Pet dogs have a habit of sitting by doors and windows waiting for absent owners to return. Most people would think nothing of this. But having studied the phenomenon, Rupert Sheldrake, scientist turned science outcast, is convinced there is only one explanation: dogs know when their owners are coming home, and they know because they are telepathic.

Telepathy has been Sheldrake’s big idea for two decades. He believes that dogs, birds, humans, even termites carry invisible “morphic” fields through which their ancestors pass on habits, customs, even IQ points, down the generations. Dogs that Know when their Owners are Coming Home is his latest book on the subject. Here, Sheldrake claims to provide further evidence for animal telepathy from interviews with hundreds of pet owners and animal trainers, and from his own experiments with a 10-year-old terrier called Jaytee.

Nobody has replicated Sheldrake’s findings. And most scientists view morphic fields as at best a bit of imaginative fun rather than serious science. But Sheldrake has clearly struck a chord with the public. His books sell; teachers invite him into schools where he shows children how to carry out their own DIY telepathy experiments. Even New Scientist has run one. And the more critics attack Sheldrake, the more his popularity seems to grow.

So what are we to make of this former Cambridge don? A refreshing force for democracy in science, who exposes its institutions as clubs for the narrow-minded? Or a well-intentioned pseudoscientist, who legitimises beliefs in the paranormal? To look for clues, New Scientist visited Sheldrake at his home in north London’s leafy Hampstead.


Why do so many people think their cats and dogs can read their minds?

More than half the dog owners we surveyed think their dogs can read their minds or pick up their thoughts, and over a third of the cat owners. I think so many people claim their animals can read their minds because sometimes their pets do read their minds, they are picking up their intentions. The most dramatic examples are to do with dogs knowing when their owners are returning home. When an owner is 20 miles away an animal can’t be reading subtle cues in their owner’s behaviour, or body language. And in our experiments (see “Smart pet”) we’ve eliminated all the other normal things that the dogs might be responding to, such as routine, familiar car sounds, people at home knowing when their owners will return.

How can you tell whether a dog knows that their owner is coming home? I can hear scientists questioning whether you could quantify this.

You can quantify it. What we do is videotape the door or window where the dog usually waits and then we simply quantify the amount of time it sits there. I get all the tapes analysed by somebody who doesn’t know the details of the experiment. Sometimes the dog will go to a window for other reasons, like barking at passing dogs or cats, or sometimes they just sit there because it’s sunny. In fact, the results are highly significant even if you include the visits to sit in the sunshine, and even more significant if you eliminate these visits.

In your new book, you suggest pets could be used to predict earthquakes. Is there any evidence for this?

Animals sometimes display unusual behaviour before earthquakes. These premonitions are non-telepathic phenomena and could be explained in terms of electrical changes or minor tremors the animals pick up. In the 1970s, China trained its citizens to look out for such behaviour in animals and to report them to the authorities. In my book, I quote the case of the Haicheng earthquake, which took place on 4 February 1975 in the evening. Throughout January, more than 20 species of animal such as cattle, dogs and chickens, showed signs of fear. The authorities combined this with seismological records and decided to evacuate the city on the morning before the earthquake struck.

The Chinese haven’t been 100 per cent successful using animals. They’ve missed some earthquakes. But they continue to make successful predictions. People in the Western seismological community haven’t considered this evidence. They see earthquakes as an engineering problem, a physics problem, a geology problem, which animals have nothing to do with.

Could animals be used to predict earthquakes, say, in California?

Yes, by asking people to monitor animal behaviour. The Internet and modern telecommunications mean this is now feasible on a scale never before possible. You’d need to set up an easy to remember number, say, 1-800 petquake, for people to call if their animal behaved unusually. You could feed the information into a computerised map which would glow if there were lots of calls from a particular region. The system could involve millions of people. Unusual behaviour could be associated with impending thunderstorms, or firework displays. But if it was in a seismically prone area and there was no other reason for the surge, then it could be a sign of an impending earthquake. Quite apart from its utility, it would be a wonderful example of participatory science.

Is there any way of knowing whether changes in animal behaviour take place at other times, but may not be noticed?

