Hildur Sif 
There is a moment that many dog owners know without ever having planned for it. You are sitting in the living room, perhaps reading, perhaps watching television, and the dog — who has been asleep for the past hour — suddenly lifts its head, gets up, and moves to the window or the door. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes later, a key turns in the lock. Someone is home. The dog knew.
Most people who have experienced this simply file it away under the heading of dog things. Remarkable, yes. Inexplicable, perhaps. But not something they expect science to take seriously. And for most of the twentieth century, they were right. Science didn’t take it seriously. The phenomenon was treated as anecdote, as confirmation bias, as the sentimental overinterpretation of people who loved their pets too much to think straight about them.
Then Rupert Sheldrake came along and decided it deserved a proper look.
What followed was one of the most fascinating, contentious, and genuinely illuminating episodes in modern parapsychological research. It centred on a terrier crossbreed named Jaytee, his owner Pamela Smart, a camera, a great deal of videotape, and a question that turned out to be far harder to dismiss than anyone expected: How does the dog know?
A Dog Named Jaytee, and the Woman He Waited For
Pamela Smart — known throughout the research as P.S. — adopted Jaytee from Manchester Dogs’ Home in 1989, when he was still a puppy. The bond between them was immediate and strong. She lived in Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester, in a ground-floor flat next to her parents’ flat, and when she went out, she typically left Jaytee with her parents, William and Muriel Smart (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 1).
The first hints of something unusual surfaced in 1991. Pam was working as a secretary in Manchester at the time, keeping regular office hours. Her parents noticed that Jaytee would go to the French window in the living room almost every weekday at around 4:30 p.m. — around the time she was setting off for home. Her journey usually took forty-five minutes to an hour. Jaytee would wait at the window for most of that time. This seemed unremarkable at first. Pam was working predictable hours. Perhaps the dog had simply learned the schedule — some kind of internal time sense, or a response to the rhythms of the household (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 2).
Then something changed. In 1993, Pam was made redundant and became unemployed. Her schedule dissolved entirely. She was out at irregular times, for variable durations, for no predictable reason. Her parents usually had no idea when she would be home. And yet Jaytee continued to anticipate her return (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 2).
This is the detail that changes the story. It is easy enough to explain a dog responding to routine. It is much harder to explain a dog responding to the absence of routine, and still getting it right.
Pam read an article in the Sunday Telegraph in April 1994 about research Rupert Sheldrake was conducting on this very phenomenon, and she got in touch. What began as a casual observation by a family in the north of England would grow into one of the most meticulously documented investigations in the history of parapsychology.
The Researcher and the Question He Refused to Ignore
Rupert Sheldrake is a Cambridge-trained biologist — he studied natural sciences at Cambridge, took his PhD in biochemistry there, and was a Fellow of Clare College. He is not a fringe figure by background or training. But his intellectual curiosity has always pushed at the edges of what mainstream biology is willing to countenance.
Sheldrake had been collecting accounts of animals anticipating their owners’ returns for years before he encountered Jaytee. In random household surveys conducted in Britain and the United States, he and his colleagues had found that between 45% and 52% of dog owners reported noticing this kind of behaviour — the dog going to wait at a door, window, or gate while the person was still on their way home (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 1). By 2011, his database held more than a thousand accounts of dogs and over six hundred of cats showing similar anticipatory behaviour (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 138).
The explanations that sceptics typically reached for were, Sheldrake acknowledged, perfectly reasonable starting points. Perhaps the dog was hearing or smelling the owner approaching. Perhaps it was responding to the routine times of return. Perhaps it was picking up subtle cues from people at home who knew when the absent person was coming back. Perhaps the phenomenon was simply an artifact of selective memory — the dog went to the window often; people only remembered the times that coincided with the owner’s arrival (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 1).
Each of these explanations could, in principle, be tested. And Sheldrake proposed a simple experimental design that would do exactly that. The owner should come home at non-routine times, in an unfamiliar vehicle — a taxi, say — so that the dog couldn’t recognise the sound of a known car. The people at home should not know when the owner was coming. And the dog’s behaviour should be recorded continuously on videotape with a time code, so that selective memory could be ruled out entirely (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 1).
This is not a complicated experimental design. It requires no laboratory, no specialist equipment, no grant funding beyond the basics. What it requires is patience, rigour, and the willingness to take the question seriously. Sheldrake had all three.
The Austrian Television Experiment: A Striking Beginning
Before the formal scientific investigation began, there was a television experiment that would set the scene — and also sow the seeds of controversy.
