An animal communication perspective on learning to share our planet with all species

I was tempted to title this episode "Whose Planet Is It, Anyway?" With fewer and fewer wild places remaining, sharing planet Earth with other species increasingly means sharing our urban spaces with wild birds, animals, insects and other species. 

These other species need the same basic resources we do - air, water, land. They need places to hunt and forage, meet mates, raise families, live their lives. This means your choices and actions can have a huge impact on the wild lives being lived all around you!

In this episode, we talk through vital points to consider:

• Reframing concepts like "mine" and "yours" to consider the option of "ours."
• Taking a hard look at terms like "invasive species," "pests," "bad: or "good" animals.
• Rebalancing the taxonomic charts in light of our dependence on our artificial modern conveniences to meet our own basic survival needs.
• Using our knowledge as empowerment to use the home spaces we control for the benefit of all species.
• Remembering our own wild roots and using those as inspiration to share what we possess as equitably as we can.

I'd love to hear your ideas for how human animals can help and support other species to get their needs met as they live their lives alongside ours! Drop a comment or send me a message to share your insights. 🩷

Transcript

Shannon Cutts: 0:12

Hi, my dear ones, Shannon here with animallovelanguagescom, and I want to welcome you to this episode of Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can truly enjoy together. On this podcast, we're in our fifth season now and we are de-wooing, if you will, de-mystifying animal communication. Let's make animal communication natural and practical again, because that is truly what it is. We have interviewed hundreds of beautiful practitioners from all over the world. I've talked with fellow intuitives, with holistic practitioners, with veterinarians, with authors, with speakers, with advocates, and in the last couple of seasons I've really been coming out more from behind my hostess badge and sharing stories from my own professional practice as an intuitive, as a communicator, as an animal communication teacher and as a bond builder searching for the right word here and as a bond builder between homo sapiens in our ultra artificial, high-tech modern world and the rest of the natural world that's keeping company all around us, and as a channel for the wild animals of this planet to have a voice, to speak, to share their truth, to share what it's like to live alongside our species. And so for this episode, I want to take a deep dive into a topic that I have always felt passionate about, and animal communication has finally given me a practical way, a vehicle to take action on that passion and I really want to take a deep dive into how to share space. But that sounded maybe just a little bit too off-putting to some listeners, so just know that that's kind of going to be our secret subtitle for those of you who are listening. But it really struck me and this is kind of where I want to start today's episode.

Shannon Cutts: 2:19

It really struck me this past summer here in Houston Texas. Really struck me this past summer here in Houston Texas. Typically in the summertime we experience intense showers. Often we get stronger storms, tornadoes, hurricanes. We're used to having a really wet, neotropical, humid summer climate, but this past summer either we overused our water resources or we didn't get enough natural moisture. Either we overused our water resources or we didn't get enough natural moisture, or, I suspect, a combination of both, and our enormous city imposed water rations and let us know that if we used our hoses or our sprinkler systems outside of certain set days and certain set hours, that we were going to be fined and it wasn't a small fine, it was a really steep fine in the thousands of dollars.

Shannon Cutts: 3:08

And my heart just hurt because here are all of these wild animals that are sharing our spaces, from the teensiest, tiniest, little bitty bitty beings, the little insects and the earthworms, the what we would call the lowest of the low, on our very left brain food chain of life on our taxonomic charts, all the way up to the larger beings, the raptors and the predator animals that keep our ecosystems and our wild populations in balance. And essentially, by imposing these rations, we were withholding natural resources from these beings who, due to the artificiality of how our world today is set up, they actually rely on us to provide these things for them. So, even though they are wild and they're living in urban spaces, so often these animals, their only access to the natural resources that should be and truly are belonging to all. Well, the only way they can get it is if we turn on our sprinkler system or we run our hoses, or we take some action based on the agency we have for the little plot of land or property that we have been given legal control over. And if we're not allowed to run our hoses or sprinkler systems or fill our bird baths, then everybody suffers quite literally.

