When she was growing up, Danielle MacKinnon often felt like she just knew what the animals around her were feeling. She was a very sensitive child, so she chalked it up to that and tried to focus on being "normal," getting her MBA and working in marketing — until her dog got sick and she took him to a pet psychic, who helped her realize what those "weird" feelings around animals really were. She spoke with Cosmopolitan.com about how she turned that into a business, why your dog acts out, and whether or not your cat is staring at a ghost when he wakes up in the night.

How did you discover that you could communicate with animals?

My dog had been at the vet for four days, our bill was up to $4,000, and no one knew what was wrong. I ran into a friend who told me, "All right, well take your dog to the pet psychic in town." And I was like, "There's a pet psychic in town? This is a real thing?" We went the next day to an event the psychic was attending. He looked back and forth between me and my dog and my husband for a while, and then he finally said, "Well, she's sick because she's upset and because she was upset, she ate corncobs. And the reason she's upset is because you and your husband have been fighting about your mother." We had been fighting about my mother-in-law and visiting my mother-in-law.

That was my aha moment. I went to college for my MBA, I was in the corporate world doing all this other stuff and really doing the 9 to 5, work-your-way-up-the-corporate-ladder thing, and I was good at it, but I was immediately like, "I don't want to do that anymore." I knew this was what I was supposed to do and this was what I'd been doing my whole life.

So did you quit right away?

No. That would've been awesome, but no, because I had an MBA salary. Instead I started a part-time business, and I'd do it on the side, just on nights and weekends. That was going pretty well, but I kept getting little messages like, "It's time, Danielle, your business can take off and you can leave the corporate world," when I would meditate, or other people would say it to me. Then we bought a new house, and the day before we signed the papers I got laid off. I took that as a sign and I was like, "All right, this is it. It's a new house, new life, I'm not going back to the corporate world, I'm going to do this work full-time."

How did you realize that you could teach other people how to do this?

I would be doing a private session with someone and their animal, and I'd get the psychic hit like, "Hey, you could this," and the person would go, "I've always wanted to do it!" And then a few people around the same time said, "Can you teach me?" I started teaching people one-on-one at first, all over the phone. Then I expanded that into classes with more people, and live classes. It's really fun to watch people look around and go, "I did it! And you did it too!" Right now I teach hundreds of people a year, but that will change when I launch my own school of animal communications at the end of the year. It will be all live webinars.

How do you start teaching someone how to do this?

There are two main basics. One is that, if you were to think about trying to do animal communication right now, wouldn't it freak you out a little?

It would, but I really love dogs, so I guess it would also be exciting.

Well, what happens is that people love animals and they want to try it, but then they think, Can I do this? I really want to do this well. Am I good enough to do this? All these emotions come up. So the beginning classes are really about dealing with all those fears and emotions, and teaching them how to deal with them so they can be in what I call "The Zone." When you're in the "The Zone," you can do animal communication, so that's the first part.

The second part is teaching people how animals will communicate, because there are several different ways that animals can get intuitive information to you. Most people are used to TV, so they think, Well, the animal is going to send me a picture in my head, and they spend all their time looking for that, but there are many ways information can come in.

It can come in through a picture, it can come in through words, but those words are usually like, "love boy," or, "big ball," or, "always cold," so they're short phrases. People can get feelings, like they connect with an animal who is an anxious animal, and as soon as they connect, they go, Oh, I feel so anxious, but it's actually the animal. The way I receive a lot of information is a data dump. Without seeing it, feeling it, or hearing it, suddenly I just know stuff from that animal. It's hard enough to try this and put yourself out there when you don't have any tangible evidence, and then to just not have something you felt, thought, or heard, and just know what you have in your head? That's a scary thing.

Do dogs and cats communicate differently?

No. They communicate based on personality, so you could meet a cat who is standoffish as well as a dog who is standoffish, and they're going to be that way when you communicate with them. If you have an excitable dog, most likely when you go to communicate with your dog, that dog's going to be like, "Hello! I love you! I love you!"

Do you notice a difference if some animals are more intelligent than others?

No. This is kind of the crux of my work. What I've learned is that at the deepest level, animals know everything, and I know it's going to make me sound crazy, but my dog knows my financial situation, my dog knows where my son is going to school, my dog knows everything about me. He could be a dog, a cat, he could be a hamster, a mouse, but if this animal is connected to me, then they know everything about me, they just choose not to deal on that level. Animals are working with humans to teach us unconditional love; their natural state is accepting a loving, whole place. A human's natural state is that we don't quite trust, we don't believe in ourselves, we don't feel safe. When you're talking with an animal intuitively at the deepest level, there's no intelligence difference. In fact, many of them seem to be a lot smarter than most of us.

Do you need a human that the animal has a connection with to communicate effectively?

No, not at all. You can communicate with animals in shelters and wild animals, and they don't necessarily have humans connected to them, it's just that a lot of people who would come to see me, they're the humans coming to see me and bringing their animal. But I have found that the animal is able to help the human. I love communicating with humans and animals because there's always going to be healing that occurs during that communication.