In November 1994, the Science Unit of Austrian State Television (ORF) filmed an experiment with Pam and Jaytee. Two film crews were deployed. One crew followed Pam as she walked around the town centre of Ramsbottom. The second remained in her parents’ flat and continuously filmed Jaytee. After several hours, the crew accompanying Pam decided it was time to go home. At that precise moment — not before, not after — Jaytee got up, went to the window, and waited there until Pam arrived (Wiseman, Smith, & Milton, 1998, p. 1).
The results received considerable media attention. Channel 4’s Absolutely Animals stated: “Jaytee always goes to the window when his owner, Pam Smart, starts her journey home.” A commentary on Paul McKenna’s World of the Paranormal declared: “He does it every time Pam goes out. He’s psychic” (Wiseman et al., 1998, p. 1).
The footage from this experiment was, by any measure, striking. In the edited version produced for television, the two videotapes were shown together on a split screen, in exact synchrony. Pam is seen on one side of the screen being told to go home. Almost immediately, Jaytee shows signs of alertness — ears pricking up. Eleven seconds after Pam is told to return, while she is walking toward the taxi stand, Jaytee gets up, walks to the window, and sits there expectantly. He remains there for the entirety of her return journey (Sheldrake, 2011, p. 57).
Sheldrake was clear about what made this sequence so compelling: “There seems no possible way in which Jaytee could have known by normal sensory means at what instant Pam was setting off to come home” (Sheldrake, 2011, p. 57). The timing was random — not a routine return time. Pam was in a taxi, not her own car. The people at home with Jaytee did not know when she was coming. And yet the dog moved to the window eleven seconds after the signal was given, several miles away.
This, of course, is a single experiment recorded under the not entirely controlled conditions of a television shoot. Sheldrake knew that. He had already been thinking rigorously about experimental design. But the Austrian footage provided vivid, visual evidence that something here was worth studying with genuine scientific care.
The Systematic Videotaped Experiments: What the Data Actually Showed
Beginning in 1994 and extending through 1996, Sheldrake and Pam Smart conducted a systematic programme of research with Jaytee. This included an initial series of 100 observations in which P.S.’s parents kept written records of Jaytee’s behaviour during her absences, followed by a more rigorous series of videotaped experiments.
The preliminary log-keeping was already revealing. On 85 out of 100 occasions, Jaytee reacted by going to wait at the French window before P.S. returned, usually ten or more minutes in advance. A linear regression analysis showed that the times when Jaytee began waiting were very significantly related to the times that P.S. set off to come home (p < .0001). Crucially, it did not seem to matter how far away she was. Jaytee’s anticipatory reactions regularly began when P.S. was more than 6 km away — far too distant for him to have heard her car, especially against the heavy traffic in Greater Manchester (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 2).
The critical formal experiments were those conducted with randomly selected return times. In these trials, Pam went at least 7 km from home, and the place where Jaytee usually waited was filmed continuously on time-coded videotape. Pam herself did not know in advance when she would be coming home. Instead, she received a signal via a telephone pager at a time randomly selected by Sheldrake, who was sometimes more than 300 km away. She returned by taxi — a different vehicle each time — to eliminate any possibility that Jaytee was reacting to the sound of a familiar car (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 139).
The results of these 12 experiments were striking. On average, Jaytee was at the window only 4% of the time during the main period of P.S.’s absence — and 55% of the time when she was on her way home. The statistical significance of this difference was very high: p < .0001 (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 1).
Let that figure settle for a moment. A dog spending 4% of the time at the window while his owner is away, and 55% of the time the moment she begins her return journey — travelling in an unfamiliar vehicle, at a randomly selected time, with no one at home knowing she is on her way. That is not a small or marginal effect. That is a large, robust, replicable signal.
In the series of 30 ordinary homecomings — where Pam returned at times of her own choosing, at various times of day, after going shopping, visiting friends, attending meetings, or visiting pubs — the pattern was equally clear. Jaytee spent significantly more time at the window when she was on her way home than during the main period of her absence, across a range of durations and distances (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 3).
Control experiments added another layer of rigour. Jaytee was filmed on ten evenings when P.S. was not returning home, or was returning unusually late. During these control observations, Jaytee made various visits to the window for the usual reasons — watching cats pass, watching cars pull up outside — but he did not go to the window more and more as the evening went on. His behaviour was simply not the same. The anticipatory pattern was absent (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 13).
