Sarah Reagan

Knoxville, Tennessee, United States

Sarah Reagan

Knoxville, Tennessee, United States

I am a certified animal naturopath/homeopath and currently teach and practice in the holistic animal health field, specializing in equine and feline health. I also do some limited human health consultations, especially in aromatherapy with the use of Young Living Essential Oils.

My first love is Goethean Science and using (or more correctly stated, becoming with) its techniques as an approach to study and write about the relationship between human and domestic animals, particularly those we tend to look upon as companion animals, not excluding horses. Even though my specifically chosen field of study and work is Human/Animal Studies (HAS), that field itself involves knowledge of several disciplines including behavioral ecology, ethology, and psychology. However, when these sciences are approached conventionally, all of these approaches are reductive and the entities themselves (the animal, the human) are seen as the conductors of their world in an interactive yet atomistic way. The human and animal are typically viewed as self-contained entities that influence each other both spatially and temporally. This kind of relationship is referred to as substantive, as opposed to an ontological relationality. We often say..."I have a relationship with my (fill in the blank)". What we are not seeing is that we are each a creative function of our relationships at any given time. In practical terms, what this heavily impacts for animals is the transient nature of their existence in our human world. We fail to recognize that we all are products of all the relationships between ourselves and our environment, including between the human and animal in that environment. Even though it may not be obvious at first, these concepts also impact the health of the animal, so everything I do is integrative within a science of holism. Therefore, what my mission has become is to introduce these concepts to the human/animal relationship as well as to the approach within natural health.