Bach Flower Remedies
for Animals
By the same authors
Stefan Ball
Bach Flower remedies for Men
The Bach Remedies Workbook
Judy Ramsell Howard
The Bach Flower Remedies Step by Step
Bach Flower Remedies for Women
Growing Up with Bach Flower Remedies
Stefan Ball & Judy Ramsell Howard
The definitive guide to treating animals
with the Bach Remedies
Index by Mary Kirkness
Illustrated by Kate Aldous
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ISBN 9781409019992
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Text © Stefan Ball and Judy Ramsell Howard 1999
Illustrations © Kate Aldous 1999
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by
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This edition published in 2005 by Vermilion,
an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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For Alexandra, Madeleine & Ethan (SB)
. . . for Sam & Fay (JH)
. . . and in memory of Christine Newman, who loved
helping animals
Many people have helped make this book what it is. At the risk of leaving out the most important we are delighted to acknowledge help received from:
Dr Bach's work has been used to help animals of all shapes and sizes for as long as the remedies have been in existence. Dr Bach had a dog – a spaniel called Lulu – who received some of his remedies from time to time. His colleague and successor, Nora Weeks, had a series of cats, and they too were all given remedies when they needed them.
The last of them was Wumps, who was most definitely one of the Bach Centre team. He was an independent soul, who liked his morning cuddle but knew how to draw the line. He wasn't one to demand attention or constant petting, but instead was quite happy to wander off on his own to play in the garden to be amused by the bees, butterflies and fish in the pond. Or he would find a warm corner in which to rest and watch the visitors come and go.
Many of these visitors would ask Nora about using the remedies to help their animals, and she would give what help she could. Today out of the hundreds of calls handled at the Bach Centre every week, a good percentage continue to come from people who want to use the remedies to help their animals. So the need for a book to explain how to go about doing this has long been obvious. Indeed, we have been asked time and time again to recommend a reliable book on the subject and have never been able to do so because one didn't exist. In the end we have had to write it ourselves.
Neither author claims to be an expert on animals, but in researching and writing this book we have been fortunate to be able to draw on the generous advice and assistance of many friends, both personal and professional. Practitioners registered with the Dr Edward Bach Foundation, many of whom we have helped train in the remedies, have in turn helped train us in animal lore and have given us the benefit of their experiences. And correspondents around the world have told us stories of how their animal friends have been helped by the remedies.
This book has been a long-cherished project for both of us. We hope that in sharing what we know and what others have shared with us it will make a contribution to the well-being of our fellow creatures, both great and small. If only one animal has an improved quality of life as a result of our efforts, then it will have all been worthwhile.
We hope you enjoy Bach Flower Remedies for Animals, and get as much out of the book as we have enjoyed putting in.
Stefan Ball got to know the Bach Flower Remedies through his wife, Chris, who trained as a nurse with Judy in the 1970s and started work herself at the Bach Centre in 1991. Occasional odd jobs at the Centre, including translation work and help with educational and audio-visual projects, culminated in a commission to write his first book on Dr Bach and his remedies and an invitation to join the team at the end of 1995, an invitation that he was honoured to accept.
Judy Howard has been working with the Bach Flower Remedies since 1985 when her father John Ramsell invited her to join the team at the Bach Centre, Mount Vernon. John worked with Dr Bach's friends and colleagues, Nora Weeks and Victor Bullen from 1971 and was appointed their partner and successor, so even before she began work at Mount Vernon the remedies were an integral part of Judy's family life.
Judy is a registered nurse, midwife and health visitor, and is a Trustee and Custodian of the Bach Centre. Her husband, Keith, is a keen wildlife gardener and herpetologist, skills which naturally spill over into caring for the garden at Mount Vernon and for the wild creatures who visit it.
In the book of Genesis, Adam was given the magical power of naming the animals, so confirming the special position humankind held in relation to the animal kingdom. There was a kind of feudal contract in place, in which humanity's care and responsibility was exchanged for service and fruitfulness. All was balance and harmony in the Garden of Eden.
The story of Noah and the great flood confirmed the ideal of care and compassion for other living things. The animals were not saved simply because they were a valuable resource. They were saved because, like the righteous man Noah and his family, they had intrinsic value as part of Creation. And when the flood was over God made his covenant not just with the human beings, but with all the living creatures who came out of the ark.