I'm not sure I follow. Can you give me an example?

This woman brought her dog, Jesus, to me, who was peeing in a plant in the kitchen inappropriately. I was like, "I have to fix this problem with Jesus." So I connected with the woman, but then I connected with Jesus, and I said, "So what's going on? Do you not know where outside is?" And he was like, "I know where outside is, Danielle." So I asked him to tell me what was up and what he told me was that he was peeing in the plant whenever there was violence happening in the kitchen. I wasn't totally psyched to tell this woman who did not tell me, in any way, that there was physical abuse going on. That's a really hard thing to do, is to go to someone who just wants me to tell them, "Hey, he's got a bladder infection so take him to the vet," and instead say, "So you're being physically abused and he's concerned about it, so here's how he's handling it." I've had to build my business in such a way that people have to understand when they come to me, I'm not just going to fix their dog because that's not what it's about; it's about this connection between the human and the animal, so their deep, intimate stuff is probably going to come up.

What kind of problems are the most common that people come to you for help?

Their animal is sick and they don't know what to do. Behavior problems like the dog is barking or pulling their fur out. Sometimes people are just like, "I love him so much and I just want to make sure he knows." And the funny thing is I'll connect with the animal and the animal will be like, "I know. She tells me every single minute of every day."

Do you find that the amount of time a dog or cat has been in a person's life makes a difference? Like my mom has had a puppy for a month right now and she's like…

Beside herself?

Yes, but also, like, getting very frustrated. She realized he's getting really anxious in his crate and I was like, "Well, you've only had him for like a month. You have to remember he hasn't been in your life for a very long time. He's still getting used to it."

I don't find that length of time makes it easier or harder. If it's hard, it's because that animal is teaching that person something. So the anxiety of the puppy in this case is reflecting the anxiety of your mom, and you know how your mom is kind of high-strung anyway? She's not, like, the most relaxed person?

Yeah...

So this puppy is going to be working with her on that. So if your mom doesn't start working on her anxiety, and you know how she's busy a lot of the time and doesn't settle down very easily? So the puppy is going to keep being like this until your mom starts addressing that. You could take him to a trainer and the trainer could calm the puppy down, but the puppy is still going to be working on this level with your mom to help your mom, so really the only solution is to have your mom deal with her anxiety and her inability to kind of take time for herself.

Whoa. That is exactly why I wanted her to get a dog. Anyway! What about when people come to you because they rescued an animal and they don't know anything about it?

If that's all somebody wants, then I usually say we shouldn't do a session. Animals are spending their days wanting to live in the present, and they're don't want to talk about what happened to them in the past. I would say 1 out of every 100 animals that I talk with will go into what happened to them in the past, so it's a really small percentage. Most likely, had you brought your dog to me and that was going on, the dog would've been like, "Yeah, some stuff happened, but whatever, now I want to talk about my human dad because he acts funny when he's…" you know what I mean? They'll change the subject and go to the other stuff that's more interesting and more pertinent.

What do you do when skeptics come at you and say things like, "She's making it up," or, "This can't be real"?

I see it sometimes on my Facebook page, but I never worry about it. I don't address it. There are some people that are absolutely not going to be OK with what I do because it scares them or they think I'm a horrible person, and I'm OK with that. If I spent time going out there and seeking out those people to prove something to them, it would mean that I don't totally believe in what I'm doing.

Do you have people constantly coming up to you when they find out what they do, asking for you to talk to their pet real quick?

I used to deal with that a lot, but I've developed some strong boundaries. If I'm at the gym, I can't sit there in the middle of a box jump and talk about your dog. Some people will think I'm jerky because I don't want to do it when I'm not working, but you wouldn't go up to a doctor that you see in a grocery store and say, "Can you just tell me, is this a rash or cancer or something?"

OK, I have one more question. One of my coworkers is dying to know: can animals sense ghosts?

I don't believe in ghosts, but what I do believe in is that our spirits and energies hang around. An animal that is still here can absolutely communicate and connect with an animal or person on the other side. You know how sometimes you see a cat staring off into space kind of looking a little kooky? Most of the time that's because they're connecting with, talking to, or watching someone on the other side, or a spirit.

But dogs don't really do that.

Yes, they do. They totally do that. Let's say you have two dogs. If one crosses over, the two dogs are still in communication with each other, so the dog who's still left here may actually start doing behavior that the dog who crossed over would do, and it's because the dog that crossed over will kind of egg him on, like, "Hey, go do that howling thing I used to do at the bottom of the stairs." So it kind of freaks people out sometimes, but they're in communication and the dog who crosses over wants you to know.

In December 2015, Danielle is launching her online school, the Danielle MacKinnon School of Animal Communication, through which she'll teach others how to communicate intuitively with animals. Visit daniellemackinnon.com and sign up for her newsletter to receive the official launch invitation.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Alexandra Martell managing editor I'm the managing editor of Cosmopolitan.com, and also the site's foremost expert on all things Friends,Harry Potter, and OG 90210.

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