Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon
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Plain English Summary
Can your dog tell when you're heading home? Researchers put a terrier named Jaytee to the test in four experiments, choosing return times randomly so nobody at home could tip him off. Everything was filmed for an independent judge to review. The verdict? Jaytee didn't reliably signal when his owner was returning. But here's the twist: another team studied the same dog in the same period and reached the opposite conclusion. The difference? How each team scored the footage. One checked specific time blocks; the other measured total window time. A perfect case study in how analytical choices change what the data seems to say.
Abstract
In his book, Seven Experiments That Could Change The World, Rupert Sheldrake suggested that the public carry out experiments to test whether pets can psychically detect when their owners are returning home. The first of these tests was undertaken by an Austrian television company and involved an owner in the Northwest of England (PS) and her dog (Jaytee). The test appeared remarkably successful and seemed to show Jaytee responding when PS set off to return home from a remote location. Rupert Sheldrake and PS kindly asked the authors if they would like to carry out their own investigation into Jaytee's abilities. This paper outlines various 'normal' explanations that might account for the phenomenon and presents an experimental design that minimised these possibilities. The paper then details the procedure and results of four experiments. Analysis of the data did not support the hypothesis that Jaytee could psychically detect when his owner was returning home. Finally, the paper discusses a possible reason for the difference in results of these studies and those carried out by the Austrian television company.
Links
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- Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
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- Testing a Return-Anticipating Dog, Kane — Sheldrake, Rupert (2000)
- Perceptive Pets: A Survey in North-West California — Brown, David Jay (1998)
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📋 Cite this paper
Wiseman, Richard, Smith, Matthew, Milton, Julie (1998). Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02696.x
@article{wiseman_1998_jaytee_dog,
title = {Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon},
author = {Wiseman, Richard and Smith, Matthew and Milton, Julie},
year = {1998},
journal = {British Journal of Psychology},
doi = {10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02696.x},
}