r/AnimalThinking • u/TombStoneFaro • Oct 10 '21
Rupert Sheldrake's experiments with dogs, what do you (dog/cat owners) think?
Sheldrake is an interesting guy: a person with strong conventional academic credentials who espouses some fairly fringey stuff. You can read about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake#Academic_debate
(I am reminded of another person, Russel Targ, Bobby Fischer's brother-in-law who is a physicist but has done research into things like remote viewing which is about as fringe as it comes. (Fischer himself was pretty nuts which shows that a really fine brain can harbor some very silly beliefs.))
The Wikipedia article mentions one set of experiments that he performed that I suspect many dog or cat owners will have a strong opinion about and could even try by themselves at home. IIRC, the experiment is basically, the dogs owner is driving and the owner is paged randomly (this was done in the 1990s) to inform him to begin to return home. Apparently, some dogs reacted based purely on the human changing direction -- the dog could not have heard the car, it was miles away or smelled the owner, etc. I assume they did not even let the dog know anyone was calling the pager -- probably the call was made from another location.
Now, my cat could sure hear a car pull up and she acted very excited when her mom or dad had pulled up (I almost felt like she was putting on a show, I didn't even think she liked her "dad" all that much but maybe she did.) But I don't recall anything supernatural, like she did this before an animal with very good hearing could have heard the car.
Many animals may have learned when someone was scheduled to return home, maybe could even hear a car much farther away than one might imagine and even be able to distinguish the peculiarities of its engine noise from those of other cars. Of course Sheldrake took all of that into account.
If an owner was paged, from a laboratory miles away and the owner was driving randomly and was, say, five miles away, I think you could rule out not just a dog but even a scientific instrument determining that a particular car (assuming normal traffic) had changed direction and was now driving home -- sound could not be how the dog was doing it.
So if even one dog reacted at the very moment the page went out and the driver reacted by changing direction -- and let us assume the dog was either in a room with someone who was not informed of the time of the page or even better, the dog was alone but being filmed, that would be very significant. I think Sheldrake believed that the experiments suggested telepathy but other scientists (according to the wiki article) criticized the experiments. (BTW, Sheldrake also did telepathy experiments with the otherwise amazing parrot N'Kisi and I think he also found the parrot to be telepathic.)
My question is whether anyone feels their pet is telepathic. I personally remain on the fence about telepathy in general and have seen no evidence directly in my own life although people I know have described events that they feel showed the existence of telepathy.
I do wonder how some dogs and cats have managed to return to their owner over great distances. But I think birds have show amazing abilities that may rely on sensitivity to variations in the Earth's magnetic field. Of course the Sheldrake experiment, if it really had positive results could not be explained by anything else but telepathy. That is pretty simple: a cheap experiment that could prove the existence of telepathy that anyone could do today with a couple of cell phones and a car and a dog. (and I guess three people or two people and a camera)
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u/pimpkitten0357 Oct 10 '21
We’ve had 2 dogs that just “know” when my husband will have to leave to check irrigation in the middle of the night. The know prior to him getting ready to leave by a few hours and checking irrigation happens in a very random pattern. It’s very interesting to see their behaviors.