we want to be the one to initiate the conversation, we need to intentionally get ourselves into that state of mind, which is not a disembodied state. you know, high spiritual state where you're about to vibrate off the planet. It really is about sitting still and quiet, including having an awareness of the sounds around you.
I like to close my eyes so that I minimize mental distraction from what I'm seeing around me. And watching my natural breathing with him is a lovely way to become anchored and present. And I'm reminded now of a conversation I had with Lawrence Anthony, the elephant whisperer, who I know you've spoken about with your dad, actually, and in the telepathy tapes.
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Chapter 4: What kinds of questions do animals ask in telepathic communication?
And sometimes the people who approach me, even if it is the wildlife vet or the game ranger or the land manager, they do so kind of in secret. And when I give them the feedback from the animal, they find another way to present it to the team who's making decisions. And I understand all of that. I've got compassion for that. In my early days, I was also very shy of it.
But it is such a shame that often the animal's truth gets diluted or even not conveyed because the human through whose mouth it has to go to other humans is afraid of looking stupid or admitting that they might believe in these more, you know, seen to be esoteric topics.
I would imagine, though, that the reason that you keep getting sought out is because what you're coming back with bears out in some way to be true. Can you talk about that? Is what you're saying meaningful enough to them that they are believing in the animal telepathy?
Many times the people I work with in the wildlife space do come back and ask me to help with other animals in the future because they have seen it borne out in practice. They've seen a change in the animal's behavior. Or a classic example of what often happens is an injured animal, an injured wild animal, an injured seal who's...
Out on the rocks and the tide is coming in and too freaked out to be captured. When understanding, and if that seal does want medical assistance, it relaxes and allows people with the cage to come close enough and they will walk into the cage. So when people see back in situ, they see things playing out and animals' behavior change, then they think, wait a minute, there's a lot going on here.
One of the big obstacles for people, even the so-called believers, one of the big obstacles,
to them using this more regularly is that when they see an animal changing behavior per the suggestions in the telepathic consultation they have to confront the fact that that means the elephant is a fully self-aware sentient being capable of choices capable of curtailing their behavior or their patterns and capable of cooperating with the people, you know.
And that's a big thing for people to swallow. Even wildlife scientists and biologists who care a lot about the animals are still maybe not quite willing to say that these are fully sentient beings with cognitive and other skills. But yes, many organizations do come and ask again and again, particularly for the more challenging cases where they can't find an animal under their care.
They don't know if it's been hunted or killed or stuck in a snare somewhere and still alive and could be rescued or if it's fallen down a hole. There's many, many people who do come back again and again. And it's amazing to me how compassionate the animals are because often I'm working with animals in the wild who have
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Chapter 5: How should one prepare mentally to communicate telepathically with animals?
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm guessing, when you heard the telepathy tapes, it probably wasn't a shock to you, right? If someone doesn't have a voice that they're gonna find a way.
Do you think that humans who do this, like we just did an episode on Alzheimer's patients who are connecting telepathically or non-speakers who all over the world, their parents and teachers are saying are connecting telepathically. I mean, do you think they're just tapping into the same intuitive channel that you access with animals?
Many people do connect with other humans in this way. I've had friends come in my workshops who have been volunteers in coma care with hospital patients in comas from which they're not expected to emerge. And they've been able to direct even medical treatment and change the patient's environment in their ward based on their wishes.
And that then proves to make them a lot calmer with all the monitoring that's going on that can prove that in terms of their physiological and biofeedback metrics. Yes, absolutely. I consider myself lucky that I appear to be more wired to connecting with animals because I find humans quite complicated by comparison.
And in the sense of this essence-to-essence connection, I have that spontaneously flowing with, you know, the very, very closest sort of soul friends or people I'm really bonded to. It flows automatically and naturally.
But otherwise, I find it a lot to get through, to wade through all the masks that all of us humans have and the this and the that and the mind stuff to get to the real person inside. Somehow, I seem more attuned to the animals who don't have those masks. They just are themselves, and that's very readily...
available but yes I feel it is the same thing and whether it's even being to being or whether it's coming from the field that we share and that we're tuning into and what's in the field who knows and I used to be very interested in all of that and read all the books on new physics and so on and without wanting to regret anything I do kind of wish I hadn't spent so many years reading that all because that was at the expense of just experiencing it and being out there even on your own when there's no one around to laugh at you
or to have to tell or, you know, run the risk of looking foolish in front of whatever that means. Just being out there and having these little hellos with the bird in the garden or the worm that I'm trying to turn upright who's upside down and asking him to help me because, you know, I've got my coffee cup in the other hand and I'd rather do it one-handed.
These little moment-by-moment seeming miracles are just the fabric of living a connected life in relationship. And this experience is, I think, what it is to be fully alive where we are. Where we are, even if it's in a room in an apartment, you can bet there's a little spider or a bug somewhere.
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Chapter 6: What role does Anna’s work play in wildlife conservation and rehabilitation?
And so we went through to the laundry and she locked me in the laundry with the cat. He was traumatized, clearly feeling unwanted, in distress at having dogs nearby, didn't know what was going on. And there was no plan for her as such. But she did say she would like a name that would help her feel like she belonged. So I said, well, do you have any ideas what name you'd like?
Knowing full well that animals often don't identify with name, but she'd asked for one. I said, well, any idea what names you like? She said, yes, I'd like to be called Minky or Lear. So I wrote those down and shrugged and went back and gave feedback to her vet person who almost fainted because apparently this vet's best friend from childhood's name was Minky and she had a daughter named Leah.
So somehow this cat had known that those were the people that mattered the most to the vet and she was asking for the same name because she wanted to be that close to her. So my vet friend, she became a friend. She dropped her skepticism and became a friend. She kept the cat.
