Our game master is starting a new game soon with a new setting (Something not Seattle) and we were given the option of either

A: Keep playing the guys we've been playing with so far, or

B: Start fresh with new characters that may or may not be more appropriate to the location.

Now while I probably will stick with my shamanistic handyman 'Crazytalk', I've been playing around with making some characters in case I change my mind or something bad should happen.

One of the things about this new location is that it is very close to rural areas with viable farmland. This made me think of playing around with some characters appropriate for getting work on farms and the like and so I thought "Veterinarian",
then I thought "Magical Veterinarian", because I do things like that. A Veterinarian who may be either Wizard, Shaman or Mystic Adept and uses their magic in addition to medical knowledge.

Then it occurred to me... Does your garden variety healing magic work on animals as well as people?

What do you think folks? Can the average bargain basement wand waggler heal a wounded cat as effectively as a teammate on a run, or will they need to have a unique set of spells for animal healing?

I would allow it seeing as your mage can cast heal equally on yourself as easily as you can on the shapeshifter in the party, so it probably could work on any animal.

If you want to apply a small die penalty for working on unusual forms, that could be done but really unless it was something really out there I would just handwave it in.

Sure.

I think the only magical effect I can think of that addresses critters as being anything different is the adept power Nerve Strike (2 hits for one box stat reduction, instead of 1 for 1). You could interpret that as "therefore everything else works the same on critters as for metahumans" or you could read it as "the on ly time they addressed the issue, there was a 50% reduction in effects, so extend that across the board (i.e. two hits to heal one box of damage with heal, two hits to raise the guard dog's agility by one, etc).

Depends how broadly capable you want magicians to be. Given the potency of magic I've leaned to the latter in my game (half effect on critters, and none on spirits), but that is just my game -- I think I'd take the former reading as the more general one.

So do you apply that same idea to combat spells or illusions spells then? Half effect on critters and none on spirits? I mean if you want to force your magician to get custom spells for everything and duplicate the hell out of things, sure, go for it. Otherwise it needlessly complicates things. Unless healing critters or spirits comes up very frequently I think there is no reason to worry about this.

Your teammates might wonder at the plastic cone on their necks, but reassure them that they'll be chasing cars again in no time and their coats will be shinier than ever before. Maybe rename the spell with only fluff differences?

Otherwise, dogs have the same 6 essence as a metahuman. Healing should work the same for both, as it's based on your physical integrity or however the book words it. That's the reasoning behind low-essence characters being harder to heal, anyway.

Just to health spells. (and FWIW, the player of the shaman in my game thought this made sense, having a creeping sense of guilt about how broad some of the spells were. Seeing some boundaries seemed to be more reassuring than worrying for him. So works in my game, but as I said I think the more general reading would be the other way)

The heal spell probably works better on animals since people tend to have chrome

Don't know about yours, but my guard critters often have chrome.
Same rules still apply, of course.

Just health spells or just the heal spell? Why do I ask? Well you may be quite right in not wanting a magician in your game to cast Increase Strength on his spirits but by the same token, it might be nice to be able to cast Decrease Strength on that Earth spirit that is tearing your team apart. If you want to increase the reflexes of your hellhound with a spell, maybe it is reasonable to force the magician to cast such a spell at a high force (to get the hits needed to actually increase the reflexes) but on the other hand to slow down a really fast critter you also need to cast at a much higher force, higher than you would need for an equally fast metahuman.
Yeah those spells can abused but it sounds like your player is already wary of the issues and likely would just self regulate. Like you say though, your game, your rules. I'm just checking if all the ramifications were looked at, in case someone else wants to follow suit.

Well, in 5th Edition, any Health Spell with the Essence Tag is affected by the target's Essence value as if using a Heal Spell, and therefore casting dice pools are reduced by the Essence modifier of the target. So Heal and Increase/Decrease Attribute spells are affected. There may be others.

We just wrapped up an SR4 campaign here on DS that took place in the wilds. I played a farmer/shepherd named Stogie who had turned his Adept nature towards helping on the farm. Physical buffing, attunement to animals, everything he had was useful in that context. After he had been driven off his land by corporate mining interests, he was starting a new life of eco-terrorism with the aid of his last surviving border collie, Jake.

He had veterinary skills that the GM allowed to help in magically aiding animals.

I had a lot of fun.