Conference hydra::dejavu

    
    Cats seem to be quite sensitive to ... entities.  Elsewhere, I
    recounted a story about the cat of a woman I know who sensed something
    neither the woman nor her boyfriend could see.  Whatever it was
    seemed invisible, but (outside of frightening the cat) seemed harmless.
    
    Dogs traditionally are supposed to be able to predict death,
    particularly dogs that howl in the night.  Sort of substitute banshees,
    one supposes.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

    There is a book published about 25 years ago entitled
     
                         Kinship with All Life
                         
    It's probably out of print, but it recounted one man's experiences
    with a dog named Strongheart.  (Yes, the one on the Strongheart
    Dog Food.)
    
    The book was primarily on telepathy, not sensing earthquakes or
    entities.
    
    Donald Reinke
    

    Animals do seem to be able to *sometimes* sense impending earthquakes.
    In China there is a network of farmers etc. who are supposed to
    report signs of nervousness among their animals up a chain to
    earthquake researchers who use this information as part of a system
    for the short term prediction of earthquakes.  Last I heard they
    had promissing (but still not definitely positive) results from
    the system as a whole, including that factor.
    
    I understand that there is now an official program in the USSR to
    study this phenomena.  There is individual, fairly respectable,
    research in this country also.
    
    This is probably not "psychic", however, but a sensitivity to
    electrical activity, subsonics, supersonics, magnetic field changes,
    odors, some other physical phenomena or some combination of the
    above.  Earthquakes "start" way before anything shakes, and I would
    want to eliminate an awful lot of possible physical effects before
    I attributed anything to psi in this case.
    
    People sometimes report some uneasyness also, but blame it on other
    factors, and ignore it.  "Man is a rationalizing animal."
    
    				Topher

    I had a dog who was quite sensitive to potentially dangerous natural
    phenomena, even if they were very distant.  In the tiny town I grew
    up in someone's house was destroyed by fire--they lived 4 miles
    or so from us.  The thing that woke us up was our dog running from
    window to window and whining.  It was the dead of winter, so the
    windows were shut tight--no smoke smell drifting through.  There
    was a faint orange glow from far off, but how he connected that
    with a dangerous event I don't know (do dogs have color vision?).
    The town had no fire trucks with sirens either, so that couldn't
    have disturbed him.  As a kid of 8, I was impressed.
    
    Marcia

RE: .4
    
    He might of heard distant shouting which was inaudible to you.
    
    Although many other orders of animals have color vision, in general
    mammals have poor or none.  This would seem to be because mammals
    evolved from a nocturnal animal which had lost the ability, and
    it took a long time for evolution to "rediscover" it.  The major
    exception is the "higher primates".  Some other mammals have some
    weak color perception, but for most purposes you can ignore it as
    insignificant.
    
    				Topher

    Re .4:
    
    Dogs probably do not have color vision, though the jury's still
    out on that: it was less than a decade ago that it was _proven_
    that cats do have color vision (though skewed towards orange-red).
      
    Canine vision is not very sharp, but they have incredible olfactory
    sensitivity.  Dogs used to detect smuggled drugs have had supposedly
    "sealed" packages, sometimes double- or triple-sealed, from which
    by residual odor alone they've detected contraband.  So that you
    couldn't smell the smoke doesn't mean the dog can't (ask any owner
    of a lady dog in heat: the owner can't smell a thing, but dogs from
    as far as several miles away will "come courting").  Also, though
    less likely, a dog's hearing is incredibly sharp and perhaps he
    could have heard the fire, four miles away or not.
    
    I favor the "smell" theory.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

    Re: .5 & .6
    
    Thanks for the input.  Whatever senses he used, we learned never
    to ignore it when he started to act up.
    
    Getting back to a previous comment made in another reply to the
    base note about sensitivity of animals to impending earthquakes
    and the like:  it was mentioned that animals' sensitivity to stimuli
    that are undetectable to humans (subsonics, atmospheric pressure,
    etc.) was not a manifestation of psychic ability.  I was interested
    in that because up until recently most of the establishment thought
    I absorbed said that nothing could be sensitive to those stimuli,
    and that anyone who pretended they were was fooling him/herself.
    (The same way no-one believed in the physiological changes that
    could be brought about by meditation practices which, when proven
    to exist, led to the development of bio-feedback.)  Back in those
    days, animal's ability to "predict" earthquakes, major storms and
    the like would have been called a "psychic" ability.
    
