Music For Animals

Do you love your animal companions and sometimes wish you could better understand what they are feeling or thinking? Do you have questions about their behavior, health or emotional state?

People with these types of questions often consult an Animal Communicator.

Through the simple processes of concentration and love, Kim Ogden-Avrutik, Dr.P.H. uses her intuitive ability to pose your questions or concerns to the animal. She will hear what the animal is saying, feel what the animal is feeling, or see what the animal is seeing.

Dr. Kim then discusses this response with the human companion. Keeping in mind that animals are spiritual beings, just as we are, they often enjoy sharing their insights, wisdom, concerns or viewpoints with us. With this in mind, sessions may cover diverse subjects, including:

Learning if your animal is happy

Resolving behavior problems including litterbox & housetraining mishaps

Overcoming multiple animal household concerns

Discovering how you & your animal can help each other on this life-path

Helping animals deal with travel or a move

Dr. Kim has helped animals and their human companions throughout the world. Species communicated with have included, but not been limited to the following: cats, dogs, horses, rabbits, birds, fish, and lizards. All creatures including those in the human species can benefit from good, honest, wholesome, non-judgmental communication.

Dr. Kim’s book Ask the Animals: Life Lessons Learned as an Animal Communicator is published by Lantern Books.

Check out Dr. Kim’s active workshop and lecture schedule.

Kim Ogden-Avrutik, Dr.P.H. Animal Communicator

I have to say that I was very disappointed after watching The Greatest American Dog – or rather, after watching about five minutes of the show.

I was hoping that someone in Hollywood had finally got it right vis-a vis creating a reality show based on animal content – dogs specifically. Once again it seems that people creating shows about animals have missed the boat by featuring the owners, not the dogs.

I was involved with a show on Lifetime with the same problem – the writers and/or producers seemed to have forgotten that a show called something like The Greatest American Dog should be about dogs – not the people who own them. Anyone tuning in to the show for the first time is doing so because they love dogs – not because they want see people they don’t care about trying to get famous through their dogs.

I also noticed that there didn’t seem to be any mutts involved – dogs or people. Beverly Hills all the way. There’s nothing wrong with Beverly Hills but I certainly think some other neighborhood might have been included. After all, it is called the Greatest American Dog and most dogs in America are mutts. The whole show was a mish-mosh of the worst of three or four other reality shows currently on air. Doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of creative originality going on in Hollywood land these days.

Why the producers didn’t go to shelters for a contestant or include rescue dogs or guide dogs or war dogs or fire dogs or just plain dogs is a mystery to me. It seems like the people who created the Greatest American Dog didn’t really like dogs at all. I wonder if any of them actually own a dog.

I personally couldn’t have cared less about the human contestants - or the hosts for that matter. They were interchangeable with every other Hollywood reality show and boring from he start. I don’t think it was their fault, I think probably it was the direction of both the actors and the show.

The whole program reeked of corporate Hollywood. Those guys should get out in the real world a tad more. If you’re going to do a program about dogs – especially the Greatest American Dog – do a show about dogs. If you would like to see a great American Dog google Skid Boot.

CBS has a chance to do some really good things for dogs and the network itself. All they need to do is get some people on the show that actually seem to like dogs as opposed hanging around the swimming pool swirling champagne. Maybe it’ll pick up, but I doubt it. It’s very hard to screw up something that is canine based, but I’m sorry to say I believe the Greatest American Dog has achieved that distinction.

It’s really too bad. The only thing missing on the Greatest American Dog were the dogs.

In the course of working with many different pet psychics and intuitive animal communicators I’ve heard some pretty amazing stories. This is one of them.

Jean Connelley was one of my favorite pet psychics. She was a little, roly poly woman who was completely in tune with animals all over the world. She told me this story. She said thought it was the craziest thing she ever heard but that it happened.

I had asked Jean to check out my dog Daphne and in the course of the conversation Jean asked me if I wanted to hear tone of the craziest thing that had happened to her as a pet psychic. I told her absolutely – pet psychics have told me some of the most fascinating stories I’ve ever heard.

