There is no shortage of books where one can find info on psychic abilities in humans. However, very little has been said about psychic abilities in other types of animals. Thankfully, biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written an entire book on the subject.
As the title of the book suggests, it contains a lot of information on cases of dogs (and, to a certain extent, cats and other pets) that know when their owners are coming home. The book tells of many experiments performed to test this, generally by having a dog owner set off towards time and recording the exact time the dog displays clear reactions of anticipating their return. Sheldrake takes into account the ideas that the dogs could have just remembered when the owner is usually home or smelled or heard their owner's approach. These ideas fail to explain all cases, due to dogs anticipating returns at random times and anticipating their owners' return long before they came within hearing or smelling range. Thus we are left to consider things like telephathy as very real possibilities.
As well as showing cases of dogs and other pets knowing when their owners will come home, the book also presents cases of pets knowing when their owners are sick, injured or dead before they see them, pets picking up their owner's intentions, pets knowing when specific people will call on the telephone, various animals finding their way home after being transported far away to unknown locations (and often with no way of knowing which directions they were transported), animals predicting disasters, and so on.
Sheldrake is well known for his theory of morphogenetic fields, and in this book he uses these fields to explain telepathy. Basically morphic fields link different members of a social group. This explains why telepathy seems most prevalant in social animals. It also explains how things like fish shoals and termite colonies manage to act as a whole, as if the entire group were one "superorganism".
Sheldrake does not see psychic powers as supernatural, but rather as natural features that, like more accepted biological features, evolved to enhance survival. For instance, telepathy would be of great value to a herd that needs to escape predators all together.
Precognition (predicting future events) is somewhat harder to explain than telepathy, and Sheldrake notes that he would personally prefer alternative explanations in cases involving animals that seem to predict future events like disasters (many of the more prosaic explanations, such as detection of vibrations, were insufficient). However, keeping an open mind, he does leave precognition as a possibility.
At the end of this updated and revised edition, there is an appendix where Sheldrake tells of incidents between him and various skeptics who tried to discredit him. He shows how many of these skeptics acted quite dishonestly, ignoring evidence presented to them and, worse, distorting Sheldrake's claims to create strawman arguments.
Overall, this is quite an intelligent and well thought out book. My only real problem with it is one small part in the appendix, where Sheldrake states that "Atheists are not people without a belief; they are people with a strong faith in the doctrine of materialism". As I myself am an atheist who supports the idea of psychic abilities, as well a number of other "unorthodox" ideas, I took exception to this gross generalisation. Furthermore, on the very next page Sheldrake contradicts himself when he admits that certain well known atheists such as Sam Harris plus at least several atheistic parapsychologists are open-minded to psychic phenomenon, and that the question of whether psychic phenomena exist is unrelated to the question of whether or not a god or gods exist (and thus shattering the stereotype that all atheists are close-minded "materialists" opposed to all things "paranormal").
Apart from this one case of unfair stereotyping, however, Sheldrake was overall quite good at presenting convincing arguments. He presented numerous case studies for telepathy and other psychic abilities in animals, remembered to compare different explanations (as opposed to uncritically jumping onto any personal favourite explanation), and the experiments used control tests and were repeatable.
The case for psychic powers in animals is a compelling one and certainly warrants further investigation. Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home is a must read for anyone interested in learning more about the topic.
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Top reviews from other countries
Mariano Jc
Convincente estudio biológico sobre capacidades parapsicológicas
Reviewed in Spain on May 3, 2017
Kindle Customer
Unique phenomena in search of scientific reasoning...
Reviewed in Canada on July 16, 2012Valerie Joan Januschka
Every dog or cat owner should read this book
Reviewed in Australia on November 17, 2015
