Animal Reiki

From Japanese Reiki to practice with animals

Reiki as a named practice traces to Japan in the early twentieth century. A religious studies entry on Usui Reiki Ryoho reports that Usui Mikao founded the Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai in Tokyo in April 1922, that his student Hayashi Chujiro began his own Reiki research society in Tokyo around 1925, and that Hawayo Takata, who studied with Hayashi from December 1935, brought the practice to Hawaii and later to the North American mainland. The entry does not mention animals. The wider family is described on the Reiki, Usui Reiki and Western Reiki pages.

The Animal Reiki Source and shelter work

The sources reviewed do not give a dated history of treating animals with Reiki before the late twentieth century. The main account comes from Kathleen Prasad, who describes learning a human-led method that she says was the only one taught in the 1990s, finding that sensitive or traumatized animals often rejected hands-on sessions, and developing the Let Animals Lead method over roughly 25 years. Her own site gives different figures for how long she has practiced, and the account has not been checked against independent records.

A 2020 magazine profile reports that Prasad founded Animal Reiki Source in 2004 and, with Leah D'Ambrosio, the Shelter Animal Reiki Association (SARA) in 2007 in Marin County, California. The Shelter Animal Reiki Association describes itself as a worldwide grassroots organization and names Prasad as its president. The sources reviewed disagree or are silent on some dates, and none comes from an independent historian.

Names and related terms

Animal Reiki is the usual name for Reiki offered to animals, and some practitioners use species names such as equine Reiki for horses. The Animal Reiki Source site glosses Reiki as a Japanese term made of rei, often rendered spirit, and ki, energy, and says it is often translated as spiritual or universal life-force energy. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describes the human practice as one in which practitioners place their hands lightly on or just above a person to direct energy that is thought to support the person's own healing response.

Let Animals Lead as a named method

Let Animals Lead is a registered name for Prasad's method, which her site contrasts with human-led approaches. In that framing, hands-on sessions and the idea of sending or beaming energy toward an animal are what the method avoids, and meditation comes first with the animal's agency as the guiding principle. The term is therefore a specific teaching, and the sources reviewed do not show that all practitioners who offer Reiki to animals follow it.

How sessions are described

In the Let Animals Lead description, the animal can accept or decline a session and shape how it unfolds. The practitioner asks permission directly or sets an open intention, stays passive, avoids looming or holding eye contact, and keeps to the animal's level. Hands are used only if the animal invites contact through body language, and animals may move freely in and out of the space. The site says practitioners should not expect an animal to lie still for an hour, and that sessions can alternate between short-distance or hands-on Reiki and periods of movement and rest.

A magazine account of shelter work describes practitioners sitting at a dog's eye level near the kennel and meditating while the dog decides whether to approach and sniff their hands. It reports that hands rest lightly on the body, and touch happens only if the dog initiates it. The article presents the aim as relaxation rather than fixing a behavioral or physical problem.

Distance and participation

Practitioners of the approach state that animals do not need to be touched to respond, and the Shelter Animal Reiki Association says its techniques do not require contact. The Animal Reiki Source site also says practitioners can work with animals without touching them or being near them, including wild animals, and that it offers distant support for animals and their people. This corresponds to the Distance treatment concept used in Reiki generally. These are practitioners' descriptions, and none of the sources reviewed tested whether distance affects an animal's response.

Training and professional norms

The Animal Reiki Source site reports dual accreditation from the CPD Standards Office and endorsement by the Canadian Reiki Association, and describes an Animal Reiki Practitioner Code of Ethics written by Prasad. As summarized there, the code covers asking permission, respecting refusal, giving companions information about the method and its possible outcomes, and respecting their choices about conventional or holistic care with the support and advice of a trusted veterinarian. These are the training body's own statements. The sources reviewed identify no independent training standard that applies to Animal Reiki as a whole.

Relaxation and stress in shelters and homes

The Shelter Animal Reiki Association states that its Let Animals Lead techniques aim to improve the lives of shelter animals and their caregivers and to reduce stress in shelters. The 2020 profile reports Prasad's view that the aim of a session is relaxation, and that members report shelter dogs who receive sessions are often adopted soon afterward. The same article reports that Prasad acknowledges there are no official statistics. These are practitioner claims and impressions, and the article quotes no veterinarians or independent researchers.

What the Animal Reiki Source describes as healing

The Animal Reiki Source site describes healing in animals in non-clinical terms, such as an animal visibly relaxing after weeks of anxiety, or an injury mending after months without progress. It does not define healing in clinical terms, and it cites no studies, trials or peer-reviewed research for these accounts, relying on Prasad's experience with what she calls thousands of animals. Readers should treat such accounts as the tradition's own description and not as findings.