Equally significant was what happened in different locations. When Jaytee was left alone in P.S.’s own flat, his anticipatory behaviour appeared only about 30% of the time. When he was at P.S.’s sister’s house, the ratio was somewhere in between. At his parents’ flat — his usual setting — the anticipatory pattern was present on roughly 80% of occasions. Sheldrake suggested an intriguing explanation: Jaytee’s waiting at the window seemed motivated, in part, by the desire to communicate to the family that Pam was on her way. When there was no one to tell, he was less motivated to perform the behaviour — though he sometimes did it anyway (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 22).
There is something quietly touching about that. The dog waiting not just because his owner is coming, but because he wants someone else to know.
When the Sceptics Arrived: The Wiseman Experiments
Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, well known in British media for his sceptical investigation of paranormal claims. In early 1995, having seen the media coverage of the Austrian television experiment, Wiseman contacted Sheldrake and expressed interest in conducting his own investigation of Jaytee. Sheldrake extended the invitation warmly. Pam Smart and her family agreed to help (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
This is worth emphasising: Sheldrake invited the sceptical investigation. He loaned Wiseman his video equipment. He wanted independent replication. This is how science is supposed to work.
Wiseman, along with his colleagues Matthew Smith and Julie Milton, conducted four experiments with Jaytee between June and December 1995. The experimental design was rigorous. Smith accompanied Pam to locations 5.5 to 8 miles from home, and she returned at randomly selected times, known to Smith in advance but not to Pam herself. They returned in cars unfamiliar to Jaytee. Wiseman filmed Jaytee continuously throughout. Neither Wiseman nor P.S.’s parents knew when she would be returning (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
In August 1998, Wiseman, Smith, and Milton published their findings in the British Journal of Psychology. The British Psychological Society’s press office issued a media release entitled “Mystic dog fails to give scientists a lead.” The resulting newspaper coverage was sweeping. “Pets have no sixth sense, say scientists” (The Independent). “‘Psychic’ dog is no more than a chancer” (The Times). “Psychic pets are exposed as a myth” (The Daily Telegraph) (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
And yet — here is where the story gets genuinely fascinating — when Sheldrake examined Wiseman’s actual data, he found something that the paper’s conclusion had failed to mention.
The data from Wiseman’s three experiments at P.S.’s parents’ flat showed exactly the same pattern as Sheldrake’s own. Using precisely the same definitions of the main period, pre-return period, and return period, the average proportion of time that Jaytee spent at the window in Wiseman’s data was: 4% during the main period, 48% in the pre-return period, and 78% during the return period. The differences were statistically significant (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 16).
In Wiseman’s experiments, the effect was actually larger than in Sheldrake’s own. Jaytee was at the window 78% of the time when Pam was on her way home — compared to 55% in Sheldrake’s randomised experiments (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 212). The data, when examined as a whole, confirmed Sheldrake’s findings rather than refuting them.
How, then, did Wiseman conclude that Jaytee had failed the test?
The answer reveals something important about the way experimental criteria can determine conclusions before the data is even examined.
The Battle Over Criteria: A Question of What Counts as Evidence
Wiseman and his colleagues had designed their analysis around a specific criterion for Jaytee’s “signal.” Rather than plotting the overall time Jaytee spent at the window across the entire experimental period — which is what Sheldrake had been doing — they looked for the moment Jaytee first went to the window for an inexplicable reason. If this “signal” occurred at the right time, the experiment was a success. If not, it was a failure (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
This criterion, Sheldrake argued in his published response, was not based on the waiting behaviour he had already documented over more than 100 observations. It was based on oversimplified remarks made by commentators on two British television programmes that had rebroadcast an extract from the Austrian television experiment. These programmes stated that Jaytee went to the window “every time” his owner was coming home and “when she starts her journey home.” In fact, as Sheldrake had documented, Jaytee’s characteristic behaviour was his sustained waiting at the window — and he often began this waiting slightly before Pam actually set off, while she was forming the intention to return (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
By using a single-moment criterion — one brief, inexplicable visit to the window — Wiseman had designed a test that would find Jaytee “failing” whenever he behaved in the way Sheldrake had actually observed and documented: not a single dramatic visit, but a pattern of increased, sustained presence at the window during the return period.
Wiseman, Smith, and Milton made their criterion still narrower after the first experiment. During that first trial, Jaytee visited the window 13 times. The first inexplicable visit lasted only 53 seconds — not at the time Pam set off. After reviewing the tape, Pam pointed out that Jaytee’s characteristic behaviour was remaining at the window for a longer period. So for subsequent experiments, Wiseman revised the criterion: the “signal” must be the first inexplicable visit lasting more than 2 minutes (Wiseman et al., 2000, p. 1).
