Overview

A delightful and accessible scientific exploration of animal behaviour, from one of the world's most innovative scientists. Many people who have ever owned a pet will swear that their dog or cat or other animal has exhibited some kind of behaviour they just can't explain. How does a dog know when its owner is returning home at an unexpected time? Filled with captivating stories and thought-provoking analysis, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home is a groundbreaking exploration of animal behaviour that will profoundly change the way we think about animals, and ourselves. After five years of extensive research involving thousands of people who own and work with animals, Rupert Sheldrake conclusively proves what many pet owners already know - that there is a strong connection between humans and animals that lies beyond present-day scientific understanding.

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9780099255871

Table of Contents

Reviews

Delightful . . . this book will turn our understanding of animals inside out -- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of * When Elephants Weep * Wonderful . . . splendid and thought-provoking * Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs *

An open-minded inquiry into animals' precognitive capabilities from Sheldrake (Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, 1995), attentive to the evidence and thoroughly investigative, conducted in the belief that science can he fun and rigorous, inquisitive as well as skeptical. Do animals possess telepathy? What lies behind their uncanny sense of direction? What is it chickens know that the scientists studying earthquakes do not? Sheldrake, a British biochemnist, has gathered a vast number of case histories documenting animals, from dogs and cats to horses and parakeets, that can tell when their owners are coming home, animals that anticipate epileptic seizures and air raids, cats that can tell who is on the phone, animals that find their human families after being separated by huge distances, not to mention the whole fabulous act known as migration. By way of explanation, Sheldrake proposes the possibility of what he calls morphic fields, self-organizing regions of influence, invisible blueprints as it were, with both spatial and temporal aspects, that interconnect and organize a system. Within the elasticity of the morphic field, channels of telepathic communication operate over the vastness of space - the type of connectedness witnessed in quantum entanglement theory - and the fields, large and small, specific and nonlocal, possess a collective memory, an instinct for habitual patterns shaped through experience. Sheldrake situates all this within ideas currently entertained by physicists and cosmologists and migration theorists and others, so that the word preposterous never seems applicable. What would be preposterous is trying to explain away the incidence of animal prescience and precognition as irrelevant and the product of wishful thinking, or to dismiss the potential that animals may have to forewarn events from medical crises to seismic upheavals, examples of which abound in these pages and not infrequently flabbergast. Sheldrake is a pleasure not just because he roams way beyond the mechanistic theory of nature, but because he appreciates worthy new questions as well as answers, one such being the time-honored Why? (Kirkus Reviews)

Delightful . . . this book will turn our understanding of animals inside out. <br>-- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep<br><br> Wonderful . . . splendid and thought-provoking. <br>-- Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

Delightful ... this book will turn our understanding of animals inside out -- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Author Of When Elephants Weep Wonderful ... splendid and thought-provoking Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

Delightful . . . this book will turn our understanding of animals inside out -- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of * When Elephants Weep * Wonderful . . . splendid and thought-provoking * Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs *

Author Information

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than eighty scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University where he took a PhD in biochemistry, and philosophy at Harvard University, where he was Frank Knox Fellow. He was Director of Studies in cell biology and biochemistry at Clare College, Cambridge, where he was also a Fellow. He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and has taken part in BBC and other radio programmes. He has written for newspapers such as the Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column, The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Sunday Times, and has contributed to a variety of magazines, including New Scientist, Resurgence, the Ecologist and the Spectator. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco and he lives in London with his wife and two sons.

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