And from time to time, she'd refer very difficult cases to me and she would tell their people, look, I'm going to call in an animal communicator and I'm just letting you know. I don't say I believe in how it works. I don't know how it works. I don't want to know, but it works.
And so I really laud her courage for following the proof and following the heart of the matter, even though her mind could never really resolve how it works.
And then, just a few more questions. One thing that, when I've been talking to parents and spelling communication partners with the non-speakers and teachers, they'll say, one of the biggest elements in the telepathic bond or communication is trust. Not just trusting them, that they're competent and they're in there,
Often, I think so many non-speaking individuals deal with the same discrimination as animals do, right? People might not think you're in there and that you're cognizant of your surroundings. So trusting that they are in there, but also trusting yourself.
And I'm just wondering if you would say the same, like how important is trust to this ability to connect telepathically or energetically with another being?
Trust is super important in both directions. Well, in the sense of for us to communicate effectively and get over the inner skeptic, we do need to trust ourselves and give ourselves a break. Just say we're trying our best, but to trust ourselves, to try our best, to trust that there is a sentience on the other side of it. And I must say the animals have to trust us as well. They really do.
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Chapter 7: How do organizations and individuals respond to animal telepathic consultations?
Let's say someone's coming in to talk with, you know, have a communication connection with a non-speaking person or with an animal because they're going to record it and then be all like, look at me on social media. The animal's going to pick that up and not trust them and not open up. We need to be absolutely clean energetically.
I've had a personal experience where I fell out of trust and the animal's behavior changed immediately right in front of me. I had been working in the wilds of Botswana and had fallen feverish and very ill in a way that couldn't be understood and was dangerous. So I was waiting to be medically evacuated by a small bush plane that was going to be sent a couple of hours later.
So I was sitting on a chair by the cold fire pit of the morning. Everyone else had gone off on their activities and just the camp cook and assistant were in the background. And a large bull elephant who was sauntering by, feeding, you know, a good sort of 200 feet away, he saw me sitting there, picked up on how dejected I was feeling and sort of backtracked and came towards me.
And elephants can display what's called displacement behavior, where they'll pretend to be casually doing something ordinary, but they're just trying to get close to you to give you a slap or to push you out of what they might consider to be their territory or they might see you as a threat.
I didn't feel like I could come across as a threat because I was so weak and so sick and just in awe of this elephant. You know, nonetheless, who knows what trauma they had. They are refugees from neighboring countries where they've been persecuted and hunted and just horrible crimes against them. So he was sort of slowly coming towards me, not too directly, feeding the trees along the way.
And when he came close enough for it to be a possible concern, my training kicked in. And I was like, well, you know, this could be displacement behavior, so best I get up and move. So I got up, left the chair there, and I moved back to stand behind a dead snag that was twice my height, which would have taken the elephant up to about his height.
And I just stood behind there, just to create a bit of a safe barrier, but still stay, you know, on the scene. And he gently came closer, a lot more gently than he had been browsing, just gently, just sort of leaning in a little. And it felt to me like he was really concerned.
I'd been sitting there crying at my distress at having to leave, and that really felt this compassion and this care for me. And from the other side of this dead tree trunk, he slowly left his trunk to reach out towards me to have a bit of a sniff. And I caved in. My mind said, this could go south really quickly if he's up to something else or even just move suddenly.
Then it could be injurious or fatal to me, which I don't really mind, but that's going to get the staff into trouble and the operator will lose their license and, and, and. And this whole sort of house of cards, this whole dominoes of consequences happened in my mind. And so I stepped even further back just four paces so that I was then under the shelter of my tent. He got so upset with me.
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Chapter 8: How do animals perceive humans and what emotions do they hold towards us?
The workshops that I have run over the years are less about teaching and more about helping remember that folks can practice with this. And like I've alluded to, most of the work is actually getting out of our own way. The only online course I do have available I did with a colleague is called For the Love of Animals. And it's six modules, self-paced.
One module is the telepathic connection technique, but the other are all around the necessary work for clarity and precision and effectiveness, which is getting out of our own way, including our emotional responses and the meaning we make and so on.
For those who are considering becoming practitioners or who want to attend weekend workshops, I can highly recommend the website of Penelope Smith, who is regarded as the grandmother of interspecies communication. Her website is animaltalk.net, and she has there on her website a very large database. of professional animal communicators who have subscribed to a code of ethics she devised in 1990.
A very beautiful code of ethics that gives the sovereignty and the intelligence credit to the animals as well. So folks who are on her database have subscribed to that code of ethics and there you can find a consultant and or an animal communication teacher around the world. There's a lot of US resources there as well. And, yeah, just again, I encourage people to play with this possibility.
It just makes for such beautiful encounters with all the beings who share the space with us.
Yeah. And then the final wrap-up question, you know, when you think about maybe the deepest truths you've uncovered by being silent and still and communicating by all the different, you know, conscious beings and entities in this world, what are those truths, those singular truths?
It seems to me that the non-humans have kind of got it nailed when it comes down to the enduring truths, not because they sit there and meditate in the lotus position on a high concert, but because they are living lives of presence. I think presence with a capital P is what any animal is. They're fully where they are, inhabiting their bodies and available to the moment.
Another great truth is actually truth, or shall we say authenticity. To be authentic is not an issue for them. They're not lying and pretending or trying to figure out who they are, they're just authentic. And that comes without any judgment of where any being is on their path or on their development. There are actually no goals. There's just being, and can we be real?
Can we be real to where and who we are now? So these qualities of authenticity and presence. Another truth that's often uncomfortable for people that I have learned myself from the animals as well is that your physical death is not an end to everything. It's not a big disaster. It's simply a transition in the state of being.
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