Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: Fully Updated and Revised

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.

Some dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home. No, not when they are walking up the front steps, but when they are still at the office DECIDING to come home. Some animals know when their owners are in distress or dying, far away. Some animals know when their owners are about to have a seizure, or attempt suicide.Author Rupert Sheldrake has compiled a database of hundreds of fascinating anecdotal reports, supplemented by simple but clever research studies. He challenges us to consider these unusual but intriguing phenomena, that do not depend on physical distance or any known sensory pathways. He has a healthy respect for scientific method (and uses it when he can) but none at all for scientific dogmatism. To skeptics who discount these remarkable observations as mere "selective recall," he says, do the research and prove it.This is a fascinating and well-written book. It was hard to put down, and in fact, I may read it again. To be sure, Sheldrake can't explain the phenomena he describes. He invokes the concept of morphic fields but can't really tell us what they are. Further research is needed, and, to his credit, Sheldrake is attempting to recruit people all over the world, to participate in just such research. Why, even you could participate. I recommend this book highly. Run out and buy it today. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

I love the documentation in this book--the instances of animal/human connection are well known to anyone who has ever been close with a dog, cat, or horse. After two uneventful weeks at my sister's, my dog started waiting at the window for me on the day I was returning home from Australia (I live in mid-USA). How did he know? My sister didn't even know the day I was returning. This book helps explore that kind of connection, and poses possible research studies to explore the connection further, so it is a good resource for a student looking for a research project on the subject. One warning: it is not an exciting read. There are many interesting stories, however. Whether you agree or not with the theoretical ideas of the author doesn't really matter--the documentation is there regardless of why these things happen. The explanatory theory espoused is interesting, and the examples cited are, for the most part, consistent with it, but there is no way to really test the theory -- that these "morphic fields" exist. This is an interesting read for those with a special connection to their animals, be that dog, cat, horse, bird, ferret, bunny, or another person.

I loved this book; I have admired Rupert Sheldrake's work on Morphic Fields for years. Here he applies the science to a subject close to my heart, which I also write about, the intuitive and telepathic qualities of animals which I have witnessed all my life. Fascinating case studies combined with scientific rigour make for a fascinating discourse on the psychic abilities of animals and, indeed, people.

Sea que el libro me ha resultado interesante, especialmente por tratarse de un estudio dentro de la biología sobre capacidades parapsicológicas. Las capacidades parapsicológicas son tratadas con prejuicios, excepticismo, reticencia, esoterismo, mitificación, futurismo, etcétera por lo cual resulta desmitificador y refrescante un estudio en los animales que son, además, los animales con los que convivimos.Por lo demás, antes de leer el libro conocía las precogniciones y "deja vu" en mí mismo, por lo cual no dudaba de ello, pero creía que la telepatía eran imaginaciones ya que nunca me ha ocurrido, sin embargo, los perros y gatos que muestran saber cuándo sus dueños vuelven a casa cuando el dueño decide volver me convence de que la telepatía se da.Un saludo.

Any of us who have been in close contact with animals, both household and/or woodland, are aware of a level of environmental awareness that they possess that is fully absent in human beings. In a fluid and understandable manner, the author, Rupert Sheldrake, produces countless examples of animals who not only demonstrate this awareness but act on it in a tangible and measurable manner. While reading this text you, too, will be reawakened to examples in your life and interaction with animals that are similar to those that he carefully describes. Ultimately, however, the reasons for these behaviors are still a mystery even though the author may describe them as being part of a self-named `morphic field'. Other scientists use terms such as universal consciousness, akasaic field, psi, etc.. to define similar circumstances. But Mr. Sheldrake does wage a healthy battle against the dichotomy that exists in our scientific community. They empirically state that we live in a world that is solely defined as being one of materialistic structure and purpose. The materialistic definition states that all matter can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts and, by doing so, a mechanistic view of all actions and interactions must be taken. This is done in spite of the fact that a great scope of reality around us escapes their narrow defining parameters. The examples within this book show how new parameters must begin emerging even in this specialized area of animal/human communication.The search for `the ultimate truth' is one which requires not only a clear mind and incredible stamina but a unique openness to the world and the actions we see around us. If we actually knew the world's truisms we could casually sit back and reject any and all further ideas as being superfluous and inane as the scientific community seems to be, at present, doing. We do not. So we, as an inquiring society must move forward, closely examining any and all theoretical constructs that are brought forward. We must do so with a totally open and humble mind. It terribly discerning, however, that the same field, namely natural science, that originally rejected the church's dogmatism and close-mindedness, are now involved in the same mind-numbing process, namely rejecting all phenomena that do not fall under their materialistic banner. The author, through this and his other writings, is attempting to view the world through different, and yet undefined, paradigms. As stated, the terms he uses are slightly different from other researchers but there is a strong overlap between his thoughts and those of other rebellious truth-seekers. I personally wish to applaud the unrecognized yet important work that they are performing.I heartily recommend this book for anyone who chooses to view the world as being more wondrous than how it has been described to us. No, there is no magic involved. It is only that our scientific definitions are, at present, incomplete and in great need for expansion.

Am Freitag bestellt, am Samstag morgen angekommen. Besser kann es nicht sein. Buch ist wunderbar, jedem nur zu empfehlen. Herzlichen Dank!!

It was a bit repetitive however the informative content and the fact that it was a report on test cases, make allowance for repeated information. Every dog or cat owner should read this book. Extracts from this book could be read to young 'pet-owners' as bed-time stories.