It’s not an insuperable problem to deal with selective memory. That’s why we videotape the dogs who seem to know when their owners are coming home. We can see exactly what they do, when they do it. In the case of the 1-800 petquake idea, there would no doubt be a steady trickle of false alarms and probably some hoax calls as well and people would think their cat looked restless when it was just sick. But you would have a full record of all the calls that came in, you would also have a full record of earthquakes, so you could look at the data to see if you get a surge of calls in an area where an earthquake later strikes.

Which other animals have you observed?

We’ve done experiments with parakeets that know when their owners are coming home. Cats have proved rather more elusive because they don’t always wait in the same place. When it’s a fine day they’ll wait outside on the doorstep, if it’s a cold day they’ll wait inside on the boiler. I haven’t got sophisticated surveillance equipment, so cats are harder to work with.

How far down the evolutionary scale do you think telepathy goes? Can a goldfish be telepathic?

So far, all the impressive cases are with mammals and birds. I haven’t a shred of evidence that there are any abilities of this kind in fish. Termites, bees and wasps could also be telepathic. Some people who keep snakes and other reptiles-tortoises and terrapins-claim their animals seem to anticipate when they are going to be fed at non-routine times, but I haven’t got any clear evidence that there’s any telepathic involvement. I placed an appeal in a magazine called Reptilian International to contact snake owners to try to find more instances. If you ask that kind of question of dog or cat owners you get hundreds of answers, many cases. In the Reptilian appeal, there was a deafening silence

You claim telepathy is a consequence of morphic fields. What are these?

Morphic fields are a kind of bond within species. There are many kinds of bonds, such as those between a mother cat and her kitten. I have proposed that these bonds are real connections, which link individuals even when they are apart. Human social groups such as families inherit a collective memory through morphic fields. One example of this is the habits, beliefs and customs of ancestors, which influence the behaviour of present generations.

If telepathy exists, why are humans so bad at it?

Well, to me it’s an open question. All the surveys I’ve done show that, on the whole, women are better than men, and children are often better than adults. Modern, urban humans of the educated kind are obviously not very good. Educated people , if they believe in telepathy, feel they can’t admit it in public. People in traditional, non-Western societies are far better at these things, at least according to anecdotal accounts. Unfortunately there are very few traditional societies left.

What would it be about Western urban living that would dumb down our telepathic skills?

One reason is that telephones and televisions make telepathy less important. You’ve got simpler, more direct and more reliable technological means of achieving distant communication. In the modern world, the place to look for telepathy is in connection with telephone calls. Lots of people report the sensation of knowing when a friend or other person is about to call them. I don’t think this is merely a coincidence. And the latest thing is telepathic e-mails, where you become aware of someone’s intention to send you an e-mail. I am starting to get a lot of anecdotes from people about telepathic e-mails.

Your work is frequently criticised by other scientists. Why is this so?

The work I do excites very strong prejudices. In some cases it’s a knee-jerk thing where they haven’t actually read the paper. The criticisms I have had from some people are often extraordinarily ill-informed. There is a whole set of taboos about what you can and can’t do in science. There’s no doubt that things such as telepathy have been on the taboo list for a long time.

What is the harshest thing anyone has ever said about you?

In 1981, John Maddox, the editor of Nature, compared my book, A New Science of Life, unfavourably to Mein Kampf and said it was “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years”. He was trying to put what I was doing beyond the pale of science.

It is sometimes said that Maddox made you famous.

In retrospect, I think that he did me a good turn.

A lot of people make jokes about morphic resonance.

Yes, particularly in New Scientist.

How do you feel about that?

Making jokes doesn’t bother me particularly. The sceptical response of science is nothing new to me. What does bother me is the closed-mindedness on the part of people who trained that science is an open-minded inquiry. I started thinking about these ideas when I was a don at Cambridge. I tried to run them past my friends and colleagues and most of them were quite prepared to discuss them but in a completely jocular way. No one would take them seriously. So if I said, I’ve got to go and make a phone call, they’d say: “Why bother, use morphic resonance, ha, ha!”.