    So when the term "sensitive to psychic phenomena" is used now, does
    it only mean sensitivity to non-physical entities, and exclude natural
    phenomena?
    
    Marcia

    
    
    re .0  As a point of interest I have seen animals focus on areas
           in a house, become facinated with apparently nothing - and 
           when i've taken a look there has definately been an energy
           pattern/block there - ego... in my experience animals (dogs
           n cats anyway) are sensitive to non physical entities/energies.
    
           Domestic animals also have 'feelings'/emotions in my opinion.
           THere's a book about a women clairvoyant who used to be quite
           active with Vets in California.  She would communicate with
           the animals dogs/cats/horses etc and pass the info onto
           owners/vets regarding  their pains/feelings and
           apparently had a very high accuracy ratio....of course I
           didn't bother to validate the info either.  
    
                                 
          Cheers
    
          Lora

    	No, it was on IN SEARCH OF - a show which one must take a LARGE
    grain of salt to believe the information it gives out.
    
    	Larry
    

    Debra has a standard poodle that has been prone to stare in the
    room at what appears to be nothing. If you call her to get her
    attention, she will look at you and then return back to her
    stare. My dog has done similar things but usually looking outside
    at what also appears to be nothing at all. In Mogul's case (my dog),
    he may have seen a cat or some furry creature and is awaiting its
    return. I haven't notice him stare like Morgan does in the room,
    where there are no physical entites for her to focus on.
    
    Debra and I have concluded the dog is either brain damaged (hardly,
    she is way to cleaver and foxy to have a dented brain), on some
    kind of hallucinogenic or actually sees/senses a presence. Since
    she doesn't roam the streets, I doubt she is on drugs. Not knowing
    a great deal about animal psychiatry, I can only assume she feels
    a presence that Debra and I are not in touch with.
    
    Chuck
    

    
    
     re .12
    
               I have a  big thoroughbred who came down with a very
               rare autoimmune reaction 8 or so years ago.  It is quite
               fatal 2% or so recovery.  It became a 4 month intense
               period whereby he almost died more than a couple of time.
               There were some very weird other world things & experiences
               surrounding those 4 months.
               
               I'm convinced the reason he's alive today is because
               the intense, close bond which took place between us,
               especially during the last month and a half.
    
               Interestingly enough it was a profound period in my life
               whereby I expanded the dimentions of mind dramatically.
               These experiences later impacted my life in an extreme
               positive positive way - in the physical world as well
               as the world of the subtle energies.
    
               After his recovery I was standing in his stall one day
               brushing his rump; I was standing close to one of the
               stall walls when I noticed he had been gently trying
               to get close to me and I became sandwiched inbetween
               the wall and him ( he often does this when he feels 
               the need for closeness).  Mentally I said to myself,
               emphatically 'will you PLEASE move your rump so I can
               have some room!'.  He responded immediately.  It was
               so dramatic that I stepped outside his stall and pictured
               as well as well thought the words, 'make a large circle in
               the stall going to your left'; he looked to his left
               and then turned and walked in the circle returning to
               his original place and just stood there.  I continued
               to test it; while he was on the training line (about
               6' long whereby the horse is taught commands and can
               be exercised thru verbal command in a larger circle
               around the trainer) I gave him his walk, trot, canter
               ho commands telepathically ... yes I mixed them to 
               insure some sort of integrity... he followed each command
               as he was used to doing during verbal exercising.
    
               I can now call and or get his attention mentally while
               he's in his paddock (about 8 acreas) no matter what the
               distance and often give him mental commands as well 
               as converse with him telepatically while riding.  
               Others witnessed this..... 
    
               No one can convince me that animals aren't sensitive
               to 'other energies'.
    
    
           Lora
                 
                 

    I live on a very old farm that Castenada would have loved.  The
    house has a permanent resident (affectionately refered to as the
    thing in the closet) who plays with and discusses the state of the
    universe with my burmese cat.  The other cat could care less.
    
    Some of the horses (we have 8) have a telepathic bond with their
    person.  My two are a half arab paint and a evil-wicked-mean-and
   -nasty Morgan mare. I can ride either of them without tack, call
    them from the field without words, etc.  They are also excellent
    character references and quite protective.  The funny part about
    these two, is that they are quite dangerous for other people to
    deal with when not in my presence (for example they treed a 
    couple of tresspassers).  They too stare off into space frequently.
    

