If you’ve ever had a highly emotional pet, you know how difficult it can be to calm your four-legged companion. However, a pet’s uncontrolled anxiety, aggression or even enthusiasm can create risks for your pet, for you and for other humans and animals.
In a recent article, we shared a method for reducing your own stress called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which involves tapping on specific acupressure points along your body with your fingertips. The very same technique may be as effective – if not more so – to treat your pet’s emotional issues, according to Joan Ranquet, an animal communicator who frequently uses EFT in her work.
Ranquet, who has written several books about animal communication and is the founder of “Communication with All Life University,” an animal communication certification program, says that “animals respond to EFT faster than people do. They don’t question whether it works.”
Ranquet points out that although your pet’s issues may have internal causes, animals also pick up on – and respond to – any stress you bring home. “An animal’s instinct is always to be perceiving what we’re feeling. If we are freaked out, they aren’t feeling safe. And if they aren’t safe, they’re going to do crazy stuff.”
Your pet’s behavior may, in turn, leave you with your own set of emotions, which your pet can sense. “A lot of times, I’ll see a situation where there’s a continued pattern,” she says. “The human and the animal both may be feeling anxiety, but they may be feeling it for different reasons.”
For this reason, Ranquet recommends tapping not only on the pet, but also on the human. “Tapping helps to calm everybody down about the situation,” she explains. But, ultimately, it’s the human in the household who has to be the “adult.” “Tapping allows you to make clear and better choices,” she says.
When working with her human clients, Ranquet focuses on the feelings the person is having about the pet’s behavior. She often works by phone, talking her (human) clients through the EFT tapping sequence. Once clients have tapped on themselves, she will have them tap on their pet. The tapping points are very similar for both people and animals.
Ranquet describes one situation in which a woman contacted her because her German shepherd displayed tremendous aggression toward her new husband. “During our first session, I recommended EFT, and by the second session, both the woman and the dog were much calmer.” The woman’s husband, who had been skeptical about Ranquet’s work, finally decided to also do a session with the dog after seeing the quick results.
It’s important to realize that EFT isn’t meant to replace good pet training. “It’s an adjunct to training,” stresses Ranquet. Still, she has seen tapping work for a wide variety of issues and a range of animals. “I’ve tapped on international show animals. I also tapped on a horse who hated ponies and was terrorizing young girls who were riding their ponies. And one of my big projects is to go to shelters with my students and tap on animals that seem unadoptable,” she says. “I’ve even used EFT to calm animals when they are dying and tapped with people afterward, as well as the other animals in the household, to help them with their grief.”
You can learn more about using EFT on your pets by visiting Ranquet’s website.
