Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home

Many pet owners are sure their dog knows when they are on the way home — waiting at the door or the window before the car could possibly be heard. Rupert Sheldrake collected thousands of such accounts, and then did what few had tried: he put one dog to a rigorous, videotaped test.

Jaytee

Jaytee was a terrier belonging to Pam Smart, of Ramsbottom near Manchester. He would settle at the window around the time she set off to come home — and kept doing so even after she lost her job and her returns became irregular, which ruled out a simple sense of clock-time. To test whether he was somehow anticipating her, rather than hearing a familiar car or picking up the family's expectations, Sheldrake designed a controlled experiment.

The videotaped experiments

Jaytee was filmed continuously while Pam was out. She travelled well away from home, returned at a time chosen at random and signalled to her remotely, and often came back by unfamiliar means so that no recognisable engine could give the game away. The tapes were scored blind, second by second. The result was clear: across the experiments Jaytee spent about 4% of the time at the window during the main period of Pam's absence, and about 55% of the time once she had set off to return — a difference with odds against chance of less than one in ten thousand. His vigil intensified as she drew nearer. On control evenings, when Pam did not come home at all, no such build-up occurred.

The Wiseman experiments

The most-cited chapter of the Jaytee story is often told as a debunking, but the facts are more interesting. At Sheldrake's own invitation, the psychologist Richard Wiseman filmed four of Pam's absences. The episode was widely reported as a failure to find the effect — yet the disagreement was never about what the dog did, only about how to score it. Wiseman judged success by a single all-or-nothing rule: did Jaytee's first unexplained trip to the window fall in the ten-minute slot when Pam set off? Because Jaytee went to the window often, his first trip was usually early, so by that rule all four trials "failed." But when Wiseman's own footage is plotted the way Sheldrake plots his — as the proportion of time at the window across the whole absence — it shows the same rising pattern, low while Pam was away and far higher once she was heading home. Wiseman later acknowledged this plainly: the patterning in his studies, he said, "are the same as the patterning in Rupert's studies," and "by looking at his data... there may well be something going on." Both sides agree on the data; they differ on how to read it.

Not one dog

Sheldrake repeated the work with a second dog, Kane, and found the same anticipatory pattern — the Jaytee result was no one-animal fluke. The wider phenomenon of unexplained animal powers — telepathic parrots, homing pigeons, and animals that sense disasters before they strike — is taken up in Animal Telepathy: Parrots, Pigeons & Premonitions, and the underlying idea, of bonds that link animals within a shared field, in The Extended Mind.

Sources & talks

The filmed Jaytee experiment, made for Austrian television:

Jaytee, a dog who knew when his owner was coming home: The ORF ExperimentYouTube

Primary sources: Rupert Sheldrake & Pamela Smart, "A Dog That Seems To Know When His Owner Is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations," Journal of Scientific Exploration 14 (2000) · the book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999; rev. 2011) · and the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia.