Wonderings from the Wack

I finally found Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's book "Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home". I checked it out from the libraray the other day. It's quite fascinating how some animals ( not just dogs but cats, birds and horses too ) can sense somehow when their person is on their way home. I am not talking 5 minutes before because they hear the car or something.
Dr. Sheldrake collected thousands of anecdotes and conducted several controlled experiments. Some animals seem to know up to several hours ahead of time when their person's plane has landed early and no one knows, or their person has been out shopping and has thought "I'd better get home now". The animal will get excited and bark or just go wait by the door. It's like some animals have telepathy. Some people can also give their animals mental commands as well. One lady told her story of her free-roaming cat. She would be working in her house and that cat would be off somewhere several blocks away. She would think, "Time to come home Leo" and sure enough a few minutes later the kitty door would bang and there he would be.

For those of you that know my dog, he is obviously as senstive as a rock, just like me. I was sitting on the couch reading the book and he was laying in the kitchen doorway looking away from me. I tried a mental "Angus, come". Not even an ear flick.

Dr. Sheldrake also mentioned a Dutch explorer in the early 20th century who stayed with some Bushmen of the Kalahari desert. One day he went off with the hunting party. 50 miles away they killed and eland. Mr. van de Post wondered out loud how excited the camp would be when they saw that the hunters were successful. The Bushmen said, "Oh, they already know." Sure enough when the party got back to camp the tribe was already singing the successful hunting song and preparations for the carcass had been underway for several hours. The Bushmen naturally assumed that the white man's telegraph worked the same way.

A few months ago I ready Dr. Sheldrake's book "The Sense of Being Stared At". It was fascinating too and I remember posting about it. It makes me wonder about our caveman ancestors. Were humans more telepathic in our distant past? Without our modern methods of communication, telepathy would come in handy when tribes were separated at a good distance. Perhaps we still are but are bombarded with so many things in our daily lives only some people can feel it anymore. Or perhaps it's a talent we no longer need and it has been bred out of some of us.

The sense of being stared at is still with us though. Almost everyone has had the prickling on the back of their neck when you know someone is behind you looking at you. That would be another cavemen handy talent. Natural selection being what it is, the ancestors that could tell when they were being staked by a saber-tooth tiger were more likely to survive and pass on their genes than the ancestors that couldn't.