It’s 9 a.m. and already hot, a sticky sweet kind of hot that the peculiar mix of animal life and bugs, foliage, sand and the constant threat of rain seems to produce.

Christene Johnson waits in the narrow passage between the big cat cages at Shy Wolf Sanctuary, a Naples non-profit rescue and habitat for wolves and other exotic animals.

Even in a day-to-day life that could hardly be considered ordinary, this morning is beyond unusual. Today Johnson is going to work on her first black Asian leopard, an unpredictable 13-year-old with three legs named Moondance.

Moondance does not want Johnson’s services. Or perhaps more accurately, she doesn’t want to be stuck again with that needle on the end of the pole.

Sanctuary founder Nancy Smith bent the syringe needle trying to sedate her the first time. She fills another syringe, reloads the long pole and threads it through the single-ply chainlink of the cage to try again.

Moondance will have none of it and retreats to the protection of a small enclosure.

“Did you not explain to her that we are trying to help her?” asks Cindy Carter, a longtime volunteer who works with the cats. Beside Moondance (who was rescued from another facility after a full-grown cat in an adjoining cage bit the 6-month-old’s leg off), there’s a jaguar-leopard cross named Bango and three Florida cougars.

Johnson looks at the cat for a moment. Then: “Help?” Johnson says. “What’s help?”

Carter nods and laughs. That sounds like Moondance all right.

Johnson, 41, has been working with animals the past five years. She’s the one-man-band of Healthy Animal Essentials. “Rewarding Unconditional Love,” her business card says, followed by a string of acronyms, job descriptions and titles.

VOM, CCMT, CEMT. Holistic Animal Practitioner & Energy Worker. Animal Chiro-practitioner & Massage. Animal Communication & Reiki Master. Medical Intuitive & Dietary Consultant.

Some of it makes some sense — to some people anyway — but animal communication? Like Doctor Doolittle and Animal Planet’s gushing pet psychic Sonya Fitzpatrick?

More or less.

Used to be that people didn’t admit to reading their horoscope regularly much less seeing a psychic with their orange tabby. But today there are television shows, workshops and books that purport to connect us with our furriest children. Plug in the words pet and psychic into the Google search engine and you’re likely to pull more than four million hits.

It seems as though if our pets want to talk, we want to listen.

- - -

Still, Johnson is mostly hired for the more mundane aspects of her skills: spinal care on a 200-pound English mastiff perhaps or massage on a partially paralyzed Pekinese. The energy work, the telepathic communication and psychic sensitivity to uncover medical issues is an added bonus she says factors into her more mainstream therapies. She has about 30 clients and, in addition to the physical therapy, she also offers workshops on pet massage and animal communication, private readings and a forum for people who want to contact dead pets.

“Excuse me,” Smith says as she comes by with a large metal-link gate. She glances back at Johnson: “Just to be safe.”

Johnson walks down to Moondance’s cage. She drops into a crouch and watches the 120-pound cat drift into a sedative haze — dead weight with big teeth, crushing jaws and wide open eyes.

She shakes her head. “I have a cat muzzle but not for anything that big.”

Are you ever afraid?

“Yes, but you can’t let them know it ,” she says. “Usually it’s not an issue. I usually work on house pets. Dogs, cats, the occasional snake and guinea pig. Working out here is always high risk.”

Johnson walks into the habitat with only a few tools, which include a small, spring-loaded devise for joint manipulation that makes a sound many animals dislike. Especially at first.

“Is this going to freak her out?” Carter asks frowning. The sanctuary staff members seem a little nervous: It’s rare to be in a cage with a big cat, sedated or not.

Johnson shakes her head. “I’m going to make the sound first.” And she does, three or four soft ka-pings in a row. The tool was originally designed for humans but later altered for work with animals. Because it’s adjustable, she can use it on a hamster, a great Dane or a horse.

And the treatment works, Smith says. “They show it in different ways but the total release, you can see it.”

In the past four or five years of working at Shy Wolf, Johnson has adjusted one coyote, a number of wolves and wolf-dogs, as well as shed some light on the abuse and neglect that may be influencing current behaviors.

Johnson moves up and down the cat’s spine three times, stopping periodically to explore the musculature with her fingertips. She’s noticing a domino-effect of problems created by the gate Moondance developed to compensate for her missing leg.

“The problem is that muscle structure has been altered to the point bone structure has changed,” she tells Smith.

She tugs loose some hair from Moondance’s dense coat. An alternative vet Johnson works with will do a DNA test on it. Perhaps something else will be revealed — a parasite, say, a vitamin deficiency or an infection.

The cat’s foot twitches, but her eyes are closed now and she appears deeply asleep.

“She stayed very present through the whole adjustment,” Johnson says, “and then she just let go.”

Carter watches, hands on her hips.

“I was a nervous wreck last night,” she says as Johnson works on Moondance’s teacup ears.

“Oh, were you scared I was going to hurt your girl?”

“Noooo, I was worried my girl was going to hurt you.” She looks down at the cat. “Oh, poor little girl.”

- - -

Believer or non-believer, there are oh-my-God moments that make you stop and think.

One starts with Elan, a wolf dog rescued from a Collier County home.

Elan came to them with dangerous weight loss that had revealed an infection from a collar that had once been so tight that the skin had grown around it. Sanctuary volunteers took him to the emergency vet, who gave Elan a 50-50 chance of surviving, even with treatment.

“He basically had given up any will to live,” says Deanna Deppen, who has worked with Johnson and is on the Shy Wolf board. “Of course, we were pouring medicine into him. But he wouldn’t eat anything — with the medicine or without it. He wouldn’t eat dry food, canned food, raw meat, chicken, beef, turkey, hamburgers — cooked or raw. We tried cheese. We tried organs, the hearts and livers that they generally like. He wouldn’t eat anything. Certainly not enough to keep him alive.”

