We’ve learned that companion animals will energetically cord with humans readily, even when they have no past life relationships with them. Will such a cord, and energetic cords in general, persist indefinitely unless consciously severed, or will they fade with time and lack of proximity?

This is a good description of the power of love and its absence in determining what people feel is important and what they invest their time and energies in building. When it comes to relationships, those can form casual weak links or bonds through cording, or quite robust and permanent ones if there is an important event or series of events, as through a marriage, and those will last forever because they are enshrined in the akashic records and the energetic signature of all that took place will be on file and accessible to workings of the Law of Karma, and using the cordings to the participants involved with one another to send the energies of what took place in the past around to them again. This might be a blessing in the form of a reminder of the possibility of love, and it might be a blessing at just the right time to counter a low moment, courtesy of someone from the past who you gave love to. This may well be a beloved pet because the companion animals are divine agents of love, they were predatory creatures reworked and repurposed to tolerate and befriend human beings, and to care about them as a member of their own pack or family and become devoted—they will want to be with you, they will miss you when they are not, and that forms cordings and these cordings will persist across time. This is why approximately 75% of people's pets are literally animals they have spent time with in prior lifetimes in the same fashion. It is a major reason why some people are pet owners and others disdain the idea; it is often the case those who are pet owners have done so before and innately have connections through cording to many pleasant and rewarding experiences from having companion animals share their life with them. And this may well be a planned agenda, one of many, decided on in the light before incarnating, for the divine realm to help arrange a former beloved pet enter life in a way it can be found by you and reclaimed, as it were, becoming its owner, to resume that positive loving relationship once again in a new setting where the both of you are in a new lifetime but still represent the same soul beings. Those old cordings will serve to create an attraction and to make fast friends between the two of you, and this will be rewarding and nurtured, and highly valued and a successful repetition of the prior benefits to both parties of having someone they love share their existence for a time—it is a beautiful phenomenon and divine on all levels. Just as with people who might come and go from your life because they don't strike a spark in some way, and the relationship remains temporary or a casual one for which little time is devoted so there is no chance to make deep connections and deep bondings through cords that will persist as a high priority, the same is true between pets and their owners. If the relationship is of a short-term nature or unsatisfactory for some reason, sometimes there is simply not a good fit. When a pet that is chosen has had no prior interaction with a person, they are truly meeting as strangers and will need to develop a relationship and trust the old-fashioned way, little by little. Anything that represents a hurdle might become a dealbreaker; for example, a dog that is slow to learn to be housebroken might be returned to a kennel or shelter, as simply judged to be unsuitable, and that will end the tie. Those cordings that have happened will indeed fade through lack of care and feeding, so to speak. If there is a serious trauma that happens that severs the relationship, in all likelihood a cording will persist to mark the occasion that something truly bad happened. This is demanded by the Law of Karma because it would represent a karmic error of some kind, and that will always have a karmic consequence that will be seen to by the Law of Karma. So to have those cordings will provide a mechanism to send that negativity back around to the perpetrator for them to reckon with. This could be in many different forms and won't require the original participant to return and materialize and resume a relationship, although sometimes deliberate arrangements are made in the light for that very eventuality. So you may well have planned, along with someone who might have been your nemesis in another lifetime, to reincarnate in a similar geographic area, in a similar time frame, to be peers chronologically and meet up in some way, either as neighbors, schoolmates, coworkers, and so on, in order to have an opportunity to clear up old business. As such, the resumption of those relationships might be marked by friction, discord, mistrust, and dislike even from the get-go—that is a tip-off there is a deeper story there. It is not simply an arbitrary emotional reaction with no rationale, there is a deeper karmic history involved in such cases, and that is what is being felt within, and by both parties eventually, because the cordings will see to it that there is an exchange of the old emotion from prior go-rounds. So meeting up with a companion animal will bring good and potentially bad times back around again to be reckoned with. There are many ways that this is done via divine planning, so one might be in a new incarnation, in a position to be a loving and devoted pet owner to an animal that was abused by them in another lifetime, and this is a way of making restitution.