Perhaps that naming ceremony long ago in the book of Genesis was the soil in which our attitudes towards animals, and towards nature in general, first took root. Whether or not this is true, the old feudal ideal of mutual respect and fealty soon withered away as Western philosophy found new ways to understand humanity's place in the natural world.
The new attitude was most famously expressed by the French philosopher Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century. 'The reason why animals do not speak as we do' he said 'is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts.' Descartes never considered the possibility of non-verbal language. Nor did he consider the emotional bond so familiar to every owner, carer and handler. Animals did not speak, so they must lack both reason and souls. They were just bodies – machines of flesh and blood.
In more modern times this view drew ammunition from the work of the American behaviourist and psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Skinner, who died in 1990, was very clear that the only possible scientific approach to the study of psychology of animals was to look at behaviour. He gave his name to the 'Skinner box', which was a simple machine used to train rats and pigeons to respond to stimuli. A simple machine to test simple machines: and if animals are machines, without feelings or thoughts or consciousness, and if their only role is to be useful to mankind, then it doesn't really matter what we do with them as long as we make them more useful. The horrors of factory farming and veal crates are a logical result of this point of view.
For a long time animal behaviourists were only interested in studying responses to external stimuli. Anyone claiming to be interested in what animals do spontaneously and of their own accord was a hopeless romantic. Some behaviourists even went so far as to try not to observe animals directly at all, and confined themselves to statistical analysis alone.
Skinner in particular went further than Descartes when he specifically included people in his definition of machine-like animals. Where Descartes raised humanity above the animals by granting them alone a soul and spirit, Skinner firmly pushed both humans and animals back down to the status of mechanism. And, of course, if human beings are machines, there is no need to take especial care of individual people, because seen from a wider point of view they are merely expendable units in an endless series of near identical fleshy robots. The Marquis de Sade was a great exponent of this view of humanity. 'That's what murder is,' says one of his heroines, 'a little disorganised matter, a few changes in the combinations, a few molecules broken up and stuck back into nature's crucible . . . where then is the harm in that?'
A few broken molecules, cogs that can be taken apart and allowed to reform, with no particular value attaching to one arrangement rather than another. This is an extreme materialist argument, in which any talk of emotions and common humanity, let alone souls and higher purposes, is redundant and subject only to ridicule. There is nothing higher than this, says Sade, and smashes his machine men and machine women like a disappointed child.
The failure is a failure of imagination and viewpoint. Look, for example, at the computer in your home. A computer at bottom is simply a collection of on-off switches, of ones and zeros, but we all know that computers are far more than this. They can display a picture of the Mona Lisa, flash messages around the world, and simulate the birth of new planets. Fantastically advanced programs are being written that mimic human intelligence, learn from their own experiences and evolve to their own pattern. There are even computers now that can write new computer programs so complex that human programmers find it impossible to follow the logic used.
It would be ridiculous to attempt to describe these activities by writing out a series of ones and zeros. How much more ridiculous it is to describe our loves and ambitions and beauty as the mechanical motion of colliding molecules. Far from being unimportant, as Sade claimed, the arrangement of molecules into complex patterns is the most important thing there is. The reality of life is concealed rather than explained by looking at it in mechanical terms.
It should be obvious that animals, like people, are more than the sum of their moving parts. They are intelligent beings, capable of learning by themselves – as squirrels have shown when researchers oblige them to tackle the most intricate obstacle courses in order to reach a dish of peanuts. The way the squirrel works out how to overcome each obstacle is a tremendous display of problem solving ability, which clearly requires thought, memory and intelligence.
If animals are capable of intelligent thought and do not solely rely on instinct to survive, then it is no step at all to assume that they must also have the capacity to feel emotions; and not only that, but also have individual characters of their own. And if they possess these things then we in our turn possess a system of medicine that can help them just as it can help us: the Bach Flower Remedies.
In 1912, Edward Bach qualified as a medical doctor. It was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition. Ever since he was a child Bach had wanted to be a doctor, or at least to be in a position where he could do something towards the relief of sickness and suffering.
Already, observation of the men working at his father's brass foundry had convinced him that mental attitude had a profound effect on the body, so it was natural that throughout his medical career he would make an active study of human nature. He would sit for hours by his patients' bedsides, listening to them, finding out what manner of people they were, what worried them, what frightened them, how hopeful they were of recovery. He found that patients who had a positive outlook had a better prognosis and got well quicker than those who had a negative perspective of life. And this link between mind, body and spirit, and the conclusion that emotional harmony gives rise to physical well-being, was to form the foundation upon which Dr Bach built his life's work.
