From prison psychologist to wildlife whisperer: Interview with Susan Eirich

Ramble Bear, a 23-year-old rescued Ussuri brown bear, acts more like a poodle than a predator. He blinks and licks my hand through the protective fence, very demure. His tongue is surprisingly soft.

“He’s a big flirt,” Susan B. Eirich, licensed psychologist, biologist, and founder of Earthfire Institute Wildlife Sanctuary & Retreat Center, tells me during my visit to the center just west of Grand Teton National Park in the U.S. state of Idaho.

Eirich has a biology degree, but after getting a Ph.D. in psychology decided to work with people in maximum-security prisons. Then, in the late 1990s, her life took an unexpected turn when she was invited to help raise seven wolf puppies rescued from a movie set.

“When you get an offer like that, you drop everything,” Eirich says. “Holding those puppies close to your heart while you’re feeding them and feeling their heart beating and feeling their vitality — I just fell hopelessly, totally, completely in love.”

That love was a catalyst for action, and in 2000, Eirich and her late partner, Jean Simpson, who was a professional wild animal trainer, founded the Earthfire Institute. The now 165-acre (67-hectare) property connects to the Yellowstone-to-Yukon migration trail, protecting critical habitat for the biodiversity in the region.

Eirich has shared this wildlife sanctuary with bears, bison, bobcats, chickens, cougars, coyotes, deer, donkeys, foxes, horses, lynx, porcupines, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, turkeys, wolves, and many humans. Some were orphaned and too bonded to the humans who found them to be released. Some came from fur farms, roadside zoos or circuses, or were illegal pets. The humans mostly work here.

What started as a wildlife rescue facility evolved into something that now combines Eirich’s areas of expertise. Earthfire began hosting retreats where individuals or small groups of people could come be near the animals, particularly the ones that couldn’t be rereleased into the wild. The animals could always decide whether they wanted to interact with human visitors, and many did. These animals she calls the Wildlife Emissaries.

Over the decades, Eirich and her team watched as artists, scientists, healers and all sorts of people had interactions with animals that they described as profound and life-changing.

“Once you make a connection with any kind of being, it changes you profoundly,” Eirich says. “Most of us have had an experience of being changed by a dog or a cat or a horse. But these [other] beings, people don’t know who they are. We can see them in the wild, and we might have a momentary magical connection. We can see them in a zoo. But living with them, you get to see the depth of them.”

Eirich’s recently released book, Whispers from the Wild: An Invitation, captures these extraordinary interactions through heartfelt, vivid and often humorous storytelling. Each chapter tells the tale of a single animal. By doing so, she makes a case that every animal, like every human, is an individual with a distinct personality. Each animal, not each species, has lessons to teach.

She writes about the task of conserving wildlife in a part of the world where many view predators like wolves and bears as enemies to people and livestock. The book’s prologue opens with such an anecdote.

“I was speeding down Highway 80 in Wyoming with a bawling young grizzly bear and three howling baby wolves in the back seat when the phone rang. It was my partner, Jean, in Idaho, sounding panicked. ‘The neighbors are shooting at me — can you hear the shots? I just wanted you to know in case something happened to me…’” Eirich writes.

In a recent interview, Eirich talks to me about her book and shares insights from her journey and work at the Earthfire Institute. She touches on the challenges of reconciling scientific training with unexplainable experiences with animals. She advocates for an open-minded approach that values both empirical evidence and personal experience, and discusses the importance of reconnecting with nature and each other to address the current mental and environmental health crises.

Eirich maintains a sense of hope rooted in the resilience and adaptability of life itself and encourages people to look beyond human society and connect with the beauty and healing power of the natural world.

“Not only do I think there’s hope, but I do know and have experienced that there is healing available,” she says. “Once you get outside of our little tempest in a teapot in our heads and in society, once we go outside of human society, there’s health and beauty and healing available.”

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: Tell me about your journey from prison psychologist to wolf pup mother to founding the Earthfire Institute wildlife sanctuary.

Susan Eirich: I always loved nature and animals. I got a degree in biology, but I also came from a difficult family background and went into therapy, which was excellent. I fell in love with psychology, or rather helping human growth, so I got a degree [Ph.D.] in that. I was quite happy. I found it fascinating. Working in prisons was like being a light in the darkness. It was a supermax [maximum security prison] I was working in. It wasn’t light duty. It was exhausting, but I loved it.

Then, someone invited me to help raise wolf puppies. When you get an offer like that, you drop everything. I’ve always loved wolves, ever since I could remember. So when this opportunity came, I helped raise seven wolf puppies rescued from a movie set. And just holding those puppies close to your heart while you’re feeding them and feeling their heart beating and feeling their vitality — I just fell hopelessly, totally, completely in love.

