Published: October 06, 2008 12:28 am      

ANIMAL PLANET: California woman “tunes into” animals.

Marla Steele admits she thought it was crazy when she first heard about pet psychics. She was a skeptic.

But things started happening that changed her mind. For the past eight years, Steele, 43, has been “tuning into” animals across the country, sharing with pet owners any pain their animals might be feeling or telling them that their deceased pet is content in its next life.

Steele was in the Town of Tonawanda Saturday as part of the grand opening for Camp Bow Wow, a new doggy daycare and camp on Grand Island Boulevard.

Born in Kansas, Steele moved to Phoenix when she was 12. She now resides in — of all places — Petaluma, in California’s Bay Area, with her husband. Steele’s pet psychic powers have landed her numerous appearances on Animal Planet TV, and she also has her own radio show in California.

“I think that there’s a bigger spiritual connection that we have with our animals,” Steele explains.

“They pick up on so much of our life that people wouldn’t even realize how much carries over to them. And I tell them, imagine if all you did was live with someone for many years and all you did was listen and watch and observe and you weren’t speaking, how much information you would probably gather.”

Steele spoke with the News from her home last week, sharing how she became a pet psychic and some of the more strange animals with which she has communicated.

QUESTION: How many pets do you have?

ANSWER: Two horses, two house cats, I say too-many-to-count barn cats, and then three goldfish. I used to have a pigmy goat and another house cat who died a couple of months ago. He went very peacefully in my arms at home and he told me the day it was gonna be and I was able to have a nice ceremony with him to help him pass and it was just very private and loving and he didn’t have any pain. ... He just fell into a sleep.

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Q: How did you become a pet psychic?

A: I always loved animals, I’ve always had animals and I’ve always had psychic dreams ... but I never put the two things together — that the animal world and the psychic world could combine.

One day I’m at work (at Nordstrom) and a co-worker starts telling me about paying a woman two states away to talk to her German shepherd and paying her $100 and I thought, ‘Are you crazy?’ And then a couple of years later, weird things started happening to me.

I would be on my way to work and all of a sudden an image of my horse would pop in my head and he would show me falling down and scraping his knee and I would think that’s weird and I would come home and, sure enough, his knee would be cut exactly how he showed me.

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Q: How do you ‘tune into’ the animals you communicate with?

A: I have the person’s name and their address, and they are welcome to send a photograph, or they give me just the name, age, breed and gender of the animal and I just kind of say the animal’s name in my head three times and just imagine — almost like a telephone line or an Internet connection — that’s between us.

And ... then the information comes very quickly, like the Internet. I see pictures, I hear words. I’ll get feelings in my body, but it’s very, very quick and sort of instantaneous, to the point where I speak very quickly because I’m hearing a voice in my head and I’m speaking it at the same time. I would say it’s something that happens energetically.

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Q: How is it that you’re actually able to communicate with the animal? I don’t want to say do you speak dog, but do you?

A: No, that’s a good question! I think there is a universal language, because people say, ‘Well what if this dog’s from Germany, do you have to speak German?’

Most of the time, the words I hear, I hear in my own voice, although every now and again — recently I was working with this little white fluffy dog and she came to me with a Southern belle accent — but most of the time when I hear specific words from them, I’m hearing it in what I call my own inside voice.

It’s like when you think of a friend that you haven’t thought of in a while and they call. Or you get a gut feeling to take a different way home and you avoid an accident.

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Q: Why do people come to you to connect with their pet? What are they looking for?

A: A lot of times they’ll be looking for more insight. (Is the pet) having pain or discomfort I don’t know about? ... Today I’ve been working with people in Arizona, Texas, Oregon and California, and almost all of them have a medical situation that has stumped the vets and they just can’t figure out what’s going on. So I’ll let them know this is where they’re having pain. They’re showing me an energetic imbalance here.

Everybody’s psychic. Everybody is born with this ability. It’s just whether you believe it or whether you live in a society that is going to tell you you’re nuts if you go that way or if it’s more of a supportive society.

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Q: What’s the strangest animal that you’ve connected with?

A: Well, it depends on what’s strange for you, but I have talked to cheetahs, giraffes, wart hogs, snakes, mountain lions. So you take your pick and I’ll tell you what that was about.

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Q: Cheetah sounds pretty interesting. What was that like?

A: OK, there’s some cheetahs up at a place called Safari West here in Northern California. One cheetah told me I know how to shake and give my paw like a dog and they had just trained her to do that.

Another cheetah told me ... that she gets a lot of information by looking at the sky and the patterns in the clouds. And it’s like how we would get our morning newspaper and get a feel on what’s going on in the world. What they need to do for their own security and livelihood, they get by looking in the sky and looking at the cloud formations.

These two that were there ... they have a pretty large enclosure. They didn’t mind being ambassadors for cheetahs in the wild because they felt like they could educate people.

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Q: What’s the most startling thing you’ve learned?

A: I work a lot with horses and people will tell me, ‘You told me the exact vertebrae and the chiropractor confirmed it for me.’

One that stands out — it’s kind of a funny incident to us, maybe not to the person who was going through it. A woman called in on my radio show that I do here and said, ‘My dog used to love my fiancé and now she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. What’s going on?’

Before I could even censor this or put it diplomatically — it just came out of my mouth — your dog is smelling the other woman on your husband, and she said, ‘I knew it. I knew it.’

Really, (pets are) a big source of unconditional love. Where else will someone just love you no matter what you look like, what you wear, if you’re in a bad mood? They just love you, and I just think that’s great. And that’s probably why everybody wants to know more about them and what they can do to help them be happier, because they give us so much.