This article is the foundation for the rest of our work. It explains who we work with, what we believe, how those beliefs become practice and where to read further.

In brief

• Who it is for: horses, dogs and cats, often working, assistance, competing, ageing or moving through a change, and the human companions who know them best.
• What we offer: veterinary Western herbal medicine, nutrition, structured observation and clinical reasoning, coordinated with your veterinary care team and delivered mostly by telehealth from Medowie and Parkes, NSW.
• What we do not do: replace veterinary diagnosis, emergency care, surgery, pharmaceutical medication or restricted veterinary acts, or treat behaviour as a fault to be corrected.

Who we work with

Our work is for the animal whose willingness to give has been extraordinary, and for the human companion who knows them best, often someone whose daily life has been changed by their animal’s care and who is beginning to wonder what that giving may be costing. It is for horses, dogs and cats. An animal’s willingness may be unconditional; their vital force is not.

Often the animal is doing something demanding: holding public access as an assistance dog, competing or travelling as a horse, working a long day. Sometimes they are ageing, chronically unwell or moving through a passage such as a retirement, a diagnosis or a loss in the household. The companion is the keeper of their animal’s stories: the repeated observations, the preferences that never show up in a clinic room and the knowledge of what has been tried, received, resisted or endured.

That role has a name: the seanchaí, the Irish word for a keeper and teller of stories. A seanchaí is a faithful witness: someone who senses, describes and tells what the relationship reveals. They are not the author of the animal’s story, and they do not speak over the animal.

Our vision and mission

Vision: improved animal health, with animal companions confidently stewarding their animal’s healthcare, guided by their animal’s preferences and needs.

Mission: to provide international recognition for animal companions as stewards of their animal’s healthcare.

How we work

Our work begins with the animal’s story and what the companion is noticing. Together we put into words how the animal is faring, gather the story and the resources around it, shape the healthcare question, bring in the right supports and keep track of what changes over time. We call this process The Liminal Keys™: a way of bringing what you know about your animal, their wellbeing and the wider healthcare picture into clearer relationship.

You begin with a short telehealth Discovery Call about what is happening and whether we are the right fit. If it makes sense to go further, a Wayfinding Consult maps your animal’s story and what your circumstances allow, and ongoing membership support is recommended from there rather than chosen in advance.

Herbal prescribing is part of our scope and is healthcare, not casual product advice: it rests on consultation, written records and checks against your animal’s history, medications and veterinary care. A bottle of herbs is not a substitute for understanding the individual animal and ‘natural’ is not a guarantee of safety.

Based at Medowie and working regularly in Parkes, we deliver most of this work by telehealth, because most of what matters happens where you and your animal are. Explore working together, including membership tiers and in-person care.

What changes for you and your animal

Animals often show meaningful change through subtle sensory, behavioural and relational evidence long before it becomes an obvious problem. When care is fragmented, the companion holds those observations alone, each appointment sees only part of the picture and the animal’s story is rebuilt every time.

What changes is that you move from carrying it all alone to coordinating a coherent, evolving care pathway centred on your animal’s sovereignty, vitality and needs. In practice:

• Your animal’s preferences, vitality and needs become more visible and influential in their care.
• You become a clearer observer and a more confident communicator and coordinator, able to adapt decisions without overriding your animal.
• Change is recognised earlier and recorded against a maintained baseline, so your veterinary and allied practitioners receive clearer descriptions and questions, and complementary options are reviewed more safely.

What you hold at the end is a documented, evolving care pathway that brings together your animal’s sensory evidence, relational story, healthcare information, next steps and a plan for the passages ahead.

The principles behind the practice

The animal as a sovereign participant

Medicine rests on primum non nocere, permission and respect. When these are applied to animals, autonomy is usually described as something they lack formally, even as they express agency in many ways.

We recognise that animals possess relational autonomy: an individual capacity for self-determination, self-governance and self-authorisation, constituted through their relationships. It is more than permission to choose between options a human has arranged. It recognises the animal’s scope to influence their life, organise their responses and act from their own standing within the relationship. Neither individual bestows relational autonomy on the other, but each can recognise, support or override it.

mindDog Australia shows what this looks like. It requires psychiatric assistance dogs to show intelligent initiative: recognising distress and offering support without waiting for a command. That reflects an internal capacity to assess distress (self-governance), an active choice to intervene (self-determination) and a partnership that recognises the animal’s standing to act (self-authorisation).

