A Dog That Seems to Know When His Owner Is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations
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Plain English Summary
Can your dog tell when you're heading home? Over 100 videotaped experiments suggest one very good boy named Jaytee could. While his owner Pamela was at least 7 km away, cameras tracked how much time he spent waiting at the window. During her absence, Jaytee hung out by the window only about 4% of the time. But the moment she started heading home -- even when return times were randomly chosen and nobody at home knew -- he jumped to the window 55% of the time. That's a massive and statistically rock-solid difference. The results held up across different conditions: ordinary trips, random return signals sent from over 300 km away, and even when Jaytee was home alone. Remarkably, skeptic Richard Wiseman ran his own experiments, got the same behavioral pattern (4% vs 78%!), but called it a failure because he used different success criteria. On evenings when Pamela didn't come home at all, Jaytee showed no increased window visits -- ruling out simple routine. The researchers argue this points to a genuine telepathic bond between dog and owner.
Research Notes
Central to controversy #12 (animal telepathy) and a landmark case study in the Sheldrake-Wiseman interpretive dispute. Wiseman et al. obtained the same behavioral pattern but framed it as a negative result using different criteria. One of the few psi studies with continuous objective behavioral recording over 100+ trials.
Across more than 100 videotaped experiments, dog Jaytee's window-waiting behavior was recorded while owner Pamela Smart traveled at least 7 km away. In 12 formal experiments with randomly selected return times (signaled by pager from 300+ km away, unknown to anyone at home), Jaytee spent 4% of time at the window during the main absence versus 55% during the first 10 minutes of the return journey (repeated-measures ANOVA F(2,22)=20.46, p<.0001). Similar patterns appeared in 30 ordinary homecomings (11% vs 65%, p<.0001), when Jaytee was alone (p<.01), and in Wiseman et al.'s independent experiments (4% vs 78%, p=.02). Control evenings with no return showed no increasing window visits. The authors conclude the anticipation may depend on a telepathic influence from the owner.
Related Papers
Same Research Program
- Testing a Return-Anticipating Dog, Kane — Sheldrake, Rupert (2000)
- The Anticipation of Telephone Calls: A Survey in California — Brown, David Jay (2001)
- Can Morphic Fields Help Explain Telepathy and the Sense of Being Stared At? — Sheldrake, Rupert (2019)
- Perceptive Pets: A Survey in North-West California — Brown, David Jay (1998)
Also by these authors
More in Telepathy
Telecommunication Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis
Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Smart, Pamela (2000). A Dog That Seems to Know When His Owner Is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{sheldrake_2000_that,
title = {A Dog That Seems to Know When His Owner Is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Smart, Pamela},
year = {2000},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}