Shannon Cutts: 4:37

I did not follow the city guidelines. Let me just put it out there. I did not do it. I wasn't the only one. It's a tough line to walk. It's a tough path to travel Once we become aware, as homo sapiens, that the choices that we make on behalf of all species may come with consequences to our own.

Shannon Cutts: 5:03

That's really where I was kind of headed with this. Whose planet is it anyway? And taking a big step back and taking a look at the bigger picture of how long our species has even been around versus how long this planet has been populated by beings. And I'm just going to assume, if you're listening and you're still listening to this episode, I'm going to assume that you're on board with this concept that all of life is sentient. This is something that I experience every single day as I talk with your companion animals, as I, more rarely, am invited to talk with local wild animals that share your spaces, as I'm invited to the conversation to create and harmonize life in a shared space where we have animals that have needs, non human animals that have needs, and we have a legal system that has put us in charge and has decided who owns what, and has decided that ownership means anyone else who tries to use the resources is trespassing or is no longer entitled to them. And it just puts us in a very tenuous position, not only in the 3D world, for those of us who are sensitive to and again, I'm going to assume, if you're listening and you're still listening to this episode, that you are quite sensitive, perhaps even empathic to the suffering of others. And it just puts us in a precarious position and it asks us to try on a different hat, the hat of enough for me, so that there is abundance for all. And recognizing that abundance for me is also the recognition that I am providing a pathway forward to abundance for all. It's not just about how much I have and the definite, the safety and the security that that provides for me, absolutely Our lowest level Maslow's hierarchy of needs, safety and security. It loves having more.

Shannon Cutts: 7:18

That's one of the reasons, at least I believe, why humans in particular, we are just wired to always seek more is because we are so out of touch with the rhythm of the cycles of life, the seasons of life, how, after every winter, spring arrives and more naturally appears. We're out of sync with those cycles and so our sympathetic nervous system that says enough is never enough, actually never shuts down, it never turns off. We never get any relief from our sense of insecurity in this world. We no longer know what it's like and I'm speaking to myself here as well to trap or forage or harvest or hunt your own prey and to prepare it. We don't know how to build a fire. We don't know how to build a shelter. We no longer feel like we have the ability to take care of ourselves outside of all of these modern conveniences that have kind of automated our lives, and so we never feel secure that all that we have, however much we have, is going to be enough.

Shannon Cutts: 8:31

I often joke that if a solar flare hit our central power grid and knocked out the power and me and the family dog had to go out in the backyard to forage at dinner, I can guarantee you who would go hungry and who would get fed. Even our domesticated pet animals still retain more memory of self-agency, of self-sufficiency, of inner abundance, of the seasons and cycles of life, of being able to forage up their own dinner something so simple and so basic. Where I would be the one out in the forest going is this delicious looking berry, the poisonous one or the safe one? And it would be a 50-50 crapshoot because I don't know any of those things anymore. That's a whole different subject. But for now, what we're going to focus on and I'm just going to use my own little corner of the world as an example for our conversation today.

Shannon Cutts: 9:24

In fact, today I went to a local wildlife park. We had rescued a little baby water turtle. In fact our neighbors found it swimming in their pool. Why? Because mama turtles, even if they live in the water, as juveniles and adults they head back to land to lay their eggs. So the babies hatch on land and when they come out, when they push that dirt away and it makes them really strong, and they come out and they've probably got a little bit of their yolk sack left for a day or two and then they've got to forage for their food. Well, their instinct is to head to the water and there is nothing in their programming that says and once you get in the water you might not be able to get out, and there's nothing in their programming that says and that particular water might not be safe for you to get into because of all the chemicals and the chlorine and all of the other additives. And so they just do what comes naturally, what they've been doing for centuries and centuries before we got here, millennia before we even got here. Well, this little baby water turtle had headed for the pool, discovered A he couldn't get back out and B the water was toxic.

