Photography by Polly Borland
Rupert Sheldrake gazes, rapt, at the TV monitor. The videotape he is showing as part of a public lecture at Cambridge University portends, in his view, nothing less than the shattering of modern biology. It also features a cute dog. The tape, produced by an Austrian television station, looks more like a low-budget domestic farce than a paradigm smasher. On the right side of the split screen, the dog's owner, a woman named Pam Smart, is shown gadding about the English village of Ramsbottom. On the left side, her terrier-cross, Jaytee, who has remained at home, lies curled up at the feet of Pam's mother, Muriel. Beneath each of these slow-moving dramas, synchronized videotape counters tick by, confirming that the camera locked on Jaytee and the camera tracking Pam show simultaneous activity. Suddenly, a researcher accompanying Pam tells her it's time to leave. Eleven seconds later, as Pam exits a churchyard and strides toward a taxi stand to get a ride home, Jaytee rises and trots to a window. The Austrian reporter's voice-over states the dog waited patiently there for 15 minutes until his mistress walked in through the door.
The implication: Though Pam was several miles away, Jaytee sensed, somehow, the moment she formed the intent to return home.
In itself, of course, the Austrian tape proves nothing—it could be coincidence or a hoax. Indeed, that’s the judgment of Richard Wiseman, a British psychology researcher and avid debunker of pseudoscientific claims. Wiseman and two colleagues ran four owner-anticipation experiments with Jaytee and Pam and, in the August 1998 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, they concluded: “In all four experiments Jaytee failed to accurately detect when [Smart] set off to return home.” Sheldrake contends that Wiseman’s team arbitrarily established a two-minute waiting period as the criterion for owner anticipation and ignored the dog’s behavior after the return signal. “Wiseman’s own data shows the dog spent most of its time at the window when Pam was on her way home,” he argues. In any case, Sheldrake says, he has produced more than 200 similar tapes and found three dogs that anticipate their owners’ return 80 percent of the time.