In the second experiment, the first visit meeting this criterion occurred almost twenty minutes before Pam started to return home. In the remaining two experiments, Jaytee similarly failed to meet this revised criterion at the right moment. All four experiments were therefore classified as failures (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
But here is what Sheldrake found when he looked at Wiseman’s graphs — graphs that Wiseman had not included in his published paper. When Jaytee’s window-visiting behaviour was plotted over time, across the whole experimental period, the pattern was unmistakable: he was at the window most during the return period. The data looked like Sheldrake’s data. The dog was doing what Sheldrake’s dog always did. Wiseman’s narrow criterion had classified this replication as a failure (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
Sheldrake wrote to Wiseman before the paper was submitted to the British Journal of Psychology, sending him graphs plotted using the 10-minute intervals Wiseman himself had suggested in an earlier conversation, and asking him to draw attention to the striking effect showing Jaytee spending most time at the window while Pam was actually on her way home. Wiseman did not mention this effect in his paper, nor when he publicised his sceptical conclusions (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
Wiseman has, over the years, offered alternative explanations for the overall pattern: perhaps Jaytee simply became more anxious as time went on, and visited the window more frequently — a kind of increasing restlessness that would naturally peak at the end of the experimental period, which also happened to coincide with Pam’s return (Wiseman, 2011, p. 3). This is the “anxiety hypothesis” — a reasonable thing to consider.
Sheldrake’s response was to point to the control experiments. If Jaytee were simply growing more anxious over time, his window-visiting should also increase during the control evenings when Pam was not returning home. It did not (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 27). The increasing pattern was specifically associated with her actual return — not with the passage of time alone.
There is a further point worth dwelling on. The “anxiety hypothesis” requires us to believe that Jaytee’s increasing restlessness, driven purely by the passage of time, happened to peak precisely during the return period in experiment after experiment — in Sheldrake’s experiments, in Wiseman’s experiments, at P.S.’s parents’ house, at her sister’s house, even when Jaytee was alone in P.S.’s flat. That is a great deal of coincidence to absorb.
The Data That Wouldn’t Go Away
One of the most remarkable aspects of this entire episode is what happened after the controversy had played out publicly — after the headlines, the debunking, the responses and counter-responses in the journal literature.
Richard Wiseman, years later, conceded something significant. In a recorded interview for the Skeptiko podcast, he acknowledged: “The patterning in my studies is the same as the patterning in Rupert’s studies” (as cited in Sheldrake, 2012, p. 212).
This is a substantial concession. It does not mean Wiseman accepted a telepathic explanation. He continued to believe that normal explanations could account for the results. But he acknowledged that his data showed the same pattern as Sheldrake’s — that the “failure” was a function of the criterion applied, not of the underlying data.
Sheldrake, reflecting on the episode in his commentary, put it with characteristic directness: “Wiseman, Smith and Milton have succeeded in proving that the media can be misleading. They have also shown that the claims of sceptics need to be treated with scepticism. But in spite of their polemical intentions, their data support rather than refute the idea that some dogs anticipate their owner’s returns” (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
The broader picture of Sheldrake’s videotaped research with Jaytee is worth holding in mind. Over more than 100 videotaped experiments, the data consistently showed the same pattern: Jaytee at the window far more during the return period than during the main period of absence. On the 12 formal randomised trials, the combined statistical probability of the observed pattern arising by chance was p < .000003 (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 13). The probability that this was a statistical fluke is vanishingly small.
Normal explanations had been systematically ruled out. Routine timing was eliminated by the use of randomly selected return times. Hearing a familiar vehicle was eliminated by the use of taxis — different vehicles each time. Picking up cues from people at home was eliminated by ensuring no one at home knew when Pam was returning. Selective memory was eliminated by the continuous time-coded videotape. And increasing anxiety over time was not consistent with the flat pattern of behaviour in the control experiments (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, pp. 19–20).
What remained, when all these explanations were stripped away, was the pattern itself: a dog waiting, at the right time, because his owner had decided to come home.
The Telepathic Hypothesis and the Question of Intentions
What, exactly, was Jaytee detecting?
Sheldrake was careful here. He did not simply leap to “telepathy” as an explanation; he reasoned his way toward it by elimination, and then explored what the telepathic hypothesis would actually predict.