Shannon Cutts: 10:34

Luckily, I'm kind of known as the turtle lady in the neighborhood and the neighbor brought him right over and he spent about a week with us and he was eating well and swimming and seemed bright eyed and active, and so I brought him over earlier today and let him enjoy his new wild world where he has a body of water now that he could go into and come out of at will. He doesn't need our assistance. He has natural food all around him, he has everything he needs and he did not look back at me once. He was not worried. We see these shows on TV, these wild survival shows. That seems to be something that's becoming more popular in the reality TV topics, and we see our own species after a few days, just I can't take it anymore. I miss my family, I miss heat, I miss air conditioning, I miss not having bears outside my tent at night, and just they break down. We break down because we don't remember what it's like Even just walking into this wild park today and I say wild park. It's just a park full of wildlife that's reserved for wildlife.

Shannon Cutts: 11:46

Something in my nervous system just slowed down and recalibrated to a different pace, different awareness, a sense of equality. We're all in here, together, living our lives. I don't own this space. They don't own this space because ownership is a concept that always leaves somebody out. Is a concept that always leaves somebody out. It's not about politics, not talking about communism or socialism or democracy or all those other terms. We're talking about sufficiency, enoughness, natural rhythm that has been in place for millennia, that provides for our needs in each season of the year, in each cycle of life. It has a natural wisdom that helps us to regulate our nervous systems, helps us to remember how to take deep breaths, helps us to remember that we are all students here and that it is okay to have so much more to learn.

Shannon Cutts: 12:53

And so I'm going to just use my little plot of land as an example in today's episode of what is possible when we take our ownership hat off in favor of our partnership hat, just recognizing that, through some weird quirk, we have been dubbed the owners of these little plots of land. Or maybe you have big plots of land, or maybe you don't have any lands. You don't think you have any agency, and let me tell you, let me assure you, that you do. We take away, take off the mine versus yours hat and put on the ours hat and recognize that you've been given a great amount of power. Whether you realize it or not, whether you're feeling powerful or not, you've been given a great amount of power and authority because our legal system recognizes that you are in charge of this little bit of space, whether it's a condo in the middle of a high rise with nothing but a window to the outside, or it's a huge rural ranching property, or it's 1, 16th of an acre in the middle of one of the largest cities in the United States, like I have, we have tremendous authority and power over these little spaces and, to quote one of my very one of my many favorite movies, ever after, along with great authority, great power, comes great responsibility, and it means making our own choices and choosing where we make those choices from and with what lens we look at the impact of each choice we make, and even if it means stepping outside the boundaries of how the homo sapiens that have agency over greater numbers of spaces decide that we should or we must allocate our resources land, water, shelter, connection relationship.

Shannon Cutts: 14:56

This morning my mom sent me an email about getting our home certified as a wildlife space, which I love that idea. I think our home is probably already meeting the criteria. The only thing that's really missing is, yet again, that administrative piece paying a fee and having somebody survey and check some boxes to say that we qualify and I'm not somebody that particularly needs to go through those additional steps in order to acknowledge what we have done so far. And there's a lot more to do. Just taking a look at our little piece of property and I've talked about this before on the podcast I'm watching huge tracts of land all around us getting gobbled up and concretized and developed into apartments and multi-use areas for human beings, and it's distressing, it hurts my soul, especially because we have a natural bayou that runs behind our house that is not concretized on the sides and so the wildlife can still go down there, they can still come up.

Shannon Cutts: 16:07

There's still quite a lot of lives being lived in and right around that water source and it's really been very upsetting to me watching these developers dump stuff into the water and you can always tell, because you go out and it's blue or it's gray or it's pink or there's something. You can just tell there's a funky smell and trying to track down who's in charge and let them know that that's not okay. We even had developers that were pumping water out of the bayou because they didn't want to pay for city water to cool down whatever it was that they were doing. So they were pumping the water out of the bayou and it's like there just seems to be no lengths to which our species will not go to cut corners or save a buck or two. But the truth is is that, outside of making some phone calls or sending some emails, there's not a whole heck of a lot that I can do about that. What I can do, and what we did do, what we've chosen to do, is ramp up access to water inside our little 1 16th of an acre, putting out more bird baths and water dishes, offering some food. I know the jury's out on whether it's a really good idea to feed the birds or not, but that's what we've chosen to do, given how we're watching their natural habitat all around us completely disappearing, and knowing that they need an adjustment period and knowing that it's a process and that if they move somewhere new, they're going to be infringing on territory that other birds have already established, and so we're just trying to ease the situation as best we can for the animals that we share space with and our little plot of land. The goal is to make it an oasis.

