In 1958 Donald Moore was driving his family from Nebraska to a
new home in Louisiana, USA, when their cat, Hornblower, got left
behind along the way. Three weeks later, over 700km from where he
was lost, Hornblower appeared at the Moore's new house, which he
had never seen before. In 1959 a South African family moved house
1100km away, leaving their pet tortoise behind. The dawdling
tortoise found its owners three years later, still wearing its old
identity tag.
These animals were "psi-trailing" -- travelling long distances to
unknown places in search of their owners. The word was coined by
American parapsychologist Dr Joseph Banks Rhine, who during the
1950s led research at North Carolina's Duke University into animal
extrasensory perception, called animal psi or anpsi. His team
investigated 500 cases and identified five categories of anpsi --
sensing forthcoming harm to an individual, foretelling natural
disasters, anticipating the return of a loved one, finding a way
home and psi-trailing.
A man and his dog. One of the most astonishing
accounts of psi-trailing concerns Private Brown, a soldier who left
Britain in 1914 to fight in France. Soon afterwards his dog Prince
disappeared. Brown's wife later learnt that Prince had been able to
make his way to the London docks, cross the English Channel and
find his master in the trenches at Armentieres.
Some animals seem to sense the deaths of distant loved ones. White
House staff reported that Abraham Lincoln's dog began to howl and
rush about shortly before the US president was assassinated in
1865. And in 1923, four months after the discovery of Tutankhamun's
tomb in Egypt, as the expedition's sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, died in
Cairo, his dog -- 5000km away in English -- yelped once and
died.
Animal warnings have been associated with imminent catastrophes,
such as volcanic eruptions and fires. Inhabitants of the Skopje Zoo
in Macedonia began restlessly flinging themselves against their
cages only hours before the 1963 earthquake. German psychiatrist Dr
Utes Pleimes of the University of Geissen has recorded more than
800 danger warnings from animals and says,"We are fools to ignore
them."
Animals may somehow sense the impending return of someone they
know. The 1937 film Elephant
Boy featured the Indian actor Sabu Sabu, whose co-starring
elephant was sent to Dudley Zoo in England after filming. Long
before the man reached the enclosure, the elephant began trumpeting
agitatedly until Sabu appeared. Among the extraordinary animals
studied by Dr Rhine's team, few outshone Chris, George Wood's
part-beagle from Rhode Island. Wood claimed the dog could
communicate future events by tapping messages with his paws. Chris
learnt a paw-tapping system to identify the five symbols in a pack
of 25 Zener cards, used for telepathy experiments -- one tap to
indicate a circle, two for a cross, and so on. Even when researches
handled the cards in a separate room, the dog's ESP performance
outstripped by far the odds of chance occurrances (about a thousand
million to one).
Horse sense. Horses too exhibit anpsi. In the
early 1900s in Berlin, the stallion Clever Hans appeared to count
and spell by nodding his head, stamping a forefoot and nuzzling
alphabet blocks. Oskar Pfungst, a young psychologist, suspected
that the horse was picking up cues from the body language of his
owner or spectators. The Elberfield horses in Germany, observed by
Belgian Nobel prizewinning writer Maurice Maeterlinck around 1913,
showed similar abilities -- their trainer tied sacks over their
heads to forestall accusations of prompting. Maeterlinck saw the
four horses spell, do mathematical calculations by tapping answers
with their hooves, and identify pictures and colours.
It may be that animals react more sensitively than humans to
natural phenomena, such as barometric pressure or minute earth
tremors. Claims of psi-trailing may sometimes be put down to
mistaken identity. People's facial expressions or gestures may
offer cues, consciously or unconsciously, to supposedly psychic
creatures. But ample anecdotal material encourages the efforts of
researchers such as the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who
announced plans in April 1994 for a serious investigation of
supernaturally perceptive pets.
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