She said she had gotten a call from a friend of hers. The friend was on vacation with her grandson and was calling from the side of a road in Montana be cause she knew Jean was a pet psychic and thought she might be able to help.

She told Jean that her grandson, who was about eight years old, had been standing in front of a barbed wire fence next to the road staring face to face with a large bull elk directly on other side of the fence. It had been going on for fifteen minutes. They were both just standing there staring at each other. She was getting freaked out and wanted to know if Jean could find out what was going on.

Jean said she managed to get in contact with the elk and it told her an amazing story. It said that it had a message for the little boy – and the message was from a whale.

The message was – her grandson should become a marine biologist.

Jean said as crazy as it sounded she relayed the message to her friend and asked her if she could make any sense of what the elk had told her.

Jean’s friend told her that it was incredible because three week previous to the meeting she had taken the boy to the beach in San Diego. The boy had seen whales there for the first time and had spent hours staring at them in the ocean. They then went to Sea World and the captive whales and dolphins had come up to the boy as he sat during the show and looked directly at him. She thought at the time it was very strange as did the animals keepers, but she didn’t think anything more of it – until Jean had passed along the elk’s message.

Now it seemed to make sense. The little boy had spoken about nothing but whales since he had seen them from the beach and had come into closer contact at Sea World.

I asked Jean what she thought of the situation and she said she thought it was as crazy as anyone but that was what the elk had told her.

I asked her how she managed to contact the elk and she said that pet psychics can, as best as I can describe it, tap into a world wide net like the web without computers. Apparently distance makes no difference. May the force be with you.

Jean told me that this happened several years ago and that the boy is now pursuing a career in marine Biology. Go figure.

Believe it or not, pet psychics say the darndest things.

We had just finished making a musical CD involving Koko the lowland Gorilla who communicates through sign language and were looking for a pet psychic to see if we could involve other animals in music projects.

Most people never come into contact with a pet sychic much less ending up working with one to create music with animals. I didn’t always believe in pet psychics, or any psychics for that matter. When we first started working with Dr. Ogden my opinion of any psychic, much less a pet psychic was Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Network, cold reading and 976 numbers.

After I met and worked with pet psychic Dr. Kim Ogden my beliefs and attitude regarding pet psychics and the actuality of communicating with animals did a one hundred and eighty degree turnaround.

I found pet psychic/intuitive animal communicator Dr. Kim Ogden on World News Tonight. I called her and asked her if she thought she’d be able to act as a translator to see if we could involve pets in the creative musical process. She said yes on both counts.

In the six months we worked together on the CD I experienced some amazing revelations regarding pet psychics and communicating with animals. Aside from the fact we ended up creating a CD for dogs that dogs love – and helped us create. I learned things that I would not have thought possible regarding animals and how you can really communicate with them in far deeper ways than you would think possible.

Dr. Kim introduced us to a basic course in how animals think and some of the things that can be done using the services and talents of a pet psychic.

We learned that sometimes it’s necessary to make “deals” with animals such as – if you don’t stop chewing holes in the fence we’re going to have to send you back to the shelter – we don’t want to but that’s how it will have to be unless we can come to this arrangement. It sounds strange but I saw it happen many times when working with Dr. Kim and shelter animals. I even heard of people using pet psychics to make deals with termites to get them to leave a house they had infested.

We also found out that a pet’s name is extremely important to the animal’s physical wellbeing and relationship with its family. I saw Dr. Kim communicate names change desires – and the positive results in pets from dogs to parrots to mountain lions (yes, a mountain lion).

We now use pet psychics and intuitive animal communicators for many of our projects and for any problems we have with our own pets. We even advise animal shelters and rescues to use the services of animal communicators and pet psychics to help them adopt out animals and reduce the recidivism on returns and escapes.Pet psychics are people that can be as effective as any vet or animal psychiatrist – sometimes even more effective.

So before you return an animal to the pound because you can’t get them to stop chewing or any other problem you might like to try using the services of a pet psychic to find out what the problem is before you take any precipitous actions you might regret.

