PSYCHIC PETS
How does your pet know when you're coming home?

Reprinted with permission from Straus News Pet Country, March 2005

When the telephone rings in the household of a certain UC-Berkeley professor, his wife knows when her husband is on the other end of the line because their silver tabby cat rushes to the telephone and paws at the receiver. The cat will actually knock the receiver off the hook and make meow-ing noises that are clearly audible to professor at the other end. But if someone else telephones their home, the cat takes no notice.

Many people who have ever owned a pet will swear that their dog or cat has exhibited some.kind of behavior they just can't explain. Although there are several popular stories about animals that have made long, "incredible journeys" to be reunited with their owners,the behavior most owners experience is in the nature of telepathy: How does my pet know when I am returning home? Is my pet psychic?

Before non-believers pooh-pooh this notion, consider that random household surveys in
Britain and America show that about half of dog owners and almost ohe- Itll third of cat owners said they had noticed this type of anticipatory behavior, among other kinds.

As statistics go, this may not really be surprising, but it was revealing enough for a scientist to finally take up the challenge of researching the phenomena and subjecting it to experimentation.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., spent five years conducting tests involving thousands of people who own and work with animals, documenting it al1 in his book, Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals: An Investigation, which won the British Scientific and Medical Net ork Book of the Year Award.
"My colleagues and I concentrated on the; phenomenon of dogs that know when their owners are coming home," Sheldrake told an interviewer. "Many pet owners have observed that their animals seem to anticipate the arrival of a member of the household, often 10 minutes or more in advance; The pets typically wait at a door, window, or gate."

In one of Sheldrake's experiments, he would arrange for a dog owner to be dr~ven around town by
a taxi, miles from home, while a video camera was trained on the dog. Around the time that the owner was told to ask the taxi to head for home, the dog would invariably go to the front door to wait. Sheldrake says this shows far too high a correlation of dog activity with the intent of the driver to come home for it to be explained by chance.

"The most important conclusion from myresearch on telepathy is that the strength of the bond between the animal and its guardian is crucial," notes Sheldrake. "Animals only seem to be telepathic with people when they form bonds with them, as many dogs do with their owners."

Sheldrake knew he wasn't far off the mark wheh he heard of an English cat clinic that simply stopped scheduling appointments for cats; they let their owners bring them in whenever they could. It seems that many cats know far ahead of time when they aare going to be taken to the vet, and vanish instead.