News about protests is not the only thing coming from Hong Kong. Resident in the autonomous territory, Li Hiu-kwan, 33, claims she can communicate with almost any type of animal. A self-proclaimed medium, she says she can tell what they are feeling just by looking at pictures of them.
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And this is how she makes a living, serving anxious owners who want to better understand their pets.
“It’s a kind of telepathy,” Li explained to the “South China Morning Post” newspaper website. “When I look at the pictures, I enter the animals’ world, which is loaded with information about them. Just like the internet in the human world.”
She recalls an episode where she was able to communicate with cockroaches. In a minibus, she saw several of them coming towards her. She ordered them to turn around and go away. According to her, the insects obeyed the command.
Does it really work?
With three years of experience in the field, animal communication specialist Yeshma Sawlani says the thing even has a name: remote psychic reading. He claims that communicators can reach the animals’ frequency and that a picture speeds up the communication.
With the number of people keeping dogs and cats growing in Hong Kong, these pet psychics can earn tens of thousands of dollars a year. And, according to Li and Sawlani, more and more people are signing up for the service.
Li charges $300 for a 15-minute consultation over the phone or internet. A graduate in marketing, she adopted the new profession and created a Facebook page to promote her work. She already has more than 3,000 followers and serves two to five clients a day.
Sawlani, who considers himself a novice in the field, charges just over $190 to “talk” for an hour with animals. He says he serves an average of five clients per month.
Lack of scientific backing
Clinical psychologist Eliza Cheung Yee-lai, who chairs the Hong Kong Association of Clinical Psychologists, raises doubts about whether humans can or cannot talk to animals without direct contact.
Citing an experiment by American animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, Cheung says there is no scientific evidence that humans can talk to animals without knowing them, but several studies in the field have shown limited communication, based on verbal play and visual cues, such as hand signs and drawings.
Pepperberg interacted with a male parrot named Alex between 1976 and 2007. Their relations showed that Alex was as intelligent as a five-year-old child.
With 12 years of experience in veterinary, David Hopkins says that pet owners need to be careful with what they believe to be true or not.
He claims that psychics usually get tips from pet owners during conversations. They are, therefore, looking for the owners’ previous experiences, rather than basing their analyses only on the pictures.
For Hopkins, it’s a bit like astrology. He says that, from a scientific point of view, the activity does not hold up.
But Li responds that people should not see everything through the lens of science, while Sawlani prefers not to comment.
What the owners say
Janice Kau Wun-na, 27, is among the many in the city who are not intimidated and spend hundreds of dollars on these consultations.
Kau, a freelancer who works with media, pays $300 for a 40-minute phone consultation. During this time, she gets an average of ten answers about the behavior and feelings of her eight-month-old cat.
Before looking for a communicator, the girl accidentally hurt her cat while cutting its nails. Days later, she says, she asked the psychic if the cat was okay, and the psychic reportedly reported the accident.
Legislative assistant Ng Tung-tat, also 27, claims to be a frequent user of the service. “I believe there are things that science can’t explain,” he says.
