"Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home"
Rupert Sheldrake set out to test the idea that some dogs seem to anticipate the arrival home of their owners. If you are interested in discussing these experiments then please read Sheldrake's paper
here. I will provide as concise a summary as possible:
Random household surveys in the UK and US showed that 45-52% of dog owners believe their pets demonstrate this ability.
Sheldrake set up the experiments to rule out the following possibilities that the dog could:
-- Be hearing or smelling its owner approaching;
-- Be reacting to routine times of return;
-- Be responding to subtle cues from people at home who know when the absent person is returning;
-- Go to the place at which it waits for its owner when the person is not on their way home, and people only selectively remember its apparent anticipation when the owner returns home shortly afterwards.
Basic details about the experimental conditions:
The owner's (Pam Smart) journeys home varied from 7-22 km, at various times of the day or evening, and followed no routine pattern. She used her own car, a taxi, and cars belonging to her sisters or friends. The dog's (Jaytee) behaviour did not vary with the mode of transport. Usually Pam did not know in advance when she'd be coming home; the people the dog was left with were never informed. 95 videotaped observations were made in 3 different environments. When Pam was out, Jaytee's visits to the window and absences from it were monitored continuously on videotape, which was mounted on a tripod and left running for up to 4 hours at a time.
In a series of 12 experiments, return times were randomly selected by the following method: Pam was beeped on a pager by a person in London, 300 km away. The return times were determined by throws of dice.
There were 10 control experiments in which Pam came home unusually late or not at all. Her parents, with whom Jaytee was left, were not informed of this. These results agreed with the null hypothesis that Jaytee should spend about the same average amount of time at the window during any time period.
There were 50 videotaped observations of Jaytee on his own. Jaytee showed anticipatory behaviour in some but not all of these, and on average there was statistically significant anticipatory behaviour but less than in the main experiments.
Sheldrake used two methods to tabulate the data: one for all visits to the window, even if the dog was obviously barking at cats etc; one when visits to the window that seemed to have nothing to do with anticipatory behaviour were excluded.
Sheldrake's paper discusses this in more detail. Unfortunately I am unable to copy any of the tables as images to display here, but if you look at the paper you will see in the first two graphs that Jaytee spent significantly more time at the window when Pam left for home, and while she was travelling.
In a Randomized Permutation Analysis, the probability that the observed pattern differed from the null hypothesis was p<0.000003.
Richard Wiseman, a prominent skeptic, was critical of the idea of animal telepathy, and accepted an invitation to replicate the experiments with Pam and Jaytee in 1999. Wiseman and his team used some methods that were different to those of Sheldrake, and they did not plot their results on graphs. At first, Wiseman considered an experiment successful if the first time that Jaytee inexplicably went to the window occurred in the first 10-minute time block
after Pam left for home. Then he tried looking at the first time Jaytee inexplicably went to the window for more than 2 minutes after Pam started for home. His results were negative.
However, Sheldrake had found that Jaytee went to the window a few minutes
before Pam started her journey. Wiseman also hadn't watched Jaytee's overall behaviour after Pam set out; he did wait at the window significantly more often. When Wiseman's data was analysed including these details, the results were similar to Sheldrake's. Jaytee was at the window 4% of the time during Pam's main period of absence, and 78% of the time when she was coming home.
Wiseman claimed for 8 years that he had "debunked" Sheldrake's claims. In 2007 he admitted on the Skeptico podcast that his data does correspond with Sheldrake's.
These experiments seem to show that dogs are able to anticipate when their owners are coming home, using an as-yet unexplained innate ability. What's more, they seem to be able to sense the
intention to come home, since the anticipatory behaviour often begins when the decision to come home is made but the owner has not yet begun the journey. The dog goes to the window less often when it is at home by itself. Sheldrake hypothesizes that the anticipatory behaviour evolved as a signal to other members of the animal's family or group, and would like to see these experiments tried on wolves in the wild.
Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.
™ Version 4.2
(1)
