Sonya Fitzpatrick lies on a bed surrounded by her seven cats and five dogs. Dressed in a red blouse with matching red nail polish, blue jeans, gold hoop earrings and a gold necklace, Fitzpatrick, who's inside her Conroe home that's shaded by towering pine trees, is on the phone conducting a pet psychic session.
Chris Curry
Like a cross between Dr. Doolittle and Miss Cleo, East Texan Sonya Fitzpatrick says she can talk to the animals, mind to mind.
Chris Curry
The former fashion model counsels her clients psychically from her home in Conroe, often in bed, which she shares here with a collection of furry friends.
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"I would suggest you get down on your hands and knees and walk around the furniture, darling," Fitzpatrick says in an unmistakable British accent. On a nearby nightstand is a photo of Fitzpatrick with Ellen DeGeneres at the television personality's home in the Southern California hills. Fitzpatrick's clients, who range from A-list famous people to folks who live in trailer parks, pay her $300 per half hour to descramble the thoughts and feelings of their animals.
During this particular phone consultation, Fitzpatrick is communicating with a blind dog named Max, a chow chow who keeps bumping his head into the furniture. The pet owner, instead of taking the advice of a traditional veterinarian to equip the animal with a helmet, has decided to consult with the famous pet psychic.
"Now, walk around the furniture because [the dog] will be able to pick up the pictures that you're projecting," continues the 71-year-old, English-born Fitzpatrick, a former fashion model who could still turn a few heads. "Max just said, 'I can find my food and my water dish!' He also says, 'Mum worries all of the time about me.' And now he's telling me that he loves the fact that you're all going to walk on all fours like he does!"
Fitzpatrick, the pioneer of mainstream pet psychiatry, has become a full-blown celebrity thanks to her self-proclaimed ability to telepathically communicate with dogs, cats, birds, frogs and snakes. Once the messages are decoded, she relays the information to animal owners.
Because she has become so good at accessing the "magnetic fields in which animals project their thoughts and feelings," just about all of her consultations are by phone only. She says that even without a photograph of a pet, she can decipher what's going on inside of an animal's mind in order to further bond animals with their "human companions."
Fitzpatrick's so-called gift isn't limited to household dogs and cats. Unsolved Mysteries once hired her to talk to an ailing racehorse, and Fitzpatrick's diagnosis turned out to be spot-on. More recently, a circus had her communicate with an unhappy tiger, who told her that he would rather enjoy the last few months of his life than undergo chemotherapy. (The tiger was left alone and died four months later.) Fitzpatrick claims that she can communicate with bears and autistic children too.
Fitzpatrick, who believes that traditional veterinary medicine is the predominant cause of animal disease, asserts that she can also talk to dead animals. Many of her clients ("mostly women and gay men," says Fitzpatrick) as well as callers to her Sirius XM radio show, which challenges Howard Stern in terms of phone traffic, seek out Fitzpatrick to talk to animals that have crossed to the other side.
There's no doubting that Fitzpatrick, who says that she has "never met an animal that isn't spiritual," is cognizant of animal behavior. However, in a women-dominated field that didn't professionally exist until two decades ago, it remains impossible to prove if she (or anyone else, for that matter) can really figure out what animals are thinking and feeling.
Not surprisingly, college-educated veterinarians are quick to point out that pet psychiatry is a pseudoscience that's on a par with a "party trick," according to one Houston-area veterinarian.
However, at least one traditional animal doctor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences—one of North America's most renowned educational, medical and research institutions for animal medicine—thinks that "maybe there is some truth" to animal communication.
Fitzpatrick, seated at the dining room table of her family's English farmhouse, stares at her friends that have been cooked and served on a dinner plate. She's 14 and her farmer father has slaughtered and prepared a Christmas Day feast that includes the three geese that Sonya had telepathically spoken with on a daily basis.
Decades after the Association for Research and Enlightenment, founded by the psychic Edgar Cayce, claimed it discovered the possibility of human-animal communications, Fitzpatrick says she was naturally talking to animals. She grew up surrounded by free-range chickens, pigs and ducks in the English countryside, where her father and uncle owned farms. Fitzpatrick grew especially close to Daisy, Primrose and Buttercup, a trio of fowl she would tell to show up outside of the school gate so that they could walk her home from class.
Because of Fitzpatrick's rural upbringing, she bore witness to all sorts of farm killings. When this happened, she could feel the pains that the animals were suffering. To this day, when she's performing a psychic reading for a pet that has died, she'll feel its physical discomfort.
"If they couldn't walk, I would feel that, too," says Fitzpatrick, who extends her arms to demonstrate that, during pet psychic sessions, they model an animal's front legs while her legs are a pet's hindquarters. "I'll feel a discomfort in my abdomen area if they had a problem with the stomach. If they had a nail cut too short, I would feel discomfort in my nail. I use every part of my body, really.
