Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home
And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals
by Rupert Sheldrake, (Three Rivers Press, New York, 1999)
by Marianne Arbogast

I once cared for my parents’ dog, Buster, while they took a two-week vacation. Each evening when I returned from work, Buster would head outdoors for a brief run, then come back to follow me around the house or persuade me to take him for a walk. On the night they were due home, however, he planted himself on the grass in the front yard and watched the road, facing the direction from which they would return.

To many people, stories like this may seem curious but inconsequential. To Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, they offer threads which, when tugged, have the potential to unravel an entire worldview which fetters modern science.

"The mechanistic theory of life, still the dominant orthodoxy, asserts that living organisms are nothing but complex genetically programmed machines," writes Sheldrake, an English biochemist. "They are supposed to be inanimate, literally soulless."

As a child, Sheldrake enjoyed relationships with pets and was fascinated by homing pigeons. But as a student, he experienced a dissonance between his personal experience and scientific methodology.

"As a general rule, the first step we took when studying living organisms was to kill them or cut them up," he found. Working a student job with a pharmaceutical company, he observed "rooms full of rats, guinea pigs, mice and other animals waiting to be experimented on. At the end of each day dozens of animals that had survived various tests were gassed and thrown into a bin for incineration. A love of animals had led me to study biology, and this was where it had taken me."

His desire to understand what had gone wrong led Sheldrake on a quest that included studying the history of science and philosophy on a Harvard fellowship; earning a doctorate on plant development at Cambridge; joining the Epiphany Philosophers – an eclectic group of students, scholars and monks who gathered at an Anglican monastery for four weeks each year to explore holistic science and religion; and working in India to improve crops for subsistence farmers. While in India, Sheldrake – who had been studying Hinduism and Sufism – was drawn back to his Christian root tradition through the influence of Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine with an ashram in southern India.

Sheldrake is best known for his theory of "morphic resonance," which he defines as "an influence of like upon like across time and space." He believes, for example, that "if rats in Sheffield learn a new trick, rats all around the world should be able to learn it quicker just because the rats have learned it there" (Natural Grace, Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Doubleday, 1997). "Morphic fields" are the connections through which this occurs.

"There are many kinds of social bonds within species, like those between a mother cat and her kittens, a bee and the other members of the hive, a starling in a flock, a wolf and its pack, and a great variety of human social bonds," he writes in Dogs That Know. "Then there are social bonds between species, like those between pets and their owners. ... I propose that these bonds are not just metaphorical but real, literal connections. They continue to link individuals together even when they are separated beyond the range of sensory communication."

Sheldrake’s book is filled with stories of cats that disappear when a trip to the vet is in the offing, dogs that howl when human companions die far from home, parrots that regularly anticipate a family member’s return from work. Controlled experiments have convinced Sheldrake that such behavior is not easily explained away, by acute animal hearing, for example, or a regular pattern to human schedules. The fact that it is generally ignored by scientists is due, he believes, to two taboos: the taboo against taking pets seriously (which he attributes to "the split attitudes toward animals" in a society that depends on animal exploitation), and the taboo against taking psychic or "paranormal" experiences seriously.

"I believe there is much to be gained by ignoring these taboos," Sheldrake writes. "I also believe there is much to be gained by following a scientific approach. ... The path of investigation is more in the spirit of science than the path of denial. And it is certainly more fun."

There are "big issues at stake," Sheldrake believes. "There is no doubt that we have much to learn from our dogs, cats, horses, parrots, pigeons and other domesticated animals. They have much to teach us about social bonds and animal perceptiveness, and much to teach us about ourselves. ... We are on the threshold of a new understanding of the nature of the mind."

Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness. Rupert Sheldrake’s work can be found at his website, <www.sheldrake.org>.