If the animal is a participant, healing cannot be treated only as something administered from outside.

Bríg: nature in the individual

Ne obliviscaris vis medicatrix naturae.

Forget not the healing power of nature.

In traditional philosophy, nature is more than just ‘outside’. Naturae is understood as physis, the inherent, self-regulating force of life. The same self-regulating principle that balances an entire ecosystem is expressed within each individual as their Bríg. Bríg is nature in the individual microcosm.

Bríg is the emergent signature of the individual: a dynamic vitality that self-regulates in response to variability across the synergy of their biological, psychological, social and environmental life. It is Willow Wise Therapies’ word for the vital force. Healthcare can support Bríg but cannot manufacture, command or replace it.

Western herbal medicine is a living traditional medicine, responsive to both tradition and science. Contemporary evidence adds knowledge of plant chemistry, pharmacology, contraindications and possible interactions. Practitioners weigh historical, traditional, clinical and scientific sources against the individual animal’s presentation. Traditional knowledge supplies the philosophy that guides ethical practice, and clinical experience sharpens observation and comparison. Sensory practices such as organoleptics, the direct assessment of a plant’s taste, aroma and texture, add real-time information for identifying a plant and preparing it.

Medicinal plants can be viewed as complex, adaptive systems. Complex systems science and Western herbal medicine both hold that plants and animals have co-evolved. That shared history helps explain how a plant’s complex chemistry can communicate with an individual, through synergistic, non-linear processes that support their self-regulation. Allostasis, the maintenance of stability through change, describes one form of regulation through which Bríg is expressed. Read more: Bríg and Vis Medicatrix Naturae in Western Herbal Medicine.

Relational reciprocity

Being in relationship with an animal has its own synergy, built on continuous, interdependent feedback. Neither of you forces the other to change, and neither commands health to happen in the other. Through relational autonomy and reciprocity, you each provide a supportive environment and use co-regulation to support each other’s Bríg.

Reciprocity in relationship. Relationship in reciprocity.

Care in relationship is not a one-way exchange where the animal gives and the human receives. The animal–human relationship is an entity in its own right, in which animal and human nourish, lead, respond to, influence and are changed by one another. Animal and human are sovereign participants in that relationship.

Reciprocity in relationship asks the companion to notice what the animal has given, what the animal now needs and how the balance of care can be restored. Relationship in reciprocity means that this restoration is not abstract or transactional: it happens through the living practices of noticing, describing, deciding and caring, so that neither of you is depleted for the other.

Reciprocity does not mean every act must be repaid. It asks whether nourishment, leadership and understanding are allowed to move in both directions. 

These are the Three Challenges of the Very Important Animal Companion:

To nourish and be nourished

To lead and be led

To be understood and to understand

They describe relationship as participation rather than possession.

Mental health and relational resilience

We adopt the World Health Organisation’s definition of mental health: a state of mental wellbeing that enables individuals to cope with life’s stresses, realise their abilities, learn, work well and contribute to their community. Animal welfare science has largely treated mental health as affective state: the pain, fear, comfort and pleasure an animal experiences. Its growing attention to agency and to human–animal interactions opens the way for relational autonomy to reframe that picture.

For an animal with relational autonomy, mental health is more than the consequence of affective states such as pain, fear, distress, comfort and safety. Nor is it an environmental imposition. It is the expression of Bríg’s integrity in the psychological dimension and a primary influence on Bríg’s integrity across the individual’s life.

Relational resilience is that integrity in action. It is the emergent signature of the interactions and influences across the biological, psychological, social and environmental dimensions, expressed in how effectively the individual self-regulates to absorb a shock, self-organise and evolve toward a stable equilibrium without collapsing. It is supported through relationship and the individual remains able to respond to change without ceasing to be their own.

Resilience is not endless endurance, so it depends on reciprocity in the relationship. Continued adaptation can carry costs and does not, by itself, show that an animal is thriving. Refusal, withdrawal or a changed way of participating can also express resilience when they protect the animal from being overridden. Read more: What supports an animal to cope with change?