RE: .13
    
    I don't really wish to question that animals can be psychic.  I
    see no reason why people should be psychic but animals not.  This
    note is simply meant to be some interesting (to me anyway) nit-picking.
    
    The first problem relates to determining "who is psychic".  Telepathy
    is generally treated as a form of ESP -- the important partner is
    assumed to be the receiver.  This convention is followed by
    parapsychologists as well as occultists and lay people.  Logically,
    however, either the receiver ("percipient" in technical jargon)
    or sender ("agent") or both may be displaying the relevant talent.
    
    The import of all this is that the ability for a human to send orders
    to a horse may depend only on the psychic functioning of the human,
    not the horse.  Differences between different horses' ability to
    respond to the commands might represent differences in the human's
    feelings or expectations about the horse.
    
    The parapsychologist Helmutt Schmidt did a series of experiments
    a few years ago which tested the abilities of various animals to
    influence via PK a random number generator based on radioactive decay.
    (He was not the first by any means to study psi in animals, or "anpsi"
    as it is sometimes called).  Dr. Schmidt tested a number of different
    species, with great success, providing rewards appropriate to the
    species when they got a "hit" (when the RNG produced the "right"
    number).
    
    He then decided to test whether aversion could be used (i.e., punishing
    the subject animal when it got a "miss").  He selected as the subject
    species cockroaches.  He set it up so that a shock would be delivered
    whenever the RNG generated the wrong number.  The results: many
    *more* misses than could be explained by chance were generated.
    A rough paraphrase of Dr. Schmidt's conclusion: "Either cockroaches
    have strong PK abilities and use it to get shocked or the PK was
    provided by me all along and I don't like cockroaches (which I don't)"
    
    The other problem concerns the "Clever Hans Phenomena".  Clever
    Hans was a horse in the late 19'th century (I think) whose owner
    believed could talk.  He had taught Hans an elaborate code, something
    like Morse code except it used taps of the left and right front
    feet rather than dots and dashes.  Many savants had come to study
    Clever Hans and came away amazed.  Hans seemed capable of conversing
    via his special code.  He could do this even when his owner was
    not present, so signalling by his owner could be categorically ruled
    out.
    
    Clever Hans was considered proof that at least some (one) horses
    could actually talk -- until it was discovered that Hans became
    deaf and dumb when blindfolded or when all visitors were otherwise
    screened from his view.  What had happened was that Clever Hans
    had learned a truly amazing trick -- but not to talk.  He had learned
    to notice slight postural and other cues to tell if people were
    getting what they expected, and then using this information to
    determine how and for how long to tap.  In effect, he was acting
    as a non-psychic Ouija board for those present.  Magicians call
    this talent "muscle reading" and many have consciously developed
    its use to a reliable level.
    
    It would be foolish for me to claim, without any real evidence,
    that Lora's horse was showing the Clever Hans phenomena.  But, at
    least on the basis of what she has reported here, I can't really
    completely exclude the possibility.
    
    				Topher

    
    I have a cat that has a strange reaction to part of my house.  She
    is normally a very mellow kitty - a fixed female.  Any time I go
    to the basement to do my laundry, she will charge for the basement
    door to go down with me.  Once we get there, she climbs up on an
    old work bench that was put up by the former owner.  She begins
    to pace and trill and cry with great excitement.  Then she will
    jump down, run over to me, look up at me and DEMAND that I pick
    her up.  Once I do, she jumps down and runs to the workbench and
    the scene is repeated.  This is the fastest I ever see this kitty
    move in her life.  For a while her reaction frightened me, but recently
    I have convinced myself that if _she_ doesn't seem to be frightened
    then I shouldn't be.  I will tell you, though, that the other night
    I was going to wash some towels.  As I started down the stairs,
    I noticed the hall light was burned out.  I decided that I could
    use the towel in the guest bath until I could replace the bulb in
    the day time.  Any reaction?

    Re .16:
    
    A few points --
    
    1) The actions might not be paranormal.  There may be, oh, a smell
    or equivalent on the bench she likes.
    
    2) The actions apparently aren't the result of fright, so there
    appears to be little or no danger involved, whatever the exsplanation
    for kitty's actions.
    
    3) However, if you feel uneasy about it, there's no reason to go
    into the basement at night. [Even without paranormality, there's
    always the possibility of tripping or stumbling in the dark.]
    
    4) Some things that prowl at night can lurk in dark cellars in the
    daytime, too. :-)
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    
    

    My cats make a beeline for the basement whenever they hear
    the door open too.  They love it down there.  I think they
    smell/hear mice.  It's likey you have/had mice in your
    basement and that is what kitty is all excited about.
    
