Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon
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Plain English Summary
Can your dog tell when you're heading home? Researchers put a terrier named Jaytee to the test in four experiments, choosing return times randomly so nobody at home could tip him off. Everything was filmed for an independent judge to review. The verdict? Jaytee didn't reliably signal when his owner was returning. But here's the twist: another team studied the same dog in the same period and reached the opposite conclusion. The difference? How each team scored the footage. One checked specific time blocks; the other measured total window time. A perfect case study in how analytical choices change what the data seems to say.
Research Notes
The essential skeptical counterpart to Sheldrake & Smart (2000), testing the same dog Jaytee during overlapping periods. The two teams' contradictory conclusions stem from different analytical approaches: Wiseman scored binary signal detection within time blocks; Sheldrake scored proportion of time at window. A canonical case study in how analytical choices determine verdicts from the same data.
Four controlled experiments testing whether a dog (Jaytee, a terrier cross) could psychically detect when his owner (Pam Smart) was returning from a remote location. Return times were randomly selected using RNG or Rand Corporation tables; no one at home knew the return time; Jaytee was continuously videotaped; and a blind judge assessed his signalling behavior. Possible normal explanations (routine, sensory cueing, selective memory, multiple guesses) were systematically addressed. In all four experiments Jaytee failed to accurately signal the randomly selected return time. The authors concluded the data did not support the psychic pet hypothesis.
Links
Related Papers
Critiques
Companion
- Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory? — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- Testing a Return-Anticipating Dog, Kane — Sheldrake, Rupert (2000)
- Perceptive Pets: A Survey in North-West California — Brown, David Jay (1998)
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📋 Cite this paper
Wiseman, Richard, Smith, Matthew, Milton, Julie (1998). Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02696.x
@article{wiseman_1998_jaytee_dog,
title = {Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home? An Experimental Test of the 'Psychic Pet' Phenomenon},
author = {Wiseman, Richard and Smith, Matthew and Milton, Julie},
year = {1998},
journal = {British Journal of Psychology},
doi = {10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02696.x},
}