The way I see things is that it’s through love that you see the beauty and the truth of things. It’s like a channel. I saw the beauty of them, their vitality, their souls, their beings — everything about them. I said, “I can’t keep this for myself. I need to share this with my fellow beings.” This enlarged to all life, but right then, it was wolf puppies.

So I named them, and one was named Earthfire. I decided I had to start an institute to share who these beings are, and then expand to bears, wolves and other beings. That was the original impetus to share the magic that’s around us. Unfortunately, given the current world, we’re numb to so much of what’s around us. I wanted this to be a channel to aliveness.

Mongabay: What is happening at the Earthfire Institute these days?

Susan Eirich: These days, we’re extremely proud of our new bear gardens. A lovely woman put us in her will and gave us an extraordinary gift of several million dollars for our gardens. Every morning at dawn, I go out to let the animals into their gardens. We live in Idaho, where every animal we have is in danger: wolves, bears, etc. [People] want to kill them all … we have to be really careful that we have no escapes, with rigid restrictions. So the animals are kept in enclosures at night to sleep and then released into the gardens in the morning.

So in the morning, I’ll see Bramble Bear stretched out on his back in his hammock. I try to be quiet because I don’t want to wake them up from their beauty sleep. So they open the doors and the bears go into the pools and waterfalls, trees and berries, and things to dig and things to scratch. And then I go visit the wolves and the “small in size only” animals — I don’t call them small animals because they’re very large in personality, particularly the coyotes.

Unfortunately for me, a lot of time is spent on the computer. We are funded only by individual donations, so it’s a constant struggle. And I live in Idaho, near Grand Teton National Park, very isolated. But I really want our message [to get] out to the whole world. The animals here, to me, are a portal into something much larger. So I spend a lot of time on the computer, connecting with people, writing, doing podcasts, etc. And then, in the lovely evenings, I’m meditative with the land. The land is very vibrant here. It’s a wildlife corridor.

Mongabay: You recently published your book Whispers from the Wild. What compelled you to write this book, and what are the key messages?

Susan Eirich: The main thing is once you make a connection with any kind of being, it changes you profoundly. It can be a dog, it can be a cat, it doesn’t make any difference. Most of us have had an experience of being changed by a dog, a cat, or a horse. These beings [in the book], people don’t know who they are. We can see them in the wild, and we might have a momentary magical connection. We can see them in a zoo. But living with them, you get to see the depth of them.

I just can’t bear the idea that we humans don’t have a clue what a bear is. We have a little bit of a clue what a wolf is. We don’t have a clue because we don’t live with them. We study them as scientists, as biologists, but to actually live with them for a lifetime, the depth of their emotions and intelligence, their sense of mischief and play, and character, I have to share this. Because if people had a clue, we’d be more inclined to save land for them, treat them more carefully, or not hunt and destroy them mindlessly. They’re full fellow companions on the Earth with us, with great depth of emotions.

What compelled me was to share as best I could. I made the book into stories because I think that’s the best way we humans learn, not through intellectual stuff. We’re built for that ancient wisdom. So I wrote it as a bunch of stories to share who they are, for their sake as well as ours.

In a way, in psychology, we need to be seen. Each one of us has a need to be seen and included, and it’s no different with the animals. When you come to them with that attitude, they respond beautifully. When you come to look at them as a thing, they get insulted. So I wanted them to be seen.

Mongabay: It really struck me reading your book how the animals each have such individual personalities. Each one is as individual as every human that you meet. Can you tell me about these animals that you’ve cared for and the specific lessons that you’ve learned from them?

Susan Eirich: We had two black bears. A woman had them. I don’t know how she got them originally, but she thought they were very cute when they were small. When they started to grow, she couldn’t keep them any longer. So we took them as Major Bear and Huckleberry Bear. They lived together for many years, typical brothers who’d fight. Major Bear would steal Huckleberry’s ice cream. It was very sad to see Huckleberry trying to hide his strawberry ice cream from Major Bear’s big bear claws, looking very pathetic. But they slept together in the winter, arm in arm.

Then, Major Bear became ill. We did everything we could. We took him to a special bear hospital in Washington state. Nobody could figure out what was wrong, but he just sort of faded away and passed away. We buried him in our cemetery, which we have on the land. We tried traditional medicine, energy medicine, we tried everything, but nothing helped.

So he passed away, and Huckleberry was alone. We do retreats here, and we did a couple of week-long retreats with some artists from the California Institute of the Arts. One artist, a costume designer from L.A., was drawn to Huckleberry. She sat in front of his enclosure for a long time. Then she realized she was feeling really sad and couldn’t figure out why. She felt tears rolling down her face and said, “This is really weird.” Then she heard not the words but the message: “I miss my brother.”

