Your Dog or Cat May be reading your mind

Nothing quite gets our attention like our pets. From happy dogs to purring cats, they aren’t thought of as property, they’re members of the family. How many times have we deliberately quieted our minds and distracted our thoughts before scooping up the kitty for a trip to the vet? Maybe we have psychic animals because sometimes even that doesn’t work. The little furballs just seem to know . . .

I have argued that we live in an idealist universe. (The universe is made out of ideas, not material.) This means that our connectedness should extend to animals as well as other people. Psychic ability must be universal for idealism to be true. This would mean that pets should be psychic, just like humans. So what does science have to say about this?

There is actually good reason to think that animals are psychic in much the same manner people are. In the abstract world of academia, this isn’t so obvious, but it is to farmers, zoo staff, people who do animal rescue and many pet owners.

Animals generally can’t communicate with speech except through some limited vocalizations, or parrots with their limited vocabulary. They generally make their needs and desires known through body language, but this doesn’t always work. There are times when the animal and the human need to be in each other’s minds.

Can We communicate with our deceased pets?

We form strong emotional connections with the animals that we care for, sometimes even when the animal does not show any reciprocity. People have formed connections with many different types of mammals and birds and sometimes other species. Obviously they cannot talk to us, but we still need to know sometimes what’s going on with them, (or they with us.) This is the sort of situation where psychic ability comes in handy. They can’t tell us that something is wrong, so we have to use our intuition.

This was addressed in a 2024 paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Accounts of end of life experiences with pets, including afterlife communications were compared to experiences among humans and were found to be very similar.

Can a dog psychically know when its owner is returning?

In scientific experiments, the bond between a human and its animal friend is used for testing. In ’98 Rupert Sheldrake conducted a series of experiments with dog owner Pamela Smart to where he used a straightforward test as to whether the dog, Jaytee, knew when Pam was coming home even when that was random and by different means. Jaytee would reliably go to a window to wait for Pam when he anticipated her return.

Was it the sound of the car? No. Pam would sometimes return on a bicycle. Was it smell? No. Smell is not reliable at longer distances. Notably, Jaytee would start waiting by the window soon after Pam began her return, regardless of how far away she was at the time. (I’ve noticed that when armchair skeptics “examine” studies like these, they typically assume that the researcher hasn’t accounted for all the possibilities of ordinary causes and then don’t bother to fact check their assumptions.)

This particular study had a very tiny skeptical replication that achieved the same results, (3 attempts by the skeptic, vs. 12 by the researcher, 10 controls and 95 documented behaviors in three different environments to assure that the dog was indeed, performing a unique task.)

PSI Trailing

There is another thing called psi trailing. This is when a pet that has been lost finds its way home over territory it is unfamiliar with. The most famous and well investigated case took place in 1923 and involved a dog named Bobbie that had traveled with his family from Oregon to Indiana. While the family was stopped for gas, Bobbie, who was allowed to roam, got jumped by three other dogs and ran. The family stayed in town searching in vain, even checking in on the way back, finally giving up after about a week, eventually returning home.

After a six month journey of around 3,000 miles, Bobbie found his way home. Because it was such a remarkable feat, the Oregon Humane Society documented the effort and was able to find and interview people who had helped Bobbie along the way and confirm the journey. He checked in at stopping points along the way, sort of retracing his path, but this doesn’t fully account for the journey he took, some of which was along unfamiliar territory.

Parrot Telepathy

There has been telepathy testing with a parrot as well.

Aimée Morgana noticed that her language-using African Grey parrot, N’kisi, often seemed to respond to her thoughts and intentions in a seemingly telepathic manner. We set up a series of trials to test whether this apparent telepathic ability would be expressed in formal tests in which Aimée and the parrot were in different rooms, on different floors, under conditions in which the parrot could receive no sensory information from Aimée or from anyone else. During these trials, Aimée and the parrot were both videotaped continuously. At the beginning of each trial, Aimée opened a numbered sealed envelope containing a photograph, and then looked at it for two minutes. These photographs corresponded to a prespecified list of key words in N’kisi’s vocabulary, and were selected and randomized in advance by a third party. We conducted a total of 147 two-minute trials. The recordings of N’kisi during these trials were transcribed blind by three independent transcribers. Their transcripts were generally in good agreement. Using a majority scoring method, in which at least two of the three transcribers were in agreement, N’kisi said one or more of the key words in 71 trials. He scored 23 hits: the key words he said corresponded to the target pictures.

Using a couple of standard statistical models, it was determined that the parrot would score 12 hits totally at random in the 71 trials, meaning that this experiment was an unqualified success. The parrot was demonstrated to have a telepathic connection to its owner.

Learned behavior genetically passed down in rats

Rats were used in an experiment designed to demonstrate collective learned behavior.

Consider the following experiment. Animals of an inbred strain are placed under conditions in which they learn to respond to a given stimulus in a characteristic way. They are then made to repeat this pattern of behavior many times. Ex hypothesi, the new behavioural field will be reinforced by morphic resonance, which will not only cause the behavior of the trained animals to become increasingly habitual, but will also affect, although less specifically, any similar animal exposed to a similar stimulus: the larger the number of animals in the past that have learned the task, the easier it should be for subsequent similar animals to learn it. Therefore, in an experiment of this type it should be possible to observe a progressive increase in the rate of learning not only in animals descended from trained ancestors, but also in genetically similar animals descended from untrained ancestors.

There were several experiments carried out, with as many as 50 generations of rats to test the possibility of learned behavior being passed along through subsequent generations so that learning became faster. This turned out to be successful not only with the generations of experimental rats, but also with the controls. Why did the controls also learn? It can only be because the learning is being stored in what can be explained as a consciousness field specific to these rats. It is an experimental result that falls in line with Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory, but no other.

There is, of course, skepticism; the results of successful parapsychology experiments are always disputed. They inevitably arise though, from intense disbelief and an unrealistic standard of evidence that is applied to parapsychology in a way unseen elsewhere.

The conclusion that can be drawn here is that animal ESP experiments have many of the same outcomes as human experiments. That is to say, ESP just exists in general as part of the fabric of reality and it’s not specific to human beings. The existence of psychic animals should be of no surprise to anyone.