    Donna

    UK News Electronic Telegraph Friday 6 September 1996

    How smart is that doggie in the window ?

    By Sandra Barwick 

    A CONTROVERSIAL scientist, Rupert Sheldrake, has announced studies of a
    terrier which seem to show that the dog has an inexplicable knowledge
    of his absent mistress's return.

    He believes that this is due to "morphic fields", causing an invisible
    communication between dog and owner. But independent researchers say
    they have been unable to replicate his findings.

    Dr Sheldrake has also announced the results of a telephone poll of 122
    dog owners in Manchester, of whom 46 per cent said they believed their
    pets knew in advance when they were about to return home. Other
    scientists say it does not prove that their dogs are psychic.

    He has also been researching the detailed reactions of Jaytee belonging
    to Pam Smart, his research assistant. Jaytee, aged seven, from
    Manchester dogs' home, and probably of Border or Lakeland descent,
    appears on the basis of their research to have the canine equivalent of
    second sight.

    Dr Sheldrake has filmed 153 experiments on Jaytee. Miss Smart has been
    told to leave her house in Ramsbottom, Lancs, and travel varying
    distances before being given a signal to return at random times. (This
    was to exclude the possibility that Jaytee simply knew her usual
    pattern). He believes that 80 per cent of the time the dog reacted in
    such a way as to suggest he knew when his mistress was returning.

    According to Miss Smart, Jaytee appears to predict her return even when
    she uses an unfamiliar method of transport, such as bicycle or taxi
    instead of her car. However experiments conducted on Jaytee by Dr
    Richard Wiseman, senior lecturer in psychology at Hertfordshire
    University and an expert on psychical research, did not lead him to the
    same conclusion.

    Dr Sheldrake believes the only way to explain such behaviour in dogs is
    that there is "an invisible link or psychic bond beween the people and
    their animals

    In four tests, Dr Wiseman remained with the dog while Matthew Smith,
    his research assistant, accompanied Miss Smart and told her to return
    at different times. "In three of the tests, there was no evidence that
    Jaytee knew the moment her owner began to return. In the fourth, he did
    visit the window close to the time when she began to return. However,"
    said Mr Smith, "he visited the window at 13 or 14 other times." 

    Dr Sheldrake denies that these independent experiments did not verify
    his research. "Wiseman's data showed exactly the same pattern as ours,"
    he said yesterday. "The percentage of time the dog spent at the window
    was greater when his owner was returning."

    He said he had carried out far more experiments on Jaytee than Dr
    Wiseman, whose criteria was different from his.

    Other scientists said that it was difficult to test claims of psychic
    ability in pets.

    Miss Smart says that the project has received 1,500 letters from people
    claiming their dogs, of all breeds, can predict their actions. The
    Lifebridge Foundation, an independent research organisation in New
    York, gave Dr Sheldrake �13,000 last year to carry out a study into the
    subject. 

    Dr Sheldrake believes the only way to explain such behaviour in dogs is
    that there is "an invisible link or psychic bond beween the people and
    their animals, through which influences can be communicated at a
    distance". He believes they may be linked by an invisible "morphic
    field", a concept outlined in his A New Science of Life, published in
    1981, in which he suggested that the embryos of living things tune in
    to a field created by past members of the same species.

    Sir John Maddox, the editor of Nature at the time, said of this book
    that it was "the best candidate for burning there has been for many
    years" and that Dr Sheldrake was suggesting "there might be some place
    for magic in science".

    Dr Sheldrake, who has no pets of his own, was once a director of
    studies in biochemistry at Clare College, Cambridge. Then he went to
    work at a crops research institute in India. In 1978, he visited an
    ashram run by a Benedictine monk and wrote down his theories on the
    possibility of "morphic fields" in a hut under a banyan tree on the
    banks of the River Cauvery in southern India.

    The theory, which was refined when he returned to Britain, suggests
    that animals and humans can tune in to a collective experience and
    learn from the knowledge of others.

    Dogs are not the only objects of Dr Sheldrake's interest. In his book
    Seven Experiments That Changed The World, he examines "phantom limbs" -
    the phenomenon of sensation apparently remaining in amputated arms and
    legs. Dr Sheldrake's theory is that the severed limbs still exist as a
    field of energy, a field to which, he argues, Jaytee is giving one more
    potential pointer.