Desperate, they called Johnson, who told them he wanted a cheeseburger.

“He wanted it on a bun on a plate, a china plate like you’d get in a restaurant. She said it just like that, ‘like you’d get in a restaurant.’ We fixed the cheeseburger and took it out to him and he devoured half of it. He buried the other half for a midnight snack. We made him a second one and he ate the top half, basically. He was full because he hadn’t eaten anything in so long.”

Since then, he eats everything put in front of him. And without the fancy plating.

“It was as if it was a test,” Deppen says now. “If he told her what he needed and wanted, would we provide it?”

It makes you think.

“I think we all have the ability, it’s just she somehow can tune into it,” Deppen says. “It’s like when you have a deja vu moment or you know you’ve seen something before or been in a situation before. A gut feeling that something is right or wrong. She’s just able to communicate, to translate it better.”

Dr. Colin Burrows isn’t convinced. He’s the chairman of small animal clinical sciences at the University of Florida, which supports the only veterinary college in the state. He’s also chief of staff of the school’s veterinary medical center’s small animal hospital.

“It’s sort of a fiction,” he says of animal communication. “Shades of the horse whisperer kind of stuff. That’s not to say that there isn’t an ability, for some people, to read body language. With cats and dogs, and other animals, you can see a wide spectrum of subtle behavioral things that reveal the attitude of the animals.”

He mentions the curled lip of a snarling dog and the cat with a tail up as examples of easy-to-read animal communication.

“But as far as I’m aware — again, I’m a vet, by specialization I’m an internist and by sub specialization I’m a gastroenterologist — as far as I’m aware, I’ve never seen anything in the scientific literature that in any way, shape or form supports that kind of communication with animals. Like homeopathy and herbal medicines, some people say, oh yeah, that really works. It depends on what you believe.”

And people want to believe, he says, because animals are increasingly part of the fabric of the family. As ersatz parents, our pet’s health and happiness — or more starkly, their illness or death — takes on the same kind of valence a child’s might.

“People get very emotionally attached to their pets. Just as with people with terminal disease, they’re willing to try anything and everything.” From mainstream treatment to the far reaches of acceptable practice.

Then he laughs. “I’m looking at old medical books in my library. There’s stuff in these books that we just laugh at now. Bleeding people and animals? Today’s accepted practice is tomorrow’s quackery.”

He laughs again. “Who am I to comment?”

- - -

Johnson sits on the tile floor next to Tas, a 6-year-old English mastiff. He is spread across the Golden Gate living room like a fawn carpet of flesh, muscle and paws.

She works on his back, hands sunk into the pliable sea of skin. Johnson is smiling, talking to Tas and concentrating without exactly focusing. She doesn’t seem to be doing anything more extraordinary than massage.

“He loves when Chrissy comes,” says Peggy Hilton, a fourth-grade teacher at Big Cypress Elementary. “In the beginning, he wasn’t sure what all this was, but it only took once.

“And once I met Chrissy, a world of alternative vets opened up. I didn’t even know they existed.”

What do your friends say about using alternative physical therapies on your dogs?

She thinks for a second. “It depends on who it is. If they’re open to alternative things, it’s like, cool, that’s fine. If not, they think I’m crazy.”

Hilton shrugs. “It helps people. It helps dogs.” What’s the problem?

“We started out with just massage, but when I found out that she could do this kind of work (animal communication), I was, like, great! Because I had a lot of questions.”

Shade, her 4-year-old brindle mastiff, lays on her side near Hilton. Shade, they says, is scared of a lot of things. Leaving the house. Walking up a ramp to the car.

“She shared images,” Johnson says of Shade. “There’s lots of fear there, which is uncommon since she’s been with Peggy since puppyhood.”

That’s often how it works, she says. Pictures: Maybe of a frying pan, which Johnson held responsible for a depression in one dog’s skull, or a blue ball, which Elan wanted in addition to his cheeseburger. There was also a Russian horse that “had no English so we had to use pictures because I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying.”

Some communication is like video. Or like you’ve picked up the telephone in the middle of a conversation, she says.

It’s all part of a puzzle that only she — and the client — can make sense of.

People who come to Johnson for readings usually want to know the things people usually want to know. Did I do the right thing? Do they forgive me? Also: Do animals have a soul; Do they feel? And as the humans face the question of hastening the inevitable: How long do we have?

People are funny, though. The biggest fear most have coming to Johnson is that their dog or cat will reveal something embarrassing or uncomfortable about them, she says.

“That they’re a bad mommy,” she explains. “Of course, if I see that, I keep it to myself.” Hilton wanted to know what caused Shade to break into a panic during a therapy-dog visit at a nursing home.

“She’s got past life issues,” Johnson says now. “For some reason the kidney meridian doesn’t want to run the right way. Which is about fear.”

She changes positions and begins working around Tas’ chest.

“It’s a testament to Chrissy that he lets her massage him there.”

“He really lets me dig.”

Hilton nods. “Do you think he’d let anyone else get in his face like that?”

Johnson admits the work she does is not for everyone and that there are always going to be skeptics.

“I’ve been dealing with skeptics for 20 years,” she says. “Including members of my own family.

“Skepticism is what keeps it alive for me. I’ve had to stand up to very large men and had to stand up with what I believe in. The healing modalities I believe in have been around for thousands and thousands of years. I don’t have to defend them.

“I tell people they can believe what they want.”

- - -

Contact Christene Johnson at 825-0939 or love4animals@earthlink.net.