Dr Bach's career led him to the study of immunology and to the development of a new group of vaccines that generated a great deal of interest and excitement among his contemporaries. The vaccines had a profound effect on a variety of chronic conditions and the work he did in this area was a major breakthrough in medical science.
Despite his success, Dr Bach was neither happy with the dosage methods he was using – which involved the use of hypodermic needles – nor with the products themselves: intestinal bacteria formed the basis of the vaccines. For this reason he continued his researches in the hope of finding a less invasive method of achieving the same results. He began working with homoeopathy, and on reading The Organon by Samuel Hahnemann he felt he might at last have found what he was seeking. Hahnemann's philosophy of treating the patient rather than the disease, and thus the cause rather than the effect, was entirely in accord with his own way of thinking. The homoeopathic principle of the minimum dose, the idea of preparing medicines so that no poison was left, and the method of oral administration which caused the patient no pain, all fitted well with the principles that his own research was leading him to adopt. Thus inspired, he began to make homoeopathic preparations of the vaccines he had been working on, and was conscious of having taken a huge step towards his own ultimate goal.
Bach's study of human nature extended far beyond the hospital wards. He found himself categorising people he met socially too, and one evening during a dinner party he realised that all humanity seemed to divide itself up into particular groups of individuals – those who were fearful, those who were doubtful, those who were uncertain, or too concerned, those who were lonely, and those who seemed disinterested or indifferent.
He carried on these observations back in his consulting rooms, and soon began to notice that patients in the same character group responded best to the same type of homoeopathic vaccine (or nosode). There were seven nosodes, and at this stage he had worked out seven character groups: the relationship between them became so obvious that Bach began to base his selection of nosode entirely on the character and temperament of his patients, and abandoned the clinical examination of bowel flora. This led to even better results, and it was the improved health of chronically sick people that confirmed to him that personality and not disease was the most accurate basis for diagnosis.
Dr Bach then began searching for a harmless, positive, plant-based substitute for the bacterial starting materials he had thus far been working with. He experimented with a selection of flora and began to match the nosodes to specific plants, but he soon understood that he was on the brink of a whole new way of thinking. He realised that what he really wanted to find were plants which would actually heal negative emotional states, and have a direct effect on the personality. He could then offer his patients a treatment not just for certain chronic diseases but instead treat the real root causes of his patients' problems. The task before him was to find a means of preventing ill health by treating mental disharmony at its earliest stage, before it had a chance to manifest itself as physical suffering. Absolutely convinced that this was the path to take, he immediately packed his bags and left his work and London behind him.
This was in 1930. During the course of the six years that followed he discovered and finalised a complete system of medicine specifically intended to relieve emotional suffering and restore harmony and happiness to the personality. This system would free the body from the influence of negative thought, stress, depression, anger etc., so that its own natural healing processes had a proper chance to work.
The complete system Dr Bach discovered is made up of 38 individual remedies. Thirty-seven are prepared from the flowers of plants or trees; one is made from the water of a natural spring. Each remedy addresses a specific state of mind, mood or personality trait: for example, Scleranthus for indecision, Pine for guilt, Clematis for the daydreamer. Remedies can be mixed together in order to address the subtle variations in mood and outlook that exist in every individual, so that in spite of there only being 38 remedies, the system as a whole is capable of covering the needs of every living thing in this world.
The 38 remedies were divided by Dr Bach under seven general headings, each describing a particular emotional category. The seven groups are:
The group headings were derived from Dr Bach's early work with vaccines and nosodes, and although he chose to retain the seven headings, they lost much of their significance when he finalised his work and gave equal importance to the 38 individual emotional states within those groups.
Each one of the individual remedies falls under one of the seven headings. For example, the Fear category consists of five remedies: Rock Rose (for terror), Mimulus (for nervousness about known things), Cherry Plum (for fear of losing control), Aspen (for vague, causeless apprehension), and Red Chestnut (for over-anxiousness about the well-being of someone else).
The system is designed to be easy to use. When you begin to think about helping yourself or your animal, you first need to identify which of the 38 remedies are appropriate. If you find it hard to pinpoint the precise difficulty, try to identify in general terms with the problem as a whole. The group heading may be of assistance in this respect, and once you have determined which group category best suits your needs, let it act as a doorway to the more detailed exploration of the individual remedies. However, do not worry if you are unable to relate to the group – the individual remedy choice is far more important and precise.
