Are your pets afraid of your occult practice? of other things?

Our older schnauzer, Mollie, will leave the room after I start a ritual. She has no problem with it as long as I am setting up the ritual room, but as soon as the ritual begins, she is outta there. Toby, our younger schnauzer, loves it and sleeps in the circle during my rituals.

But Toby is very afraid of the basement. He won't go down there even if we coax him down there and frets and barks until we return safely upstairs. We have taken him down there, and he quickly returns to the upper part of the house--he doesn't like it at all. I have always wondered if he senses something down there that we don't.

I think dragons did not disappear from the earth--they turned themselves into schnauzers...

Our cats have come and gone during rituals but don't seem to take particular interest in what's going on. Sometimes they stick around but other times they don't.

When my cat Bub was younger he used to hide under the coffee table we would use as an altar. I'm sure it was because things were different -- I'd put a cloth over the coffee table when we used it as an altar, and the cloth would hang over the sides and make a little fort under there for the cat.

They do sometimes seem to see things we don't see. Like they'll watch something invisible move across the room, or will stare at a blank spot on the wall for minutes. And with all that sleeping they do I've often wondered if they are doing a lot of astral traveling!

I own 2 very big dogs that just happen to get into everything that we do, from openning the fridge to trying to paint the house. But when it comes down to doing my Rituals, Meditaion, or Spells, they just sit there & watch. It's like they are different dogs, but that's ok. This way I can get the things I need to get done.

Once I performed a short ritual and spell in which my candle flared unusually. The spell was on behalf of someone else, so I took that as a sign. As it flared, my dog that enjoys the circles I cast began to bark at something standing in the doorway of my ritual room. I could not see anything, but I could sense a presence. I consider my schnauzer my familiar in a lot of ways, and I have a spell for discovering the familiar in your pet that was given to me. Getting him to face me for the period of saying the spell was a bit tedious, but he does seem to have that quality that a familiar would have for the one he watches over. He is still too much of a puppy, though, and I look forward to his maturing.

I have heard other folks describe this in much the same way Rael.

And, like Ben...my cats didn't seem to give much of a hoot. They'd either stay or leave.

Now, the old house I owned in Virginia was shared with other long-time "residents"....spirits. The cats would raise their heads and follow something across the room with their eyes, turning their heads as they did so, but they were never spooked by my fellow house-mates. Now and then, I could see a misty figure. Most of the time, I either heard them or smelled them.