According to statistics, about 48 percent of dog owners believe that dogs anticipate the return home of family members in which they live. A fifth of these people claim that dogs feel the closeness of meeting their owner in more than ten minutes.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake analyzed the results of his own and others' experiments, in which an attempt was made to confirm or refute the hypothesis that animals telepathically anticipate the return home of their owners.
In the experiments of Sheldrake himself, a dog named Jayti took part. The results were amazing.
In 1988, Pam Smart took a terrier into her house and named him Jayty. When Pam went to work, the dog stayed with her parents, who soon noticed a curious trend: shortly before the return of the mistress, Jayty approached the window and obviously looked out for her among the passers-by. And this happened every time, a few minutes before the moment when Pam's car actually appeared in the field of view, as viewed from that very window.
In 1994, Pam came across an article in the Telegraph newspaper, the authors of which asked the owners of dogs who, as they thought, had a premonition of their return home, to respond. Both owners and dogs were invited to take part in the study of Dr. Sheldrake, a Cambridge graduate and professor at Harvard University, one of the leading experts in the field of biochemistry. During that period, he was engaged in the study of inexplicable animal behavior and telepathy in various manifestations.
Sheldrake conducted about a hundred experiments with Jayty. As a result, he managed to rule out many different "reasonable explanations" for the dog's strange behavior. Pam came home in her car, by taxi and on foot, by her friends' car, and so on. Thus, they found out, for example, that Jayty does not react to the familiar sound of the owner's car, which he hears from afar.
Similar results were obtained by another researcher, Dr. Richard Wiseman, after conducting his four experiments, although he interpreted these results differently from Sheldrake.
In both Sheldrake's and Wiseman's experiments, Jayty briefly walked to the window several times during the day. However, it was only when his mistress was on her way home that he stayed at the window long enough. When Sheldrake combined his results and those of a colleague into a single graph, it turned out that when Pam returned home, her dog spent 80 percent of the time at the window, and only 5 percent during the rest of the day.
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Wiseman agreed that both experiments gave similar results, but was more skeptical about their assessment. He admitted that the more time passes from the moment the owner leaves, the more restless the dog becomes and the more often it runs to the window.
To this, Sheldrake replied that "During the series of control tests, Pam did not return home at the usual time, but Jatie did not show any signs of 'anxiety', and he did not come to the window more often over time."
In 2000, Sheldrake conducted another series of experiments with a dog named Kane, the results of which were published in the journal Anthrozoos. In the introduction, Sheldrake wrote:
“According to statistics, approximately 48 percent of dog owners believe that their pets anticipate the return home of family members in which they live. A fifth of these people claim that dogs feel the closeness of meeting their owner in more than ten minutes. Many of them also claim that the dogs anticipate the return of their owners even at unusual times and even if the owners return in some unusual way."