This legal eagle quit her $75,000-a-year job to pursue her passion — talking to animals.

Nikki Vasconez was working as a property lawyer when she decided to start researching how to communicate with animals in September 2020.

“I started out practicing on family and friends’ pets and some strangers’ animals for free,” the 33-year-old said. “But as soon as I created social media accounts, I began to gain a steady following, and it wasn’t long before requests started pouring in.”

The Philadelphia native quit her job to become a full-time pet psychic just one year after beginning her research.

“I was so miserable in my previous job, I was working huge hours and was just unhappy but was too scared to change,” she told South West News Service. “Until this came along.”

In September 2021, Vasconez launched her pet psychic business on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. She was quickly booked up for the next four months.

“When I set up my TikTok account, I gained 175,000 followers within months and by January 2022, I had to stop taking bookings because I was so inundated,” she said.

Vasconez makes more now as a pet psychic than she did as an attorney, charging $350 for a one-hour session. She restricts herself to two readings per day to ensure the best quality readings.

“The business just took off,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it — I had to set up a waitlist which had a total of 4,000 people on it requesting me to speak with their animals.”

During a typical reading, Vasconez, who runs Nikki Vasconez Animal Communication, sits in a quiet room in her home and studies a photo of the animal. She telepathically asks the animal a series of questions, and records them as well as the animal’s “responses” so owners can listen to the exchange.

While the psychic prefers to not know many details about the animal to prevent her “human brain” from interfering with messages, she does insist on seeing the animal’s eyes in the photo, and knows the pet’s name, gender and names of the people the pet lives with.

“When I’m communicating with the animals, sometimes I see images flash across my eyes or I’ll hear particular phrases,” she said. “I don’t hear their accents or tone of voice, but I can always sense their personality.”

Vasconez also talks to animals who have passed away, which are where about half of her requests come from. 

“Of the animals I’ve spoken to that have passed, they are never upset, angry or hold a grudge,” she explained. “In my experience, they’ve only ever been happy and free and talk about how parts of their body have been restored and ailments that have gone away.”

She claims she speaks to dead animals who comment on the lives of humans who are still living. 

“It’s changed my entire perspective of death because it’s a shift, a transition because I’ve never had a single animal that is sad.”

Vasconez mainly works with household pets such as dogs and cats, but has also seen a wide range of animals including geckos, bearded dragons, horses, cows, pigs, birds and donkeys. 

Her clients include pet owners as well as barn owners and rescue owners. Many of these clients want to communicate with pets and want to understand their pain or suffering.

Women make up about 98% of the pet owners who requested her help.

The psychic remembered discovering one cat she spoke to was experiencing tooth pain. 

“The owner had asked for my help when they couldn’t work out what was wrong with him,” she recounted. “Vets had ruled out any teeth issues because the X-ray showed no signs of a problem, but I just kept getting this pain in my own mouth while speaking with him so I believed he was telling me he had pain in his lower jaw.” 

“It turned out the X-ray revealed he had an abscess and needed a tooth pulled out!”

Vasconez said she discovered that animals have opinions just like humans.

She once spoke to a horse, Cruse, who told her she did not like his owner’s boyfriend. 

“Cruse told me not to worry though, because the boyfriend doesn’t like him either! I told the owner this and she laughed saying that was all true.”

In addition to her readings, Vasconez offers workshops for people who want to talk to their pets. She was self-taught and believes that anyone who wants to can develop the skill, too. 

“Everyone can do this, I 100% believe this. I didn’t start out being able to do this but I learned to do it.”

Even though she is extremely successful and has garnered a lot of interest, Vasconez revealed that she receives online criticism as well from people who are skeptical and believe she is a fraud. 

“I understand it can be confusing as we are raised to believe that interspecies communication isn’t the norm,” she said. 

“The criticism initially bothered me but I no longer care,” she added. “I couldn’t be happier now doing what I love most.”