Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon
⚡ Contested ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can your dog tell when you're heading home? Researchers put a terrier named Jaytee to the test in four experiments, choosing return times randomly so nobody at home could tip him off. Everything was filmed for an independent judge to review. The verdict? Jaytee didn't reliably signal when his owner was returning. But here's the twist: another team studied the same dog in the same period and reached the opposite conclusion. The difference? How each team scored the footage. One checked specific time blocks; the other measured total window time. A perfect case study in how analytical choices change what the data seems to say.
Actual Paper Abstract
In his book, Seven Experiments That Could Change The World, Rupert Sheldrake suggested that the public carry out experiments to test whether pets can psychically detect when their owners are returning home. The first of these tests was undertaken by an Austrian television company and involved an owner in the Northwest of England (PS) and her dog (Jaytee). The test appeared remarkably successful and seemed to show Jaytee responding when PS set off to return home from a remote location. Rupert Sheldrake and PS kindly asked the authors if they would like to carry out their own investigation into Jaytee's abilities. This paper outlines various 'normal' explanations that might account for the phenomenon and presents an experimental design that minimised these possibilities. The paper then details the procedure and results of four experiments. Analysis of the data did not support the hypothesis that Jaytee could psychically detect when his owner was returning home. Finally, the paper discusses a possible reason for the difference in results of these studies and those carried out by the Austrian television company.
Research Notes
The essential skeptical counterpart to Sheldrake & Smart (2000), testing the same dog Jaytee during overlapping periods. The two teams' contradictory conclusions stem from different analytical approaches: Wiseman scored binary signal detection within time blocks; Sheldrake scored proportion of time at window. A canonical case study in how analytical choices determine verdicts from the same data.
Four controlled experiments testing whether a dog (Jaytee, a terrier cross) could psychically detect when his owner (Pam Smart) was returning from a remote location. Return times were randomly selected using RNG or Rand Corporation tables; no one at home knew the return time; Jaytee was continuously videotaped; and a blind judge assessed his signalling behavior. Possible normal explanations (routine, sensory cueing, selective memory, multiple guesses) were systematically addressed. In all four experiments Jaytee failed to accurately signal the randomly selected return time. The authors concluded the data did not support the psychic pet hypothesis.
Links
Related Papers
Critiques
Companion
- Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory? — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- Testing a Return-Anticipating Dog, Kane — Sheldrake, Rupert (2000)
- Perceptive Pets: A Survey in North-West California — Brown, David Jay (1998)
Also by these authors
Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall' Effect
Of Two Minds: Sceptic-Proponent Collaboration within Parapsychology
Testing Alleged Mediumship: Methods and Results
More in Telepathy
Telecommunication Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis
Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Taking the Mindfield Literally: Discovering Minds by Assuming Competence Among Nonspeakers
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
📋 Cite this paper
Wiseman, Richard, Smith, Matthew, Milton, Julie (1998). Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02696.x
@article{wiseman_1998_jaytee_dog,
title = {Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon},
author = {Wiseman, Richard and Smith, Matthew and Milton, Julie},
year = {1998},
journal = {British Journal of Psychology},
doi = {10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02696.x},
}