Working with your veterinary team

Willow Wise Therapies works collaboratively with primary veterinary care, contributing qualified veterinary Western herbal medicine knowledge, animal-centred observation and healthcare coordination, while staying clear about scope, safety and professional responsibility. We do not replace veterinary diagnosis, emergency treatment or the responsibilities of the animal’s primary veterinary team.

An animal with sudden illness, significant pain, injury, breathing difficulty, poisoning or another urgent change needs timely veterinary assessment. Herbal medicine should never delay necessary investigation or intervention.

When Western herbal medicine is considered, the animal’s wider health context matters. Their diagnosis, medicines, supplements, history and current responses can affect whether a plant preparation is suitable. Contraindications and herb–medicine interactions need careful attention.

Clear boundaries do not diminish Western herbal medicine. They protect the animal and make meaningful collaboration possible.

Qualifications and experience

Susan Johnson is a veterinary herbalist and medicinal herbalist, and the founder of Willow Wise Therapies, which has been in practice since 1998. She holds a Graduate Diploma of Veterinary Western Herbal Medicine (College of Integrated Veterinary Therapies), an Advanced Diploma of Western Herbal Medicine, a Bachelor of Equine Science (Charles Sturt University) and a Bachelor of Science with a chemistry submajor (University of NSW). She is a full member of the Naturopathic and Herbalist Association of Australia and a professional member of the International Equine Body Workers Association and a qualified equine bodyworker (EEBW, EEMFR). Her writing draws on clinical practice, plant chemistry and animal science in equal measure — and on the animals themselves, who taught her to read response before symptom.

A note from the founder: where the name and the practice came from

The name came before I had the language to explain everything it held.

Willow stands for adaptability without disconnection from one’s roots. A willow grows on land while its roots seek water. It belongs at the meeting place between the two and responds to changing conditions through flexibility rather than rigidity. The name also carries a personal memory of resting with my back against a willow in Monet’s garden.

Wise came through the willow fid of the Ogham. It was never meant to suggest I held every answer. It acknowledges knowledge held by individuals and shared by communities.

Therapies is deliberately plural. When I established the practice in 1998, I imagined a space where friends with different skills could practise alongside one another, because no person and no discipline can hold everything an individual might need. That gathering did not emerge with humans in the form I had imagined. It emerged through my relationships with animals, who became participants, guides and teachers in the practice’s development.

Western herbal medicine later gave me a professional tradition through which to understand much of what those relationships had already begun to show me. Animal bodywork, Kinergetics, biological sciences and lived experience added other forms of knowledge. These perspectives did not combine into a claim of certainty. They taught me to observe more closely, and to recognise that clinical evidence, sensory detail, traditional knowledge and lived experience can each contribute without any one of them explaining the whole animal.

A practice of remembering

Shaped across nearly three decades of learning alongside Western herbal traditions, human and animal mentors and lived practice, Willow Wise Therapies is defined by one enduring commitment: to recognise the individual animal as a sovereign participant, and to facilitate—never command—the conditions in which Bríg can thrive.

Honouring that commitment is a daily practice. Observe before interpreting. Keep the animal’s stories without claiming to author them. Work within professional scope. Coordinate rather than compete. Stay prepared to revise an understanding in response to what the animal shows next.

Ne obliviscaris vis medicatrix naturae. Forget not the healing power of nature.

For us, that also means: forget not the individual. Healthcare cannot command their self-regulating vitality, but it can recognise them, honour their participation and facilitate the conditions in which their Bríg can continue its inherent work.

References

Hiestand, K. M. (2022). The autonomy principle in companion veterinary medicine: A critique. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 9, 953925. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2022.953925

Mackenzie, C. (2014). Three dimensions of autonomy: A relational analysis. In A. Veltman & M. Piper (Eds.), Autonomy, oppression and gender (pp. 15–41). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199969104.003.0002

Mellor, D. J., Beausoleil, N. J., Littlewood, K. E., McLean, A. N., McGreevy, P. D., Jones, B. & Wilkins, C. (2020). The 2020 Five Domains Model: Including human–animal interactions in assessments of animal welfare. Animals, 10(10), 1870. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10101870

Niemeyer, K., Bell, I. R. & Koithan, M. (2013). Traditional knowledge of Western herbal medicine and complex systems science. Journal of Herbal Medicine, 3(3), 112–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hermed.2013.03.001

.