As you read the remedy indications (see page 17-39) you will notice that some remedies describe personality traits – the characteristics which make individual people and animals who they are. Examples are Agrimony (for people who put a brave face on their troubles) and Rock Water (for people who strive for self-perfection and hope others might learn by following their example). Other remedies only describe moods or emotions which, whilst commonly experienced by us all, do not relate specifically to our character or personality. Examples include Star of Bethlehem (for shock and a sense of loss) and Mustard (for despondency with no known cause). In any case, all of the remedies address states of mind which every one of us might encounter from time to time as we go through life, but when we are selecting the remedies, we need to isolate the one or the few which are immediately relevant. Therefore we need to identify the most prevalent state (s) of mind, the mood which describes the thing or things that bother us the most.
If the troubling emotion is a mood of the moment or a passing state of mind, then the remedies we select will usually enable us to overcome the negativity and regain a positive outlook quite quickly. But if the problem is one of greater substance, one which has become a deep-seated issue, and has grown with time, then we need to ensure that we select not only those remedies which address the moods which are uppermost in our minds, but also the remedy for our basic personality, that is, our type remedy.
For example, if you are someone who enjoys privacy, keeping yourself to yourself, preferring a quiet life, then you are likely to be a Water Violet type. If you are someone who hates to be in a subservient position, instinctively takes charge of situations, leads the way and generally assumes a dominant role, then you are probably a Vine type. The remedy which describes you is your type remedy, and more often than not it will be included as part of your treatment because it is the remedy to help you to regain your personal equilibrium and find your true self again.
When selecting remedies for an animal it is also important, although not always as easy, to identify the correct type remedy. If you know the animal well you are more likely to appreciate its personal little ways, its general demeanour and temperament. You will know whether it is timid and uncertain or boisterous and confident. You will know whether it is a leader or a follower, proud and aloof or possessive and clingy. It is the animal's nature, summed up in these terms, which will guide you in respect of the correct choice of type remedy or remedies, just as these factors would guide you in the choice of your own remedies.
Are animals, then, exactly the same as people?
Some think they are, and this belief leads to the assumption that animals and people are able to understand each other's motives, beliefs and behaviour without any need for interpretation. So if we see a horse biting and kicking we should automatically reach for Vine, Holly or Cherry Plum. When human beings bite and kick, they are bullying, or full of hate, or having a tantrum, so the conclusion is that the same must apply to all animals.
Unfortunately things are not that simple. (If they were, cats would know instinctively why we don't want them to climb up the expensive new curtains.) However close we are to animals, and however close animals are to each other, each species has millions of years of differential evolution behind it. The average, normal behaviour of a human being, a wolf and a chicken differ in many basic and subtle ways. What is reasonable for one species, given its special needs and its special evolutionary direction, may seem unreasonable to another – and motives are easily misunderstood.
Take a classic example of 'problematic' animal behaviour. A lady owns a dozen cats who all live together reasonably happily. Then she introduces a new cat, a male torn, rescued from the street. Immediately all hell breaks loose. The new cat and the others do not get on, and it seems there is a great deal of spite and viciousness from all of them. From the owner's point of view there is no need for all of this, and the cats are behaving unreasonably. But seen from the cat's point of view this aggressive behaviour is entirely reasonable, since the cats need to establish for their own peace of mind which is the dominant animal. Once this has been achieved things may settle down (although it could be that there are simply too many cats for the space available, in which case they won't settle down until there is more room or fewer cats).
Cats also provide another example of how anthropomorphism – the idea that the thoughts and actions of an animal can be translated directly into human terms – can lead us astray. Cats, especially toms, occasionally open their mouths, wrinkle their noses and curl their lips in disgust – or at least, that's sometimes how cat owners describe their behaviour. In fact they are gathering smells into a special organ called the vomeronasal organ, and what they are doing is called flehming. It's hard to know exactly what cats experience when they do this because humans don't have a working vomeronasal organ, but the fact that toms flehm most when they are near females in season suggests that disgust isn't an appropriate description.
Similarly, a dog's nose is far more sensitive than ours. Dogs see' into a complex world of odour that we cannot even begin to describe in words. Bats use echo location – a sense we don't seem to possess at all – so what exactly is it like to be a bat? We cannot say.