That night around the campfire, when you say things that you don’t necessarily dare say in the day, she asked if Huckleberry had a brother. It blew her away. She wrote a little section in the book about her personal experience with Huckleberry and how it scared and thrilled her that the connection could be so deep. I love that story because it’s a bear reaching out across species with his grief to a person who knew nothing about him. All the stories I included have layer upon layer of what you can explore about the nature of reality and the nature of connection with one another.

Mongabay: You have a degree in biology and a Ph.D. in psychology, and you’re coming from this background of academic framework. But in your book, you talk about these phenomena that you’ve observed in animals and people that can’t really be explained under those frameworks, such as watching one of your bears receive distance energy work and then working to heal his injury. Has it been at all difficult for you to reconcile the spiritual and the scientific?

Susan Eirich: I am from a very hard science background in my family and Cornell biology, but I was always in love with nature. So there was this intellectual side and this love side.

But when I first started, I had this wolf that I was completely in love with, which is true for every animal here, by the way. There’s no favorite — my favorite is whichever one I’m with. But Apricot, one of our wolves, became ill with a temperature that was supposed to be 100% fatal for wolves. But wild animals have a vitality and a passion to live that we often underestimate.

She became all distorted, sort of epileptic; her eyes were crossed, she couldn’t move well, and I couldn’t stand it. I tried Western medicine. The vet recommended prednisone [an immunosuppressant, anti-inflammatory drug] because her nervous system was inflamed. But she was young, and I wasn’t going to keep her on prednisone her whole life. She wouldn’t have a long life if I did that.

Out of desperation and love, I looked for alternative methods. There was this woman who happened to live down the road from me who practices a version of craniosacral therapy on human nervous systems that are paralyzed. I asked if she would be willing to try to work on a wolf. To our delight, she said yes.

The long and short of it is, to answer your question, the wolf lay down after a little while. She went into what looked like a healing trance and stayed there for 45 minutes, and then she asked for more and more. Ultimately, she healed completely.

So I had to make a shift between hard-core biology and craniosacral therapy, which is working with energy instead of drugs. So that’s sort of my “What’s happening here?” moment.

And then we tried it with a paralyzed cougar. So it wasn’t just wolves; it was also a cougar. My mind began to open, but it opened on the basis of evidence. It was something that we might call “woo-woo,” but I saw it. I have medical records. I had to start to expand. I’m still uncertain, as I imagine many of us are, about the boundaries between what we call reality, what we see as reality, what science calls reality, and energy work and what’s beyond energy work.

I’m still exploring that, but I think if you’re a true scientist, you’re open, not closed. So that was the beginning of my opening to the idea that there’s more here than we know.

Mongabay: Are there any other anecdotes or stories you want to highlight or lessons that you’ve learned from these animals?

 Susan Eirich: I wrote about the beauty of a deer. We had a three-legged deer who was found on the roadside with his umbilical cord still attached, with two broken legs, etc. A woman rescued him and then brought him to us. But he’d never known anything. He had never known other deer. He’d known humans as his herd. He was a regular old deer, the ones we see all the time and take for granted. But we had him in the front row as the first thing people would see when he came up, and they stopped short, and they’d be mesmerized by this beautiful deer. And they would start to glow, and he would start to glow. And I see this over and over again, people connecting with him. I began to wonder.

Ordinarily, he would emanate that towards his herd. That is, as a herd connection, but his herd was humans. So humans began to get a sense of what it might be like … almost like his heart expanded, and then people’s hearts expanded without realizing what was happening, just standing there.

So that would be a lesson to me as I wonder what it’s like to live in a herd of buffalo or deer where there is this herd connection. And that actually, we have that theory or tribe as a herd to what would it be like, if we could live from that place?

And the responsiveness, the responsiveness of every single animal, here, as I said earlier, they just respond. There’s a connection that happens. There are still wild animals; they still can bite, and they are still fully themselves. But there’s a connection that happens that is quite magical.

Mongabay: Can you tell me more about this concept of Reconnection Ecology? How does it differ from other approaches, and what sort of benefits does it offer?

Susan Eirich: [Reconnection Ecology] grew out of these experiences. We all know at this point how healing nature is. There’s research about how even having a picture of a tree on a hospital wall helps you heal faster. So there are all these different levels of connection with nature.

Reconnection Ecology is about the depth of experience. If you can invite and understand the possibility of this depth of connection and not be scared by it (because it is scary), it changes us. Our whole lives become more centered, more meaningful, less frantic, and more fulfilled. The word I use is “reconnect” because I think we originally had this connection, and we’re returning to it. The next word is trust. Trust that connection; don’t set it aside. And then use it to act to protect all life. That trust part is just as important.

