Understanding the success of pet communicators on TikTok The phenomenon of pet psychics and what science says about the minds and communication of animals

In recent years, scientific research has gathered an ever-growing body of data on the cognitive and perceptual abilities of animals, revealing that some of their skills are more sophisticated than previously believed. A 2023 study, for example, showed that giraffes can use statistical information to make decisions, despite having a brain that is very small in proportion to their body. Findings of this kind have increasingly called into question the idea that certain forms of reasoning are necessarily tied to the cognitive characteristics of individuals or primates.

These discoveries have led some researchers to reconsider the way the animal mind is understood. Rather than viewing animals as simplified versions of human beings, it may be more useful to think of them as individuals endowed with cognitive systems built according to different logics. This perspective is particularly evident in the study of the intellectual capacity of octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish: in the book Other Minds, published in 2016, Australian philosopher and science communicator Peter Godfrey-Smith described the intelligence of these animals as so distant from our own that it could be compared, in certain respects, to an encounter with an alien life form.

Where does the popularity of pet communicators come from

Understanding how animals perceive their environment and interpret what happens around them is a subject that has long been studied, but it is also a topic that sparks strong curiosity beyond the scientific community. Even when it comes to species that humans live alongside every day, such as dogs and cats, research shows just how difficult it can be to reconstruct their actual experience of the world: their senses can function very differently from ours, generating a reading of reality that does not at all match what humans assume or expect.

It is precisely this gap between what an animal perceives and what can actually be known about its experience that fuels, online as well, a range of controversial and unscientific practices claiming to interpret the thoughts and emotions of dogs or cats, among others. In recent months, for example, so-called pet communicators have become particularly popular on social media — these are psychics who claim to be able to establish contact with animals and thereby resolve any issues between them and their respective owners.

On TikTok, the hashtag #petpsychic has more than 18,000 posts, while the most popular accounts associated with the practice have in some cases over 250,000 followers. The popularity of pet communicators fits into a context in which more and more people are looking for new ways to understand their pets' behaviour — the questions asked can concern very concrete matters, such as why a cat has changed its behaviour. In many cases, however, the interpretations provided end up mapping the animal's experience onto human mental frameworks, implicitly assuming that their behaviour can be understood through the same parameters that govern human mental models. Yet research into the cognitive abilities of other species shows precisely the opposite: the more similarities and differences between the human mind and the animal mind are uncovered, the more apparent it becomes how limited our tools are for fully understanding mental experiences different from our own.

Will we ever understand how animals think?

The ever-growing popularity of pet communicators is interesting above all for what it reveals about people's relationship with their pets: the more we discover that animal minds are complex and different from our own, the stronger the desire can become to find a simple way of understanding what is going on inside them — and yet the matter is far more complicated than that.

In the book The Book of Minds, British science journalist Philip Ball noted that the search for forms of intelligence different from our own has long focused primarily on what lies beyond our planet. And yet one of the most complex and alien forms of intellect is already present on Earth — that of animals — whose cognitive abilities are in themselves so sophisticated and unique that it is difficult even to imagine what it is like to perceive the world through a mind so different from our own. In the book A come animale, Italian professor Felice Cimatti reaches a similar conclusion, writing that «we know far more about galaxies light-years away than about the desires of a fish».