Does your dog know when you're coming home? Does your cat know when you're going to die? Does your iguana know whether it's going to rain next Friday?
Is your pet ... psychic?
It may sound like something out of The Twilight Zone – or maybe something out of a parody of The Twilight Zone – but many people are convinced that they do share some sort of telepathic link with their animals. Now, one entrepreneur-turned-amateur scientist is recruiting participants for an experiment to test whether dogs can tell when their owners are coming home.
The trials organized by Alex Tsakiris, the California-based host of the Skeptico podcast, are pretty simple. Participants set up a webcam pointed at the place where their dog “waits” for them to come home – in front of the door, for example, or in the hallway leading to the garage. The owners then leave the house for random periods of time. Reviewing the webcam footage later, Mr. Tsakiris computes how much time the dog spent over all in the waiting place during the owner's absence, and how much time it spent there during the “return time” – the 20 minutes or so before the person arrived home.
Obviously, it's important to vary the return times. A dog that knows its owner comes home at 6:05 p.m. every day may be smart, but not psychic.
Mr. Tsakiris's experiment (more information can be found at www.dogsthatknow.com) builds on the research of Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist who opened himself up to quite a bit of professional scorn when he published scientific papers detailing his observations of possibly telepathic dogs.
In one experiment involving more than 100 randomly timed observations, a dog named Jaytee waited at the window 4 per cent of the time during the main period of his owner's absence and 55 per cent of the time when she was returning.
Cats have displayed their own uncanny abilities. In 2007, a cat named Oscar adopted by a Providence, R.I., nursing home's advanced-dementia unit made headlines when it was revealed he seemed to know when a patient was about to die.
In more than 25 cases, the generally aloof Oscar snuggled up to residents who then died within a few hours, even though many of them appeared perfectly fine at first. Doctors said they believed there must be some sort of biochemical explanation – they just didn't know what it was.
So if this phenomenon is well known, why do more experiments? Because, Mr. Tsakiris says, he wants to wear down the skeptics with more data.
“There is incredible resistance to this. People who say these kind of things are really attacked pretty viciously,” Mr. Tsakiris says. “There's a lot of very good, competent research out there that seems to get suppressed or, even worse, derided because it doesn't conform to the whole atheistic materialistic paradigm that dominates science.”
In general, I have to say the whole atheistic materialistic paradigm that dominates science works pretty well for me. Claims of psychic abilities rightly arouse suspicion, especially when they are so often accompanied by sales pitches.
And yet, Mr. Tsakiris is onto something in that if you want to find a hardened skeptic's gooey, open-minded centre, his dog is probably a good place to start.
“There's this thing called love, and when we love something it creates this real, measurable bond, and it links us up to other beings,” Mr. Tsakiris says.
Deborah Beaven of Toronto is so used to living with telepathically in-tune dogs that she was surprised anyone even needed to research it. She says her Great Dane, Journey, consistently waits for her by the window for 10 minutes before she arrives home. Ms. Beaven doesn't work regular hours, so she comes home at different times each day, and the window doesn't even overlook the front of her apartment building, so it's not as if Journey
can hear her car, or see or smell her coming. And yet
her son has discovered that when the dog goes to the door, she doesn't want to go for a walk – she's just waiting for Deborah.
Ms. Beaven says she was going to participate in Mr. Tsakiris's experiment, but her mother became ill and she didn't have the time to devote to randomized trials. Still, she has little doubt about what it will find.
“I think dogs are as in tune with us as we allow. If we're open, they're right there,” Ms. Beaven says. “They're just pure souls, so I think their psychic abilities come out a lot clearer and easier.”
It's easy to scoff at talk of pure souls and psychic abilities, but anyone who's ever looked into their dog's eyes with love, and seen that love reflected back, may well wonder what else lies beneath the surface.
A deep telepathic bond? Or are they just wondering whether you have any liver treats? Maybe one day we'll find out.
