Ruminations

Been reading this book called "Dogs that know their owners are coming home". Wait, is that the right title? Well, anyway, it's a pretty cool piece of research on the "telepathic" abilities of dogs with other dogs, dogs with humans, and other various animals with other animals/humans.

Like, there was a cat that, when it was getting mauled and disemboweled by 2 dogs, it communicated it's distress to it's owner, who was many miles away, driving. She had to pull over... she was feeling physically ill, and very anxious. She called home, but they said everything was fine. When she drove home, she and her family happened to look outside in the back yard and see the dogs standing over their poor dead cat. :P

One of the points of this book was that dogs can pick up on their owners intent... say, to take them for a walk, or their intent to come home when they are miles away from the dog. In some cases, they can even pick up on desires the owner has for their dog to do something, like pick up their toys in the living room, and put them in the toy basket!

There is so much evidence of telepathy... the author provides many instances where there was no way the dog could be picking up cues from the owner's physical movements. Or in the case of owners who are coming home, there was no way the dog could either hear the owner or smell them. The dogs that were picking up on the owners intent to come home were getting excited only at the moment when the owner decided to come home, and start the long drive. And this happened even if the times for returning home were completely random.

I've been trying to project my desires to my dogs... w/o much success. Or at least, if they do hear me, they may be deciding to just disobey me! :) But this whole telepathy thing with humans and dogs is greatly dependent upon the human's telepathy skills, the dog's telepathy skills, and how deep the human-dog bond is. It may also depend upon how adept I or my dogs are at this skill... we may all need more years of practice!

But there's something very comforting about the idea that dogs and humans who enjoy a relationship (and even humans and other humans who enjoy a relationship) have this extrasensory connection to each other, if they will just relax and try to use it.

In some of the cases, pets have been saved because their human could "hear" their projected distress, and have been able to find them because of it. That's just totally cool.

I remember in one or more cases I read that a dog sensed (from a distance) that his owner was in jeopardy, and got other people to come help out... saving the owner from drowning!

This telepathic connection seems to only exist in animals who live in groups and/or nurture their young. I gathered from this that there wasn't any evidence (yet) of such a connection existing between, say, alligators! The point seemed to be that creatures that are capable of compassion and affection for one another appear to also have this telepathic connection.

Ok, I've babbled long enough. I'm going to go kiss my dogs on the forehead, and rejoin my husband in bed -- I'm out here in the living room typing with insomnia. :P

Sigh. I hope this means that dogs go to heaven, too. :)