Animal Telepathy: Parrots, Pigeons & Premonitions

The dog who knows his owner is coming home is one case among many. Rupert Sheldrake groups the "unexplained powers of animals" into three kinds — telepathy, an uncanny sense of direction, and premonitions of danger — and argues that all three point to the same thing: animals are bound to one another, and to the people and places they belong with, by fields that reach beyond their bodies.

A parrot who seemed to read minds

N'kisi was an African grey parrot trained by the artist Aimée Morgana in New York, with a working vocabulary of hundreds of words used in context. In a controlled test, Morgana sat on a different floor of the building and looked at randomly chosen photographs, while N'kisi — filmed and recorded separately — was logged saying whatever he said. Three independent transcribers, blind to the images, wrote down his words. In the 71 trials where he used one of the agreed key-words, he scored 23 hits where about 12 would be expected by chance — odds against chance of a few thousand to one. Sheldrake published the result with characteristic openness: the journal printed two referees' comments beside it, one sceptical and one supportive, and Sheldrake himself pointed out that many of the hits fell on a single word, "flower" — then showed that even with that word set aside the result stayed statistically significant.

The unsolved homing of pigeons

A pigeon carried hundreds of miles in a closed box, to a place it has never been, will fly home. Sheldrake's point is that, after a century of study, "no one knows how pigeons home." The birds use the sun, magnetism, smells and landmarks as aids, but none of these solves the basic problem of working out, from an unknown starting point, which way home actually lies. His hypothesis is that the bird stays linked to its home loft through a morphic field — "a kind of invisible elastic band" that gives it both a direction and a pull. And he proposes a clean test, versions of which he has run: physically move the home loft while the birds are away, to a site they have never seen. If they still find it, no map of fixed landmarks can be the whole story.

Premonitions of disaster

The third kind of power Sheldrake is careful to treat as anecdotal rather than experimental. Before the great Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, animals across the region were reported to have fled to high ground — elephants in Sri Lanka and Thailand trumpeting as they climbed, buffalo stampeding uphill, dogs that refused their morning walk on the beach, flamingos that abandoned their low-lying nests. The usual explanation, that the animals felt the tremors, struck him as incomplete: "there would have been tremors all over Southeast Asia, not just in the afflicted coastal areas. And if animals can predict earthquake-related disasters by sensing slight tremors, why can't seismologists?" His response is, again, a testable proposal — a public hotline for unusual animal behaviour, watched for the geographic surges that might one day give a warning.

The group as a whole

The oldest illustration he reaches for is the termite mound. The naturalist Eugène Marais reported that termites repairing a nest around a steel plate built matching arches from both sides of the barrier — arches that met precisely, though neither working party could see or smell the other through the steel. Sheldrake reads this as a social morphic field holding the plan of the whole nest, coordinating insects that have no other way to coordinate — and he notes, honestly, that this striking experiment has never been independently repeated. Through all of it runs a single thread: a field that binds the members of a group into a whole, the idea worked out in The Extended Mind and seen at its clearest in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.

Sources

Primary sources: Rupert Sheldrake & Aimée Morgana, "Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy," Journal of Scientific Exploration 17 (2003) · Sheldrake's account of animal navigation, "A Sense of Direction Involving New Scientific Principles" · his essay "Listen to the Animals" (The Ecologist, 2005) · and the book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999; rev. 2011).