Part of the reconnection is to try to help us reconnect by sharing stories and reminding one another of experiences we’ve had. Not relegating them to the wastebasket or hiding them or keeping them secret or forgotten, but bringing them out.

I’m actually working on a second book right now, inviting people to share their stories. I want it to be worldwide because I think there are millions of us who have stories [about connections to animals]. So I invite anyone to contact me to share their stories if they have one.

Mongabay: Mongabay’s readers and listeners are often people who work in conservation or are decision-makers in that world. How do you think people who work in conservation might be better informed by or incorporate these ideas of the complex emotional and social lives of animals into their work?

Susan Eirich: I think there are many wildlife organizations around the world doing deeply heartful work. But I think many of us are limited by culture. We’re seeing through the lens of culture rather than seeing clearly from being to being. The very idea that these kinds of connections are possible starts to open up possibilities.

It’s important not to connect with an animal emotionally based solely on your needs but on who they are, fostering a genuine connection between two beings. Once we know that’s possible, we can start looking at the animals we’re working with from a different level and have them connect with us and teach us things.

I think if you come from the larger picture, you come up with different ideas of how to do conservation — working with nature and nature’s systems instead of imposing our limited ideas on how to do conservation. We can take learning from life itself and work with life to determine the best way to preserve ecosystems.

Mongabay: Why do you feel it’s important for people to be connecting with and learning from the wild at this moment?

Susan Eirich: From a human point of view, we’re desperate. Personally we’re scared, we’re lonely, we’re frazzled, we’re worried — for good reason. We’re disconnected, partly because of our culture and partly because of computers, which is causing a huge mental health crisis. So just from a human suffering point of view, it’s important now.

Another reason is that we’re losing animals. It’s now or never. The animals have much to teach us about how we can make the shift we need to make if we tune in and receive on levels that we’re not trained to attune to. Part of my work is to try to help us tune into those levels so we can home our own natural wisdom and the wisdom around us.

We need every bit of energy we can get against the negative forces that are overwhelming us. Every bit of positive energy is there. We have it in nature, and we have it in our own selves if we tune into it and support one another.

Mongabay: Do you have hope?

Susan Eirich: I think it’s silly not to have hope because we simply aren’t smart enough to know what will happen. And in the meantime, we need to do everything we can. Even if it were hopeless, what difference would it make? We’d still need to do everything we can.

So I do have hope because of the incredible resilience of life, because of the intelligence of life, because there are so many good people around the world working really hard. And we can’t predict what’s going to happen.

I ended my book with the story of a snail. When I first moved out West, I got a job in a clinic in Flagstaff, Arizona. My office was a tiny cubicle with a small window high up that I couldn’t even see out of. I couldn’t stand it, so I bought a little goldfish in a bowl with a plant for the goldfish so I could look at something living. Unbeknownst to me, a tiny little brown snail came with this plant.

I discovered the snail and started watching it. It would put out its foot and glide across the bottom of the tank, glide up the side of the tank, and then elongate its foot to glide across the top of the water using surface tension. Then, it would gently paraglide all the way down. And it would do it again and again. That snail was having such a good time. It reminded me of life itself.

There are stories of ravens skiing down snowy rooftops, bears and wolves rolling down hills, and buffalo running down a hill and skating out onto frozen lakes. There’s just a sense of play and physical joy of being alive. Or anytime you see a seed begin to sprout or a baby being born. Life is a celebration. There’s not a word exciting enough to express it.

Life itself is a celebration, and we can’t stop that. It’s going to continue one way or another. It’s kind of up to us how much we participate in it or try to override it and use it. We can’t destroy it, but it’s kind of up to us, and as long as it’s up to us, there’s a chance of hope for us. Life itself, I don’t worry too much about it. I worry a lot about the animals that are going to suffer, but life will find a way. I think we humans are incredibly resilient. Unfortunately, we are forced to be sometimes.

Mongabay: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Susan Eirich: I would also say, look more broadly to the beauty around you. Have it nourish you. There’s an incredible book called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue. He talks about ideas like, “Who knows if your land doesn’t miss you when you’re gone?” There are so many lovely, opening ideas that bring us calm.

I guess I would say not only do I think there’s hope, but I do know and have experience of seeing that there is healing available. Once you get outside of our little tempest in a teapot in our heads and in society, once we go outside of human society, there’s health and beauty and healing available.

Banner image of Susan Eirich and one of the original seven wolves named Stardance. Photo by Marilyn Paine.

Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.

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