Dear Suzan,
I have just listened to your podcast (re: 30 April 2024) about a dog who passed. You said he chose his life and people before he came here.
I have 6 dogs and 2 of 11 cats remaining, and I’ve been a volunteer animal welfare worker since 2010, so I’ve helped and met many animals over the years and have seen some heartbreaking, inhumane things that have been done to animals.
I have a very important question based on your podcast: Why would animals choose humans who abuse them and torture them? I don’t understand this.
Please could you share something about this?
Thank you so much.
Nazlee, Johannesburg, South Africa
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Dear Nazlee,
Every soul comes into this world to evolve, and all events that occur are related to that desire to evolve. Before we take a physical body, we construct a road map for how we want our learning to happen. It’s a general map and subject to change.
Because people have been given free will, occurrences may not be what we planned. Someone may hurt or even kill a soul that is moving along it’s chosen path as a result of free will. We may be prevented from completing our task to evolve, or we may take a little different direction than originally planned, but we will seek opportunities to develop spiritually, emotionally, intellectually and physically. This is true for both humans and animals.
You are doing wonderful work by showing animals what human love feels like. It’s heartbreaking to think someone could hurt an animal friend. Usually, harm comes at the hands of a person who has been badly hurt themselves.
Some spiritual paths teach that the suffering we do in our current lives is karma circling back around: bad past deeds that we must pay for. Suffering we have caused others in a previous life comes around again to even things out, and to teach us what it is to be on the receiving end of cruel acts. We can be paying back these debts whether we are humans or animals. It can cause us to become either more compassionate or bitter/aggressive. We choose. Once we understand and integrate the lesson, our paths shift to the next and usually deeper lesson.
Animals who live in abusive situations do one of several things: (1) re-home themselves (have you ever found one of these animals at your door?) (2) become aggressive (and are sometimes euthanized) (3) refuse to leave their person hoping they will finally understand what they are doing.
Animal Communicators report that when there was a slaughter of dolphins in Japan, the dolphins could not be persuaded to leave that area. They said they were there to get the world’s attention on their plight and were willing to die to do it. The Cove Movie tells the story of their slaughter here.
I hope this helps.