Shannon Cutts: 17:59

That used to be my very favorite type of nature show when I was little, and looking back now I know this was my first introduction to interspecies communication, long before I had any idea what I was actually looking at. I would watch these animals at these watering holes, these desert oases where there's literally one source of water and everybody needs it and how they worked it out. And you'd have predator animals, you'd have prides of lions or other big cats, you would have tasty prey animals flamingos or gazelle or pronghorn or smaller mammals and they all needed the water. And how did they know? As a little girl, I would watch these shows and I would think how do they know when it's safe to go drink? How do they find the courage? And well, the answer is and spoiler alert if you haven't heard it, but I've talked about it quite a bit before here on the podcast they knew because of the process of interspecies communication.

Shannon Cutts: 19:06

They could feel the emotion, the energy in motion and they could tune in and they could sense who was hungry and who wasn't. And so we would have these tentative, you know, tiptoeing or trying to fly in. And when they're doing this they're testing the emotional or the energetic landscape. Who's hungry? Are they really hungry? Are they just a little hungry? Did they just eat? How safe is it for me to come and drink and how long can I stay?

Shannon Cutts: 19:39

And there's always that moment because of course, this is what the National Geographic photographers and filmmakers wait days, weeks, months to capture on film. There's always that moment when the emotion capture on film. There's always that moment when the emotion, when the energy and motion shifts. That is when you see the pronghorn flicking their ears and the elk flicking their tails and the birds starting to just scatter and fly away, and suddenly pandemonium breaks out, because everyone who's edible and delicious just realizes in an instant that the predators just got hungry, it's time to go.

Shannon Cutts: 20:20

And the ones that are distracted, the ones that aren't paying attention, the ones who aren't practiced or the ones that have kind of lost their edge usually the young, the elderly, the infirm in some way or the otherwise indisposed. An example would be nursing mothers, who are paying a lot of attention to their young and maybe they're not quite as dialed into what the predators are feeling. They're going to be the ones who end up plated and served, so to speak. This is, in the same way, how we can bring our energy into our little area. We can bring that awareness and we can say, when I take a step back and I have a big picture, look of what's going on at this watering hole, this oasis, imagine you're a drone and you kind of fly up into the air and you can see the context around which animals converge on your space and you realize essentially they're all going after the same thing. They're all trying to get their needs met. They just meet their needs in different ways. That's when we realized there are no bad animals, there are no good animals, there are no good animals, there are no beneficial animals, there are no detrimental animals. That is not always the case when we have animals in places where they shouldn't be, like introduced an invasive species, and that is a totally different topic. However, when we take a bigger picture, look at the little oasis, the little watering hole that is our little corner of the world. For us it's this one 16th of an acre. We can see there are no bad animals. There are just animals that are coming here because they're increasingly unable to meet their needs for food, for water, for shelter elsewhere, and as much as we can provide for everyone to meet their needs, history itself encourages us that balance will work itself out.

Shannon Cutts: 22:24

Now, this doesn't mean we want the animals coming inside our homes. It can be a tough conversation. I'm thinking of one friend of mine. She's a friend that I've had really since kindergarten, so probably the oldest friendship that I have actually kept in touch with over my five decades of life. To date practice nonviolence, which means do your best to kill no one and nothing, and I think that is an admirable practice, and what that means is that when my friend comes to visit them, the insect issue inside their home is a little overwhelming and she usually doesn't choose to stay with them, which I completely and utterly understand. It's never going to be okay for me to wake up in the middle of the night with one of our giant Texas cockroaches on my face. That is me, and so I'm not trying to rain on anybody's nonviolence parade, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Shannon Cutts: 23:23

