Bach Flower Remedies
From the early days of flower remedies, Dr Edward Bach made it clear that he saw this therapy would benefit all living creatures, and so animals have always been a part of flower remedy development. Domestic and wild animals are highly sentient, often highly intelligent, beings with well-developed emotional capacities, and they can benefit greatly from flower remedies to help them through all the many upsets that may befall them in their lives. In fact, because they are free of all the emotional garbage, false beliefs, greed and envy that humans suffer from, they often respond faster and better to flower remedies than many people do.
Dogs, horses, cats and birds respond marvellously to them, and even the 'lower' animals that we keep as pets, such as rodents, reptiles and fish, can be helped with emotional problems and traumas even though we do not generally credit them with much in the way of 'emotional' faculties.
Flower remedies serve several key areas of animal therapy and care, including:
- Aiding in learning and cognitive skills
- Fears, phobias and anxieties
- Loss of the vital spark, confidence and enjoyment of life
- Obsessive compulsive disorders
- Recuperation from surgery and illness
- Rescue and rehabilitation of traumatised or maltreated animals
It is important to realise that many behavioural problems in domestic animals are attributable to other factors and may be issues not within the proper jurisdiction of flower remedies. If, for instance, a dog has become aggressive, it may be a mistake to judge this purely as an emotional problem. It could be a medical problem, and hence flower remedies would be the wrong way to go about treating it. Make absolutely sure, by consulting the vet, that there is nothing physically wrong that could be causing pain and / or distress.
Second, behaviours can be at least partly a training issue. Flower remedies can help with re-training a poorly trained animal, but will not in every case bring about a satisfactory cure all on their own. This is because if you have given your dog the impression that it is OK to growl at visitors or bite the cat, he is not suffering an emotional imbalance by doing so, but merely behaving like a dog! When it comes to treating more purely emotional issues such as the negative effects of maltreatment or severe fright, flower remedies can be used more on their own and achieve often spectacular results.
Assuming that the problem is a case for flower remedies in the first place, and that the right remedies have been selected and properly administered, positive results are usually seen within two to three weeks, and sometimes much sooner than that. Naturally, results depend on the individual animal and the nature and severity of the problem for which it is being helped.
Gael Mariani and Martin J Scott
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