We need to be aware then of the fundamental differences between us and other animals and between different species of animals if we are to be successful when selecting remedies for them. One way to do this is to give a little thought to the basic personality of the particular species we are dealing with. For example, horses are herd animals, so they like to be with other horses. A horse by itself in a field will probably feel isolated and scared. They are also prey animals, so a fear reaction to a strange human is not unreasonable. They prefer to live in open spaces and don't like to be shut in, for their response to fear is to run away. Knowing this, the response of a race horse forced into a starting stall suddenly becomes entirely understandable. It isn't stubbornness or pig-headedness that makes the animal unwilling to enter the stall, but fear.
The same factors – social behaviour (or lack of it), prey or predator, and natural habitat – can be analysed for any species so as to provide a general description of the average mindset of that kind of animal. For example, knowing that rabbits are more likely to feel fear than pure aggression helps to define rabbit behaviour in general. Individual animals may still need Vine for overdominant behaviour, particularly when interacting within their own groups, but the species-specific description should make inappropriate uses of such remedies less likely.
This method will not resolve the problem of understanding an animal's mind, but at least it points a way forward. And while we need to keep in mind the differences between species we also need to guard against going too far the other way, and making difference an excuse for lack of empathy. For all the differences between living things, there are also basic similarities. We share organs – heart, liver, brain, eyes – and we share the basic structure of life, death and reproduction as well.
We also share emotions, something which is poignantly captured in a distressing true story – told by Bruce Fogle in his book The Dog's Mind – of what happened when a cow elephant died in a safari park. A pathologist decided to do a full post-mortem on the large dead animal, and because of the difficulty involved in trying to move it he decided to do the examination on the spot where it had died.
As the work got underway the pathologist needed to move the large, dismembered pieces around the shed. A bull elephant, the dead cow's mate, was brought in to help shift them. First it was made to pick up and move one of the legs, which it did, although it seemed agitated. Then it had to move the cow's head – again, it did as it was told, but beat its trunk in the air and trumpeted once it had done so. After this the door was opened and the elephant was allowed to leave. It ran outside and as far away as possible from the shed, pressed its head onto the ground and trumpeted for a long time. It did not move again until its trainer came up and spoke to it.
Animal Behaviour
One of the most respected animal behaviourists of modern times was Konrad Lorenz. This is what he wrote in his book On Aggression: 'If it is argued that animals are not persons, I must reply by saying that personality begins where, of two individuals, each one plays in the life of the other a part that cannot easily be played by any other member of the species. In other words, personality begins where personal bonds are formed for the first time.' In the same book, Lorenz talks quite openly – and without inverted commas – of geese falling in love with each other, of close friends who have quarrelled being too embarrassed to look at each other, and of manifestations of jealousy. 'All the objectively observable characteristics of the goose's behaviour on losing its mate are roughly identical with those accompanying human grief he writes. 'We are convinced that animals do have emotions.' (Remember the elephant?)
So much for personality – what now about the existence of animal souls? It is a question that has been debated for centuries in religious circles, and not one to be settled here – but again there is no shortage of supporters of the view that animals do have souls. From the past we could mention Hippocrates ('The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different'), and Pythagorus ('Animals share with us the privilege of having a soul'); and more recently there are many thousands of veterinary surgeons who have reached the same conclusion. To mention just one, Dr Patrick Glidden, an American vet, is quoted in the December 1997 issue of Life magazine as saying: 'I believe that after euthanasia an animal's soul leaves his or her body and goes to the Creator. Animals are such innocents. Why wouldn't God want to surround Himself with their goodness – the goodness of creations that didn't reject Him, as we did?'
Even if you don't accept these views, the lack of a theoretical construct should not be enough to stop you using the remedies to treat animals. In fact, many of the most commonly used 'orthodox' medicines work in ways that we do not understand. Nobody knows, for example, how aspirin works, and the pharmacological action of some antibiotics is equally mysterious. No one is seriously saying that we should stop using aspirin because we don't know how it works: and the same argument must apply to complementary medicines. All the more so, as the Bach Flower Remedies, unlike aspirin, are all non-toxic, gentle and safe.
So one doesn't necessarily have to agree with Dr Bach's view of the soul and personality, nor does one need to believe that animals have souls, in order to use the remedies. The plain fact is that whether or not the person using them believes in them, the remedies work. And whether animals have souls or not, the remedies work on animals. As Dr Bach himself said 'no science, no knowledge is necessary . . . and they who will obtain the greatest benefit from this God-sent gift will be those who keep it pure as it is; free from science, free from theories, for everything in Nature is simple.' The way is clear to start using the remedies. Let's learn how to do this.