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Our pets can sense when we're in pain or dying - even from hundreds of miles away: I'm an ex-Cambridge academic and these startling, inexplicable stories convinced me..
When Jean Parker came home from work one afternoon, she was surprised to find the family’s cat, Timmy, meowing pitifully.
‘Timmy habitually slept on my son’s bed all day,’ she said. ‘Seeing him like this, I thought he must be in physical pain. No amount of fussing would calm him down.’
But that evening she received shocking news that her son had been in a road accident and was in intensive care at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, about 40 miles from the family’s home in Peterborough.
‘He was in danger of losing his life,’ Jean said. ‘My son was in that unit for seven weeks in a coma. The cat would not go into his bedroom. But then, one evening, Timmy ran straight into my son’s room, jumped on the bed and began purring with pleasure. That was the day my son came out of his coma and began to get his life back again.’
For more than 30 years I have been collecting case evidence of animals that appear to know by intuition or telepathy when the humans they love have suffered a serious, sometimes fatal, accident.
The existence of so many independent reports is persuasive, writes Dr Sheldrake, who has been collecting evidence of animal intuition or telepathy for more than 30 years
The bond between owner and animal is indeed a real connection, linking them together invisibly, even over thousands of miles
This isn’t a subject that lends itself to experimental investigation. Evidence can only come from chance events, not laboratory tests, since it is obviously impossible to stage dangerous incidents. But in my files I now have more than 100 accounts of dogs appearing to respond to distant injuries or deaths of their human companions, and about half as many cases involving cats.
The existence of so many independent reports persuades me that this is a real phenomenon, even though it is not possible to do experiments. Further research is needed through the collection of more well-documented stories.
My theory is simple: the bond between person and animal is indeed a real connection, linking them together invisibly, even over thousands of miles. Death and danger disrupt this bond.
To take a simple analogy, if two people are connected by a stretched elastic band, and one of them shakes it or lets it go, the other feels a difference. Even if they do not know exactly what is happening to the other person involved, they know something is happening.
I have first-hand experience of this myself. In the late 1990s, while coincidentally I was working on research into animal telepathy, my wife and I were looking after a yellow labrador called Ruggles for some friends and neighbours, the Beyer family.
It was the February half-term holidays and their son, Timothy, was away on a school skiing trip in the Italian Alps; his parents had gone on holiday to Spain.
Not only can our pets apparently sense when we are in danger, or perhaps even dead, but we can also sometimes sense their distress from far away
Ruggles settled in well and spent most of his time in our family room. But one morning at 11.30am, when he returned from a walk, he would not leave the entrance hall. All persuasion failed. He remained by the front door until he was taken out for another walk at 3pm.
So striking and unusual was his behaviour that I thought that Timothy’s mother and father must have decided to come home early from their holiday. I was expecting a telephone call from them to say that they had just arrived.
There was indeed a telephone call that afternoon, but it was not from Timothy’s parents — it was from Italy to say that Timothy had fallen off a chair-lift that morning, broken a leg and been flown by helicopter to hospital.
The accident happened at 11am British time. Curiously enough, when Ruggles returned from his afternoon walk, he was limping. He had jumped into a pond and landed on some broken glass, and had a bleeding paw and a severed tendon. He had to spend the night at a veterinary clinic. So he and Timothy were both in hospital at the same time with bandaged legs.
The following case histories indicate my experience is very far from unique. Not only can our pets apparently sense when we are in danger, or perhaps even dead, but we can also sometimes sense their distress from far away — and the same connection exists between closely bonded animals.
Terrier felt son’s death in Falklands
Iris, the mother of a young sailor in Oxford, wrote to me: ‘My son was very close to our West Highland terrier. He joined the Royal Navy in 1978 and, being shore-based much of his time until 1982, was home regularly for weekends.
‘He travelled by train, and we gradually came to realise that the dog would start getting excited about 20 to 30 minutes before our son walked in the door, so as soon as she started running backwards and forwards to the front door, I would start getting him a high tea so that when he walked in (always hungry) his meal was ready. We used to laugh about it at the time.
‘In April 1982, his ship, HMS Coventry, was drafted to the Falklands. Early evening, on May 25, the dog leapt on to my knee, shivering and whimpering. When my husband came in, I said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with her, she’s been like this for more than half an hour. She won’t be put down off my knee.”
‘On the Nine O’Clock News, it was reported that a Type 42 ship had been sunk — we knew it was HMS Coventry, although the name wasn’t released until the next day.
‘Our son was one of those lost. Our little dog pined away and died a few months later.’
German Shepherd warned of a fire
Dog owner Walter Berry was repairing a car at his garage in Northern Ireland when he spilled petrol on himself and then accidentally set it alight with the welding tool he was using.
His wife, Joan, was 200 yards away with their German shepherd, Chrissie, on the other side of two more garages and a yard. ‘Chrissie went berserk,’ Joan said, ‘and made noises he had never made before.’
