About Lois
Specialties
Making a good relationship great
Detecting emotional issues
Helping newly adopted pets adjust
Relationship conflicts between pets
End-of-life decisions
Connecting with deceased pets
Emotion Code for People and Pets
My Story
As a child, my earliest memories involve animals of all kinds including companion animals and farm animals. My family were farmers and raised cattle and pigs as well as crops in Iowa. My parents farmed in partnership with my aunt and uncle. Since their children were older than my sisters and I, my earliest memories involve my cousin Betty giving me rides on her horse Blue Bell. I loved those rides as a seven year old and decided I wanted a horse of my own. I also was the child who read every horse book in the school library and would dream about horses. I even wanted to be a jockey, until I grew three inches over summer between second and third grade.
When I was eight years old my father heard about a pony for sale from a friend at church. I can still remember the huge fight my parents had over whether they should get this pony. It was summer time and I was laying on the picnic table in the shade and could hear them arguing through the open
About an hour later the phone rang. My mom answered it and learned dad had bought the pony. He told mom to bring us kids to the meet him and I still can remember every excited moment of that car ride. My family decided to renamed the pony George Washington. He was a very unique pony that had come from a pony ride concession. While I didn’t realize it at the time, it was George that started me on my path as an animal communicator.
Somehow animals, that other people didn’t want, ended up at our house. We got our family dog Queenie from my aunt and uncle. They lived in a metro area and Queenie had escaped from their yard and got hit by a car. She came to our farm to live with us for many years. Although she walked with a slight limp and tried to chase the cows and pigs, we loved her dearly and she lived the rest of her life on our farm.
Even our family milk cows, that my father milked by hand, would come to us because they didn’t take to being milked by a milking machine. My father had very specific ideas about how to handle livestock that differed greatly from the average farmer at that time. Baby pigs and calves frequently ended up in our kitchen in a cardboard box in front of the coal furnace register to warm up. We knew they were getting warm when they started to scratch in the box and escape onto the kitchen linoleum. Then they moved down to the basement in the furnace room for several hours before going back outside to be reunited with their mother.
Dad’s philosophy for moving cattle included using the call of the stomach, otherwise known as bribery with food, and the lead cow. We would drop ear corn on the ground from the back of a pickup truck to coax the lead cow to follow us. The others would follow as we made a trail of corn from the old pasture to the new pasture. This enabled us to move them with low stress and safety for all humans and animals included.
My love for animals, as well as my desire to help them, increased over the years and greatly influenced my decision to attend Iowa State University where I received my BS in Agricultural Education. In 2015 I graduated from the professional program at Communication With All Life University, where I formerly served as a faculty member and Dean of Students from October 2016 to December 2017. I now work as an animal communicator and certified emotion code practitioner for private clients.
For almost 35 years my husband, Arnie, and I lived on a 7 acre farm in Iowa with our dog and horses. Arnie and I were hobby vegetable and fruit farmers and enjoyed trail riding and camping with our horses.
We moved to West Des Moines (Iowa) in the spring of 2021 with our dog after selling our acreage and rehoming the horses. Today Arnie is retired and Lois spends time with Jackie at the dog park as well as helping clients with their animals.