Anna Breytenbach

Early life and career

Anna Breytenbach was born on August 16, 1968 in Cape Town, South Africa to Barbara Breytenbach (nee Finn) and Johannes Cloete Breytenbach. After having successfully studied Psychology, Marketing and Economics at the University of Cape Town she entered the corporate world. She had a career for 12 years in Human Resources and Information Technology, in both Australia and the USA. Since 2004 Anna Breytenbach has practised as a professional animal communicator. She currently lives in coastal South Africa and travels in other African countries, Europe, Australia and USA to conduct workshops on animal communication.

Interspecies communication

In her twenties she decided to pursue her passion for wildlife (big cats in particular) by becoming a cheetah handler at a conservation education project. On moving to America, she explored wolf and other predator conservation. She has also served on committees for wolf, snow leopard, cheetah and mountain lion conservation.

Observing and being in close contact with these animals she says she found that she became more empathic. During her tracking training with the Wilderness Awareness School just outside Seattle, Washington she says she began to experience a heightened state of awareness with regard to the animals she was tracking. Having been raised in Africa, she had little experience or knowledge about North American species and therefore found it difficult to analyze or interpret their footprints in any logical way based on visual cues. Her mentors suggested that instead she should "feel" the energy from the track - whereupon she says she started to get brief mental images or other 'sensings'. These "sudden knowings" would subsequently prove to be true. She then researched the phenomenon of interspecies communication further and studied to advanced levels through the Assisi International Animal Institute in the USA from 2001 to 2004.

Subsequently she worked at CyberTracker International, the inventors of CyberTracker, a piece of free GPS data collection software used across the world for monitoring and managing wildlife. She travels widely lecturing on animal conservation issues and teaching animal communication.

Documentary film and public appearance

Anna Breytenbach was in 2012 the subject of a 52-minute documentary film produced by Swati Thiyagarajan, Craig Foster and Damon Foster entitled “The Animal Communicator”. This documentary was nominated for Best Long Documentary and Best Director of the “Jade Kunlun” Awards of 2012 World Mountain Documentary Festival of Qinghai China.

A short clip from the documentary film depicting Breytenbach’s interaction with a black leopard at the Jukani Predator Park in South Africa was published on YouTube and went viral with over 4.5 million views. Anna Breytenbach appeared in a segment on South African television programme Carte Blanche in March 2014.