The most striking feature of Jaytee’s behaviour was when his anticipation began. In the ordinary homecomings, where Pam returned at times of her own choosing, his anticipatory behaviour regularly began slightly before she set off — in what Sheldrake called the pre-return period (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 20). Pam was at that point forming the intention to go home, perhaps gathering her things, saying her goodbyes, walking to her car. She had not yet started driving.
This timing fits the telepathic hypothesis neatly. If Jaytee was responding to Pam’s intentions — her mental state, her resolve to return home — then he would be expected to react not when she entered the vehicle, but when the decision took shape in her mind.
In the randomised experiments, where Pam was paged to come home at a randomly selected time, there were also occasions where Jaytee seemed to begin anticipating before the beep was actually sent. Sheldrake offered a tentative interpretation: Pam knew she would be paged within a certain time window. As that window progressed, she could not help thinking about the impending signal, forming a kind of anticipatory intention. Jaytee may have been picking up this diffuse, preparatory state of mind (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 20).
This is a subtle and interesting point. It suggests that what Jaytee was detecting was not a single discrete event — not the moment of the beep, not the moment of departure — but something more continuous and dynamic: the shifting mental and emotional orientation of the person he was bonded to. The question of whether someone is “coming home” is not just a physical fact about their location; it is also a matter of their intentions, their attention, their inner state. And Jaytee seemed to be sensitive to that.
Sheldrake’s broader theoretical framework — his hypothesis of morphic fields, which he describes as fields connecting members of social groups, including humans and their companion animals — provides a way of thinking about this that does not require any violation of physics we don’t yet understand (Sheldrake, 1998, p. 45). The idea is that the bond between Pam and Jaytee created a kind of invisible connection that could transmit, or at least correlate with, changes in her mental state across distance. As Sheldrake put it in a conversation with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham: “When people are going home, the home is the attractor in their field. Getting home is their goal, their intention, and the dog somehow picks up this change in the field, and knows they are on the way” (Sheldrake, 1998, p. 45).
Whether or not one accepts the morphic field hypothesis, the experimental data itself stands independently of any particular theoretical explanation. The pattern in the data is real. What we make of it is another matter.
Beyond Jaytee: A Wider Pattern
Jaytee was the most extensively tested case in Sheldrake’s research, but he was not the only one.
Similar experiments were conducted with a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Kane, with results that showed the same pattern of anticipatory behaviour (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 139). In more than 150 videotaped tests with several different dogs, Sheldrake and Pam Smart found that the animals showed their anticipatory behaviour long before their owners returned home, when the person was still more than five miles away, and when no one at home knew when to expect them (Sheldrake, 2002, p. 264).
The phenomenon extended well beyond dogs. By 2011, Sheldrake’s database held more than twenty species showing similar anticipatory behaviour, including parrots, horses, a ferret, bottle-fed lambs, and even pet geese (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 139). Many cats anticipate their owners’ returns, though fewer do so than dogs (Sheldrake, 2019, p. 70). The implication is striking: this is not some idiosyncratic feature of the dog-human relationship, but something more fundamental — a capacity for connection across distance that may be widespread in the animal kingdom.
Perhaps most remarkable are the cases involving animals apparently sensing the death or severe distress of a distant owner. On Sheldrake’s database, there are 177 accounts of dogs apparently responding to the death or distress of their human companions — most by howling, whining, or whimpering at unexpected times when those looking after them had no reason to expect any problem (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 139). Sixty-two similar accounts concern cats. There are also 32 instances where people appeared to know when their pet had died or was in dire need (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 139).
These are not laboratory findings; they are case histories, and case histories must always be treated with appropriate caution. But their sheer volume, and the consistency of their patterns, points toward something systematic rather than anecdotal. The connection between companion animals and their people does not appear to require physical proximity — and does not appear to require consciousness of the connection by either party.
The Deeper Question: What Kind of Bond Is This?
There is a question lurking behind all the data, all the statistical significance, all the debate about criteria and controls. It is not really a scientific question, though science is one way to approach it. It is a question about the nature of the bond itself.
Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive ethologist at Barnard College and no advocate for the paranormal, has written beautifully about the depth and strangeness of the human-dog bond. “The average dog,” she writes, “behaves as if literally ‘attached’ to its owner by an invisible cord” (Horowitz, 2010, p. 277). This is, of course, a metaphor — an acknowledgment of the intense social and emotional attachment that centuries of co-evolution have produced. Dogs and humans have been living together for more than ten thousand years. Our nervous systems, our social instincts, our attunement to each other’s emotional states have been shaped by that shared history in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Sheldrake takes this metaphor and asks: what if it is more than a metaphor? What if the “invisible cord” is not just a poetic way of describing social attachment, but points toward something real — a field of connection that persists across space? “It connects dog and owner together when they are physically close to each other, and it continues to attach dog to owner even when they are hundreds of miles apart. Through this elastic connection, telepathic communication takes place” (Sheldrake, 2011, p. 61).