However, here again I advocate for taking a bigger picture perspective. Look at the situation itself. Forget about the fact that we've got our modern homes and all of these artificial conveniences, and imagine that we're a little I don't know woodchuck or what's the one that comes out and sees a shadow Groundhog. Imagine we're a little groundhog, we're in our cozy little burrow and it's our little place, it's our little home. And somebody else comes into that burrow and is like wow, this is a groovy spot. I think I'm going to claim it for my very own. And the groundhog is like no, I did all the work, I excavated it, I've been defending it, I've stockpiled it, I got my lady in here and we're caring for our family in here. And no, you're not coming in and there's going to be a scuffle, there's going to be a little fight. I don't know what woodchucks eat, but if a little insect or something else came in, that's fair game. If that other being looks tasty, that groundhog's probably going to eat it.

Shannon Cutts: 24:28

So we have to keep some perspective as far as when wild animals actually try to come into our space. We had rodents, probably squirrels. Because of the, we were able to get them out. I was able to communicate with them, get them out, and then we sealed up the opening that they were getting in through in our attic. But I can just about guarantee you that if I had climbed the tree in our front yard, we've got this giant red mother squirrel that has taken over this giant water oak tree in our front yard, and I can guarantee you that if I crawled up the trunk of that tree which is, of course, never going to happen that would be quite a sight, and I decided I was going to go and take over her nest and raise my young in it. I guarantee you she would be having none of that, and so it is perfectly fine, in my opinion, to have our own space. I am not going to be able to function very well in my life if I let rats and squirrels and raccoons, all of which have tried to take up residence in our attic in the past, if they're running around all night and I can't sleep.

Shannon Cutts: 25:41

We need to do something. We want to do it humanely, and again, here's where the agency comes in. Whose planet is it anyway? But it's perfectly fine to take action, in my opinion, because it's a very natural thing to do. So here we just get into issues like and I've run into this with many, many landlords when I was renting who would say, well, I don't want to pay for humane trapping. Say, well, I don't want to pay for humane trapping, if you can't get them out by tonight, we're going to put chemicals in the attic or in the garage or wherever they are. So we have to make some really hard choices. Or last summer, when the city said no watering and I didn't bless it. That's all I'll say about that. A little water makes a lot of difference, and I just encourage you to give yourself your own power back, give yourself your own authority back.

Shannon Cutts: 26:41

We're not talking about extravagance, we're talking about enoughness. We're talking about remembering whose planet this truly is, regardless of what our very human left brain first world laws have dreamed up for our own species. As the ultimate buck stops here over planetary resources, I like to sum it up this way it may be ours by law, but it's all of ours by truth. And the more we can learn about our ecosystems, locally as well as globally, the more we can learn about how construction projects like the ones that are going on around our little Casa right now, how they're affecting and impacting those local ecosystems and what those other beings are going through watching their homes get destroyed, their nests get knocked down, their burrows get bulldozed up, the lives that are forever lost to really start to recognize that a little effort on our part goes so far. When you have nothing, anything is better than nothing, and so that knowledge of what's going on outside of the boundaries of my little space, how will making some simple changes to my local space have a ripple effect?

Shannon Cutts: 28:18

I don't remember who it was now who said when a butterfly burps, it has a ripple effect all the way across the planet. I totally misparaphrase that so I apologize for that. But we think about just adding a little pan of water for the local birds and putting a little rock in it so the insects can sit on it and drink. And remembering those insects are food for the birds and those birds are, as much as I hate to admit it, food for larger animals, and plus, they give us such joy. The legacy that we leave, the ripple effect that we have each and every day, is a life well-lived. It's a life of deep meaning, our enoughness and everyone's sufficiency and abundance, and it shifts the energy in our local space. It shifts the energy inside my home when I know. I step outside into the backyard and I see so many beings who are able to make their lives, who have just enough. We forget, in our constant quest for more, that it doesn't actually take that much to sustain life. That knowledge that is so powerful empowers us to make small changes that have a huge ripple effect, and I really want to close this episode with this thought.

Shannon Cutts: 29:58

I'm a huge movie buff. If you've been listening to let's Talk to Animals for any length of time, you are already likely aware of this. I adore movies. They're some of my greatest teachers. The very first book I wrote, which is in a completely different field, had a whole section on movie characters.