Sometimes all you need is someone who speaks the language – whether it’s dog or cat or parrot or rabbit the pet psychic fills the bill. There are thousands of pet psychics all over the country who would be more than happy to help you decipher messages from your best friends no matter what they are. You don’t even have to be in the same city. Pet psychics seem to work on an internet that doesn’t need computers.

If you need some help right now get in touch with Dr. Kim Ogden. www.kimogden.com.
She’s helped a lot people and animals that I know of – maybe she can help you and your pet.

Dr. Doolittle - for real.

Laurel Canyon Music Company together with famous gorilla Koko who understands  English and communicates through the use of a variant of American Sign Language have produced a music CD.

When we first contacted the Gorilla Foundation, they told us that it was too bad, but Koko didn’t particularly like music so we shouldn’t too feel bad if she wasn’t interested. It probably wasn’t personal. After all, she didn’t like Sting or Paul McCartney so why should she like what we were doing.We used all the information about Koko that we had gotten from Dr. Patterson to create the content for our first song – Koko - Fine Animal Gorilla (Koko’s name for herself). It was a soft rap song using a mellow female voice.

Koko - Fine Animal Koko is the only gorilla in the world who communicates using a varient of ASL. The Gorilla foundation is the only organization dedicated to understanding and saving the endangered Lowland Gorilla. The Laurel Canyon Animal Company created Fine Animal orilla (Koko’s name for herself) to benefit the Gorilla Foundation. Many of the lyrics are taken from conversations with Koko. She approved all the lyrics on the CD. She enjoys the and we hope you will too. Over thirty-five musicians and vocalists contributed to

$14.95 + S+H

When we sent a rough mix to the Foundation we received a call the day after the CD arrived telling us for the first time Koko loved the music. We personally think it was because almost every word in every song was about something Koko was very familiar with. From her scary alligator plush toy, her trip to Maui, to her two favorite games – tickling and the game of chase.

Our process  was to create a song and then sent it to the Gorilla foundation so that Koko could listen and approve or disapprove each song. Since Koko understands English perfectly she knew what we were writing about and sometimes didn’t like what we were writing so we had to change lyrics several times.

Koko became our co-producer. It was really cool. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind — for real. We were communicating with another species using computers and music.

Interspecies communication.

We finished the CD – with Koko’s approval of course.

We were planning to release Koko’s CD in due time so we could prepare a publicity campaign but it didn’t work out exactly as we planned. A reporter for the San Mateo County Times called the Gorilla Foundation to check up on anything new that was happening with Koko – like I said earlier she is very famous, especially in the San Francisco area. (She was born on the 4th of July at the San Francisco Zoo.) Someone at the Foundation told the reporter about Koko’s new CD and our carefully timed publicity campaign flew right out the window. The next morning the headlines on the front page of the San Mateo County Times read

LOOK OUT BRITTANY — KOKO’S GOING POP!

The Gorilla was out of the bag – and that’s another story.

Lions and Tigers and Bears.
That was the local scuttlebutt. The guy up the hill who owned a soft drink company had his living room set up to hold large cats. Like at the zoo. He supposedly brought them home on weekends. I had almost forgotten about the whole thing when one of his company trucks rumbled past our house. It was something to behold. A brand new Dodge stretch pickup with double rear axles and what sounded like glass packs. It was totally tricked out in his company’s colors done in pearl-flaked electric metal pastels tastefully accented by three or four square yards of chrome. A large chrome-plated cage and padlock sat in the bed of the truck. It was empty.
Lions and Tigers and Bears.