This is a bold claim. But consider the data. Consider Jaytee at the window, 55% of the time Pam is on her way home, compared to 4% during the main period of her absence. Consider the same pattern in Wiseman’s data. Consider the control experiments, flat and undramatic, when Pam was not coming home. Consider the dog in the Austrian television experiment, getting up eleven seconds after the signal was given miles away, in a different vehicle, at a randomly selected time.
What explanation accounts for all of that? Routine? Eliminated. Sound cues? Eliminated. Cues from people at home? Eliminated. Selective memory? Eliminated by the videotape. Increasing anxiety? Not consistent with the control data.
Sheldrake’s conclusion — reached not as an assumption but as the most parsimonious explanation remaining after the alternatives had been addressed — was that “the dog’s anticipation may have depended on a telepathic influence from his owner” (Sheldrake & Smart, 2000, p. 1).
What the Media Made of It — and Why That Matters
The controversy surrounding the Jaytee experiments was shaped, to an uncomfortable degree, by forces that had nothing to do with the quality of the data.
When Wiseman’s paper appeared in 1998, the British Psychological Society’s press office issued a media release with a headline that was itself a conclusion: “Mystic dog fails to give scientists a lead.” The resulting newspaper coverage was global. “Psychic pets are exposed as a myth.” The story ran around the world (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
None of these headlines mentioned that Wiseman’s own data showed the same pattern as Sheldrake’s. None mentioned that the “failure” was a consequence of a narrow, post-hoc criterion that Sheldrake had already criticised. None mentioned that Jaytee was at the window 78% of the time in Wiseman’s experiments when Pam was on her way home, compared to 4% when she was not.
Wiseman, appearing on British television programmes including Strange But True and Secrets of the Psychics, made confident public claims that Jaytee had failed his tests. On one programme he stated that Jaytee was “visiting the window about once every 10 minutes” and that it was “not surprising he was there when his owner was thinking of returning home.” Sheldrake, examining the actual time codes from the videotape being shown, found that Wiseman had presented clips selectively: two of the eight “random” visits shown were actually the same visit shown twice, and three of them took place while Pam was already on her way home — though they were presented as random events unrelated to her return (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
This is not the careful public communication of scientific uncertainty. This is the performance of scepticism — using the authority of the laboratory to dismiss a finding that the laboratory had, in fact, replicated.
The lesson Sheldrake drew was a pointed one: “Wiseman, Smith and Milton have succeeded in proving that the media can be misleading. They have also shown that the claims of sceptics need to be treated with scepticism” (Sheldrake, 1999, p. 1).
This should not be taken as an attack on scepticism as such. Scepticism — genuine, empirical, open-minded scepticism — is exactly what the Jaytee phenomenon needed and received. The experimental controls were rigorous. The alternative explanations were carefully enumerated and addressed. The videotapes provided an objective, continuous record. That is exactly the right way to approach a phenomenon like this.
What the media episode illustrated, rather, is that the institutional deployment of scepticism — the press release, the television appearance, the confident headline — is not the same thing as the practice of rigorous scientific inquiry. One can claim to have “debunked” something on the basis of criteria designed to ensure failure, and the claim will be believed, because the public trusts the lab coat.
The Significance of the Bond
There is one more thing worth sitting with, before any conclusions are drawn.
Telepathy — the word comes from the Greek tele (distant) and pathe (feeling) — typically occurs, across all the evidence that Sheldrake has assembled, between beings who are bonded (Sheldrake, 2011, p. 50). Not between strangers. Not between random pairings. Between people and animals who are closely connected, who share a history, who matter to each other.
In experiments on telephone telepathy in humans, Sheldrake found that hit rates were far higher with family members and close friends than with recent acquaintances. When young Australians living in London were tested with callers who were either family members in Australia or new acquaintances in England, they identified their distant family members more accurately than their nearby new friends — showing that emotional closeness is more important than physical proximity (Sheldrake, 2011, p. 179).
The pattern is consistent across species and across experimental contexts: the stronger the bond, the stronger the signal. Jaytee and Pam Smart were deeply attached. Pam had adopted Jaytee
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