Can dogs read your mind?

Press, 15 March 1980, Page 16

Can dogs read your mind?

By

JUDSON BENNETT,

Features International

Have you ever, had the feeling that your dog knows what you are thinking? Does he sometimes obey your commands before you actually give them? Has he ever been, aware of potential danger even though it was out of his sight?

Indeed, current investigations are making scientists ask whether dogs have a sixth sense that puts them in touch, not only with other animals, but in many instances with humans, too.

According to a Cardiff biolgist, Dr Alfred Hardy, “some sort of telepathy” may well be a means by which ■ animals engage in wordless conversation or communication with each other.

Hamburg University’s Dr Ludwig Sachs recently expressed a similar view at a meeting sponsored by the International Institute of . Perception, explaining that many domestic dogs were smarter than their owners thought, because the animals were —- in some way —- picking up information from the huriian brain. He quoted the recent case of Chris, a beagle

owned by lecturer Henri Lis of Grenoble, which learned to tap out a code for numbers With his paw. What puzzled Henri Lis was the incredible ease With which Chris would tap out the answers to such questions as “What’s nine times five?” which Lis had asked in his mind, but not spoken aloud“The canine brain isn’t geared for doing mathematical problems,” Lis explained. “I had no possible motive in perpetrating a fraud, and never at any time did I commercialise the dog’s capacities. “The only theory I have is that the dog wasn’t doing the thinking, but picking up the answers from a human mind.” Similar experiments with dogs have been carried out recently by a Russian physiologist, Dr W, Bechterev, who claims that experiements show that his dogs also appear to act before he gives his commands.

He says that he' can think of a number and his trained dogs will tap it out. At first he thought that perhaps he was unconsciously giving some kind of sensory signal,

some subtle muscular action, movement of the lips, or other sign visible to the dogs. But the dogs responded in the same way when both he and the animals were in separate rooms, and even though the orders were quite complicated.

When Bechterev thought: “Go into the next

room and bring me a napkin from the table,” a dog would do just that, going to the table, ignoring everything else and selecting the proper object. He finally concluded that the behaviour of his dogs was directly influenced by thought suggestion. This is a view shared by a zoologist, Raymond Stout, director of the Central Park Zoo in New York, who claims that this ability is possessed by the most successful animal trainers. “The animal trainer has,

deep inside his brain, this means of communication without speech and uses it without realising he is doing so,” Mr Stout says. “It’s something unconscious — you don’t know you have it. The firs-*, time I walked up to a lion it knew what I wanted it to do, and did it.” Many ordinary dog owners also believe that they have this “animal

trainer’s” power and that their dogs are reading ■them loud and clear even though there is no verbal communication.

Says one expert: “Many cases exist where a dogowner has been away from the animal, and the dog has sensed that the owner has been ill.”

But perhaps, most startling evidence of some kind of mental connection between the minds of dogs and men involves cases- in which a dog finds his way to his master over a long distance —often .to places he has never visited before.

What rational explanation is there for the case of Ava, a sheepdog; which walked about 250' miles in 10 days over Italy's Appenine Mountains to rejoin its master at Ferrara? Or Bobbie, a ' collie; which was taken .on a motor journey from Oregon in America to Indiana, where he disappeared — more than 1500 miles away? Six months later, he was home, having travelled through several cities and towns, across a desent, and over the Rockies.

Birds that migrate af night are thought to maintain a course taken from the sun just before sunset. Could it be the same ■type of navigational system which guides a dog home to his master? Cir, is it possible that , some extra-sensory power,

beyond the capacities of ordinary physical senses, can guide a dog to the right part of the country, ■the. right town, the. right road . . . and the right house in which he will find the man or woman he loves? ... .; x