Now that I had actually seen evidence of the possibility of large carnivores spending their weekends in the neighborhood, I hoped that Raymar of the canyon had his security down pat. I could just imagine our neighbors going down to their garden to pick some Walla berries and finding a Siberian tiger wallowing in the catnip, but nothing happened.
A week later we had some friends over for dinner. They were terminally trendy Melrose Avenue flatlanders not into the rusticness of Laurel Canyon.
“I don’t know how you can stay up here all the time,” said Gavin. “It’s so, so — quiet.”
“Yup,” I nodded my head.
“I mean we’ve been here for almost an hour and nothing interesting has happened.”
“Precisely. That’s why we like it up here.”
He turned and smiled smarmily, “That may be fine for you, but I need a minimum of one major bizarre occurrence a day or I’m not a happy camper. You just can’t find that here, too quiet.”
“It has its moments,” I said.
We walked out to the carport to fire up the old Weber. Gavin was going on about no matter how beautiful it was up here, it was too darn dull.
“Tell me, just for the record. Does anything ever happen up here?”
I was getting a tad tired of Gavin’s canyon knocking, good-natured as it was. I was just about to zap him with a rapier-like canyonesque retort when the canyon itself answered him — right on cue.
Lions and Tigers and Bears.
You could feel the throb of the big engine through your feet and see the glare from the chrome all the way up from Grandview. A long snout poked out from behind the Hibiscus bushes and started to make the turn. Gavin stopped in mid-sentence and stared. I stopped and stared. It was a large metal-flake blue shark’s nose. Apparently Raymar had more than one kind of truck. In addition to being tricked out, this one was built in the shape of a twenty foot bluish shark. Right behind the dorsal fin was a big chrome cage. There was a large black panther pacing back and forth in the cage. The shark finished its turn and rumbled majestically past the carport. The panther stared directly into Gavin’s eyes, curled back its lips and snarled — ten feet from his face. The carport reverberated. Then it was gone. Shark, cage and panther disappearing in a cloud of dust on their way down the hill.
Gavin turned around, his eyes as big as the panther’s. “D-D-Did you see that?”
“See what?” I was enjoying this immensely.
“The Lion!”
“Panther,” I said. I could tell that Gavin hadn’t been a cat person before this but he was now.
“Does this happen very often?”
“Just weekends and holidays.”
“Does anything else like this ever happen?””” he asked, the look of epiphnized amazement still on his face.
“You’d be surprised. Light the charcoal will you? I’m going in and marinate the chicken.”
As I walked into the kitchen Gavin yelled, “So you think there might be any places for rent around here? We have to move in September. Maybe we’ll check out some places in Laurel Canyon.”
“I know what you mean.” I could tell that Gavin hadn’t been a canyon person before, but he was now,
Lion and Tigers and Bears.
And Laurel Canyon.

We used a pet psychic in a process where she acted as a translator between us and dogs to create a musical CD that dogs liked.

I never would have been aware of this if I hadn’t started working with pet psychic Dr. Kim Ogden. It didn’t start out with the idea of helping shelters adopt out animals but came out of a musical process in which we used the talents and services of Dr. Kim.

It went like this. We gave Dr. Kim a CD of different kinds of music that she would take into shelters (and her private consultation) and play for the dogs. Then she would take notes on the dog’s responses and send them to us to use in creating our music.

We had never worked with a pet psychic before so the whole process was quite an education for us - and Dr. Kim. What relates to this article was kind of a byproduct of the musical process and the manner in which Dr. Kim communicates with animals.

The process she uses is quite simple. She asks the name of the animal and precisely what you would like to know. She then communicates with the animal and writes down the information she receives. She then gives you the paper and the discussion on what begins.

When we were writing the songs for the CD Dr. Kim literally put together focus groups of dogs (over two hundred) to test out the music genres and lyric content. She generally did this at the shelters she worked with questioning groups of from ten to twelve dogs at a time. She then would call me with the information she had gained and we in turn would use the info to write and produce the songs.

After one session I asked Dr. Kim for that week’s information. She told me that she hadn’t had a chance to test out the music because she had only talked with four dogs.

I asked her how come. She told they got into talking about other stuff.

Apparently the shelter had asked Dr. Kim to communicate with the four most difficult to adopt out animals. In the process Dr. Kim left the pieces of paper she had written the dogs comments on at the shelter and forgot about them.

Three weeks later I got a letter from the shelter thanking Dr. Kim for helping them adopt out the dogs she had spoken to. The shelter had used the information that Dr. Kim had written down and adopted the dogs out with no problem based on that information.