Realising something was wrong, she let the dog out and he rushed straight to Walter. Joan followed and arrived in time to put the fire out, saving Walter’s life.
Uncanny timing of a cat’s wailing
A tom-cat belonging to the Pulfer family of Koppigen, Switzerland, was very attached to their son Frank, who went away to work as a ship’s cook. He came home regularly and the cat used to wait for him at the front door. But one day the cat sat at the door meowing, and seemed extremely sad.
Frank’s father, Karl, said: ‘We could not get him away from the door. Finally, we let him into Frank’s room, where he sniffed at everything, but still continued his wailing. Two days after this strange behaviour, we were informed that our son had died on board the ship, 6,000 miles away near Thailand, at exactly that time.’
Dog’s sixth sense for owner’s overdose
When Lupé was about two years old, her owner Leone took an accidental overdose of drugs.
‘I was in San Francisco,’ Leone wrote, ‘and the dog was with friends in San Jose, more than 40 miles away. Suddenly, she went to the edge of their property and began an uncanny howling.
‘Her agitation could not be relieved. After some time, my friends began to fear something was wrong with me and they rushed over to San Francisco, where they found me.’
Puppy pleaded for mum 6,000 miles away
‘I have a Beauceron sheepdog called Yssa,’ wrote Max, a doctor from Chateauneuf-le-Rouge in southern France. ‘Two years ago, when she was three months old, we moved to France from the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean, more than 6,000 miles away. There, I left her mother, Zoubida, aged ten.
‘One night, Yssa was sleeping in my son’s room. At about 3am, she came scratching at my door, whining, crying and excited. She didn’t want to go outside. Later that morning, at 9am, my brother-in-law called from La Reunion. The guard of our house had found Zoubida dead. She had been poisoned.’
On alert for a phone call 80 miles away
One summer evening, a young British soldier named David left his home in Liverpool to return by train to his barracks in southern England.
Later that evening, the family dog, Tara, started whining and shivering violently. The boy’s parents thought she must be ill, gave her some pain medicine and tried to comfort her as best they could.
But she would not calm down for well over an hour. Tara remained alert and restless, until the telephone rang with a message from a Birmingham hospital to say that David had fallen from the train in the Tamworth area, around 80 miles away.
‘His injuries, though severe, were not life-threatening and they allowed him to speak to us,’ said David’s mother, Margaret. ‘Tara showed her delight during the phone call, then lay down and went to sleep. We learned afterwards that when Tara got upset the first time, it was the moment David fell off the train, and she had calmed down when he was in hospital having been examined and made comfortable.’
Cat that sensed girl’s bike crash
Andrea from Bempflingen, Germany, wrote: ‘I sat outside on the verandah and our Persian cat, Klaerchen, lay beside me, purring comfortably. My 11-year-old daughter had gone out with her friend on her bicycle.
‘Everything seemed wonderful and harmonious, but suddenly Klaerchen jumped up, uttered a cry that we had never heard before, and in a flash ran into the living room, where she sat down in front of the shelves where the telephone was. The phone soon rang and I got the news that my daughter had had a bad accident with the bike and had been taken to hospital.’
Owner felt her animal’s anguish
As Dianne took a taxi from a hotel to the airport, heading home to Texas in the U. S., she began to feel anxious, then nauseous. ‘After about 15 minutes,’ she said, ‘I felt that my intestines were being torn so intensely that I held my stomach. By the time we arrived at the airport, I felt sick and in deep grief.
‘Fearful that something was wrong at home, I called my daughter. “We just had a terrible storm with lightning, but it is over now,” she said and told me everything was fine. But I cried all the way home.
‘When I arrived in Houston, my husband met me in tears. He explained that lightning had hit our house at 4.08pm (all our clocks were stopped at this time).
‘Kitty, one of my eight cats, was so terrified of the storm that she ran outside. When my husband got home, he saw two large dogs in the back yard standing over her body. They had mauled her to death. The trauma to her body was where I felt excruciating pain at the same time it was occurring to her.’
Dog found where owner was buried
Molly from Cornwall wrote: ‘My husband suffered a severe stroke in 1988 and died in hospital after having been there for two weeks.
‘After his burial in a churchyard near our house, our dog, Joe, would disappear for hours. We discovered that he was sitting by my husband’s grave. How did he know when my husband died, and where he was buried?’
Howls for missing World war II pilot
‘My brother Michael was a co-pilot in a Wellington bomber during the war,’ wrote Stephen from Acton, West London. ‘He went on many raids over Germany in 1940. At that time, we had a dog, Milo, half spaniel, half collie, who was very fond of Michael.
‘One night, Michael was on his way home from a raid when he radioed to base to say he was just off the Belgian coast. That night, Milo, who slept in the stables, howled so much my mother had to bring him into the house. Michael never returned from his mission. He was reported missing, believed killed, June 10, 1940.’
- If you’ve had a similar experience with your pet, write to me at [email protected].