Shannon Cutts: 30:16

As teachers, I've always adored films and the ones that impact me the most I often watch over and over and over again. Fortunately, or unfortunately, some of my favorite films really do portray other life, alien life, as invasive species, as dangerous or aggressive towards humanity. It really gives us a taste of our own medicine. Unfortunately, and I think to myself, human imagination created these battles and these characters and these journeys. There's a big part of our psyche, our generational memory, that clearly perceives us as the invasive species. And it wasn't until I watched a movie called Arrival that I realized how good it feels when alien life, newcomers to our planet, are not portrayed as being evil or greedy or bent on world domination or the annihilation of our species or whatever it is. And I realized the real message to me of that movie is we do belong here, human beings do belong here, we are part of, even if we don't act like it. So what if we acted like it? How would that change the dynamic? How would that change the friendship that we feel? How would that diminish the isolation our species is going through in this crazy time of technological advancement and growth that is often labeled artificial, that still to our basic DNA, our basic core operating system, feels so artificial? How would it change our concepts of entertainment? Maybe it would no longer be as entertaining to go to the movies and watch aliens come in and take over again and threaten our species like we're threatening so many other species, when we would start to see ourselves as a part of, as a contributor to, as friends with, or at least amicably connected to, the other species and the other lives going on all around us.

Shannon Cutts: 32:36

Science is wonderful. There's a part of me that wishes I had taken a research track. My math skills indicated otherwise. I'll just let you in on a little secret, but I do feel like science has its limits. But one of the cool things that science has offered us is sequencing of the genomes of many species, including our own, and one of the things we've learned is that big picture perspective. Again, we're more like the different. We share a tremendous amount of our DNA, our core biological operating manual, even with so-called simple life forms like fruit flies and in fact in similar circumstances, research, science experiments have proven that we also tend to act a lot like other species, and it's no surprise considering that we share so much in common biologically.

Shannon Cutts: 33:33

It's just mind blowing to me that our species has grown so fast to be so far removed from all the rest. In so many areas around the world not in all areas, but in so many parts of the world we have left behind all of the core basic skills and confidence to live as a part of. The only way we now feel safe and sufficient is to separate ourselves. Looking back at these genomic studies and realizing how much DNA we share with a banana or a chimpanzee, recognizing we're not an invasive species. We do belong here. If we're here, we're meant to be here. We're meant to learn lessons and we're meant to share lessons, and we're meant to, as my late best friend loved to say, grow in wisdom and learn to love better. Learn to love one another, learn to love ourselves, learn to love this planet that has its own intelligence and benevolent wisdom, and learn how to make this planet a safe sufficient space for all beings to share together. That is my vision.

Shannon Cutts: 34:59

If you head over to animallovelanguagescom backslash podcast, you will find all of the information about past episodes of let's Talk to Animals. You can listen in to all five seasons and you can enrich your pet parent toolkit by learning from so many amazing practitioners all around the world, and you can also weigh in and let me know what you'd like to hear about next, what questions you have. If you're on Instagram, I invite you to head over to at love and feathers and shells or at animal love languages. I have two accounts on Instagram and give us a follow. We love your follows. I announce all fresh podcast episodes there and I also send out a weekly love letter. When you sign up for the love letter. You also get $25 off your very first session with me for your pet. You can have a pet Reiki session, an energy balancing session. You can choose an animal communication session for your pet who's here or in spirit. You can connect or reconnect, learn from your animal, grow in wisdom and learn to love one another better. So I thank you for being a part of the let's Talk to Animals podcast community.

Shannon Cutts: 36:24

If you like to watch podcasts instead of listen to them, you can also find us over on YouTube. My handle is Shannon Cutts, just my name. Please do hit subscribe. It helps our podcast reach more viewers and listeners. Please do download these episodes. It helps our little algorithm a lot to reach out to new pet parents and nature lovers everywhere. Leave us a review and, most importantly, I'd love to hear more about the animals you love. Okay, so all my love. Bye for now. I will see you again in two weeks with a fresh new episode.