The dog I remember in particular was one that had been adopted three times and returned three times as incorrigible. The animal had been given to families three times. Dr. Kim learned that for whatever reason, the dog wanted to be with a single, white male. As soon as it was given to a single, white male it happily stayed adopted. The people at the shelter were amazed at how a pet psychic could make such a huge difference in how successfully their dogs were adopted. They now employ pet psychics on a regular basis to help make the adoption process far more successful than it has ever been.

When doing interviews we now advise shelters to use pet psychics to help in their adoptions and to find out more about the animals that come into their care.

We started out using a pet psychic to help us create music and ended up discovering a way to help animals find forever homes. It is a very cool thing.

Talk to your shelter about trying it out. There are pet psychics and intuitive animal communicators all over the country so finding one for your local shelter should be no problem at all

Pet psychics. You gotta love ‘em and the animals do too.

Dog That Name
(Canyon Moment #2)

“From now on, I won’t refer to people by their dog’s names. I’ll refer to people by their own names.”
We had taken a break from recording to walk the dogs. They were making so much noise we couldn’t do vocals anyway.

“It’s really strange.” I was telling Jeremiah as we walked up towards Grandview.

“What’s that?” he said craning his head to watch two blue jays going ballistic on a squirrel in a eucalyptus tree at the top of the hill.

“It’s about the dogs.”
“The dogs?”

“Yeah, the dogs — in the canyon. I never thought about it until just now when you asked me about my neighbor.”

“What does your neighbor have to do with the dogs in the canyon?”

“It just came to me. I know the names of my neighbor’s dogs better than I know the names of my neighbors. When someone asks me who that person down the street is, I say, “That’s Bartok’s owner. When I think about it, everyone up here knows everyone else by their dog’s names. If you meet someone walking their dog, the first thing both of you do is — introduce your dogs
.
“Seems reasonable to me,” Jeremiah said, “I like my animals better than most of my friends.”

“I mean really! Every morning I walk Daphne around the hill. Every morning I meet this guy walking his dog Lucy. Every morning we greet each other. I say, “Hello, Lucy.” He says, “Hello, Daphne. We talk for a while then he says, “Good bye, Daphne,” and I say, “ Good bye, Lucy.” I don’t remember his name. He doesn’t remember my name. We know our dog’s names three generations back.

“This happens all the time!” I was starting to get worked up. “I mean it’s not just Lucy! It’s Neutron, and C-dog, and Sheldon, and Wilson, and Annie, and Rosy, and E-Z, and Buck Shot, and the twins, and. . . . !” I was really getting into the metaphysical possibilities of calling people by their dog’s names, not to mention the fact I was starting to hyperventillate when a car horn brought me back to Earth.

Webster (my mostly miniature Schnauzer) chose to bring my epiphany to an abrupt end by choosing the middle of Yucca Trail as fitting and comfortable place to make his morning deposit — directly in front of a Jeep Cherokee. I grabbed Webster, collected the little speed bump he had left in the middle of the road, yelled at Jeremiah to get Daphne away from the poison oak and waved the Jeep on.

“Good thing Webster pooped when he did, you were starting to lose it with that dog name thing,” Jeremiah said as he got Daphne in tow. “I think we’ve been in the studio too long.

“Amen,” I replied, “That’s probably it. I won’t do that again. I promise.”

We were standing at the top of the hill. We watched the Cherokee turn around and head slowly back towards us.

She’s lost. I can tell by the look on her face,” I said, “She’s gonna ask for directions.”

Sure enough, the Jeep rolled to a stop. The driver leaned over, rolled down the window and asked us if we knew where a certain address was. According to the numbers, it should have been right down the street. I didn’t have a clue as to where the place was. She said she’d been up and down the street for twenty minutes and couldn’t find it. She had asked three other people and they didn’t know either. I felt sorry for her she was so upset. Sometimes up here in the canyon you never find the address.

Then I had a brainstorm!

“By any chance do these people have a dog?”

“Why yes they do.” she said.

“Would you happen to know it’s name?”

“Bandit.”

“Bingo,” I said with a smile. “Around the curve. It’s the fourth house on the left. Park right behind the black Camarro.”

She thanked me and drove off towards Bandit’s house. I turned to say something to Jeremiah but he was already headed down the hill towards the studio shaking his head and talking to the dogs. . .