Studies in rats

The only animal experiments of Reiki found in a PubMed search were two small studies in noise-stressed rats from a University of Arizona group. In the 2006 study, one group of four rats received daily noise and Reiki, while other groups received sham Reiki or noise alone, or neither. The authors reported that Reiki reduced noise-induced leakage in the small blood vessels of the mesentery compared with sham Reiki and noise alone across three runs, and noted that the effect might come from Reiki itself or from the relaxing effect of the practitioner's presence.

The 2008 study used three male rats fitted with telemetry devices, exposed to noise for 8 days with Reiki or sham Reiki in the last 5 days, and then repeated with the conditions swapped on the same animals. The authors reported that Reiki, but not sham Reiki, lowered heart rate and reduced the rise in heart rate during noise, with no significant effect on blood pressure. Both were abstract-level reviews for this page, the samples were very small, and the findings have not been replicated in the sources reviewed.

No studies in dogs, cats or horses found

Searches of PubMed and Europe PMC for Reiki combined with dog, canine, cat, horse, equine, veterinary, shelter and animal terms, and general web searches for pilot studies, found no controlled or peer-reviewed study of Reiki in dogs, cats or horses. The accounts of shelter sessions that exist are practitioner descriptions and a magazine profile that reports staff impressions. The Shelter Animal Reiki Association and Animal Reiki Source pages cite no research data.

A 2015 meta-analysis of noncontact healing studies, which lists Reiki among its keywords, reviewed studies on biological systems other than whole humans, such as plants or cell cultures, and on whole humans. It reported significant but heterogeneous effects that correlated with study quality, and the abstract does not give Reiki-specific results. It does not show that Reiki affects companion animals.

Research on Reiki in people and on contact in shelter dogs

For people, a systematic review of hands-on Reiki in placebo-controlled trials found 14 trials for mental health outcomes. It reported higher certainty for clinically relevant stress and depression, but called the evidence inconclusive because of few studies per outcome and some concerns about risk of bias. The NCCIH states that Reiki has not been clearly shown to be effective for any health-related purpose and that most research is of low quality with inconsistent results. These findings concern human participants and cannot be carried to animals.

Research that does not involve Reiki shows how hard it is to separate a practice from the effect of calm human contact. A five-shelter study of 207 dogs found that urinary cortisol fell during one- or two-night foster sleepovers and returned to pre-sleepover levels after the dogs went back to the shelter. It had no control group and excluded fearful or aggressive dogs. Any shelter study of Reiki would need comparison conditions such as sham sessions or quiet human presence.

Veterinary position

The American Veterinary Medical Association defines integrative veterinary medicine as the coordination of complementary, alternative and conventional veterinary medicine, and states that all aspects of veterinary medicine should be held to the same standards as set out in its Model Veterinary Practice Act and Principles of Veterinary Medical Ethics. The Australian Veterinary Association's position statement, ratified in 2012, likewise says complementary and alternative veterinary medicine is held to the same standards as other veterinary medicine, and that a veterinarian should examine the animal and reach a preliminary diagnosis before starting treatment. Neither document, as retrieved, mentions Reiki by name.

Animal Reiki is therefore best understood as a practice that does not replace veterinary diagnosis or treatment. Changes in appetite, signs of pain, breathing difficulty or neurologic change call for veterinary assessment, and a session should not delay it. The Shelter Animal Reiki Association states that it never interferes with the advice and guidance of veterinarians and other animal care professionals. The sources reviewed identify no statutory regulation or training standard specific to Animal Reiki.

Animal welfare and handler safety

No source reviewed reports adverse events from Animal Reiki, and the NCCIH states that Reiki has not been shown to have harmful effects in people, a statement that does not extend to animals. The risk that is documented concerns handling. A university canine health center reports that about 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year, lists escalating fear signals from yawning and nose licking to stiff posture, growling and snapping, and advises asking before approaching an unfamiliar dog. The Let Animals Lead descriptions, which leave participation to the animal, are consistent with this guidance but were not tested as a bite-prevention measure.

Frightened, injured or aggressive animals are the main concern for handlers. Practitioners who describe the approach say refusal is to be respected, and the sources reviewed do not describe how practitioners are trained to assess an animal's fear, which a reviewer may wish to check. Cost and consent are further points: the Animal Reiki code summarized on the Animal Reiki Source site asks practitioners to give companions clear information about outcomes and fee and cancellation policies.