LIVING THE FIELD

ANIMAL ENERGIES
LIVING THE FIELD
LIVING THE FIELD Animal
Energies
Contents
Lesson 20 Dolphin magic 5
Lesson 21 Powered-up by dolphin energy 7
Lesson 22 Holographic healing: virtual dolphins 11
Lesson 23 Precognitive pet sounds 15
Lesson 24 Psychic pet doctors 21
Lesson 25 Telepathic terriers 23
Lesson 27 Animal hospital 27
Lesson 28 Feeling like an animal 29
Lesson 29 Gut hunches, good choices 35
Lesson 30 Curiosity won’t kill the cat 39
Lesson 31 Kindness in the animal kingdom 43
Lesson 32 When animal minds get together 47
Lesson 33 Riding therapy: healing on horseback 51
Lesson 34 Take two cats before bedtime . . . 57
Lesson 35 Basic instincts: not-so-dumb animals 61
Lesson 36 Every picture tells a shaggy-dog story 65

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LIVING THE FIELD
Dolphin magic
For some two decades, re s e a rc h e r s
have insisted that dolphins have an
i n c redible effect upon the human brain
and immune system. Swimming with
dolphins is reputed to help heal illness,
aid the speech and physical develop -
ment of the autistic or mentally re t a rd -
ed, balance the brain and boost the
immune system. In this lesson, we look
at the source of the dolphin's supposed
power—its intricate sonar system. In
later lessons, we will also explore how
these frequencies may be affecting us.
I
n the 1950s, the US Navy discovered
something astonishing: that dolphins
have an system of using sound waves
that is more extraordinary than anything
man has ever been able to produce—then
or since.
Although bats use soundwaves and
their returning feedback echoes to navi-
gate as well as recognize objects in the
world around them, in dolphins, this par-
ticular type of ‘echolocation’, as it is
called, is very finely tuned.
Dolphins’ ‘speech’, such as it is,
comes in three broad categories: as whis-
tles, or sounds of long durations; and
series of short and long pulsed clicks
(called ‘click trains’), both of which are
wave frequencies that emanate from the
foreheads of these mammals in a narrow
beam, like a focused torch of light.
Although they may sound random to
the uneducated ear, these sounds have
specific functions and frequencies. The
click trains are used not only to locate the
dolphin in space, which will help him
carry out specific tasks, but also to com-
municate.
When broken down, these sounds are
hardly sounds at all as we know them.
Instead, they are tiny bursts of extraordi-
narily high-pitched frequencies. Each
click lasts for one-20,000th of a second,
and the volume of the sound itself can
reach as high as 250 kHz—about 15 times
above the limits of the sounds identifiable
by the human ear.
Animal
Energies
Lesson 20
Whistles, which are more like tonal
‘songs’ of widely varying wave frequen-
cies, are often the dolphin’s way of ‘talk-
ing’ to the other members of his pod.
What’s more, dolphins somehow have the
capability of emitting two and even three
types of noises—whistles and more than
one click train—all at the same time.
A dolphin’s clicks also can be subdi-
vided into different types, including: ordi-
nary click trains, which help him to sense
his place and the objects in front of him;
and bursts of pulsed clicks, which are his
social ‘conversations’. In general, a dol-
phin ‘talks’ much faster than he navi-
gates—the blasts of pulsed clicks he uses
for speaking explode out far faster (with
only several milliseconds between clicks)
than do the click trains he uses for echolo-
cations (which are 10 to 100 times slow-
er), says Michiel Schotten, a dolphin-
acoustics researcher at the Oceanwide
Science Institute in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Studies of dolphins demonstrate that
they are able to make use of these sounds
like the most sophisticated of eyes.
According to Schotten, “they can use it to
tell two hollow steel cylinders apart, one
of which is only 0.008 mm thicker than
the other.”
Schotten has also uncovered studies
demonstrating that dolphins have the
capacity to understand the human lan-
guage.1 Evidence shows, he says, that
“they are able to learn a grammar-based
artificial sign language and to understand
abstract concepts, such as ‘left/right’,
‘absent’ and ‘creative’, and even full sen-
tences.”
At the moment, our understanding of
dolphin speech is hampered by the equip-
ment we have available. Recording
equipment has the same limitations as the
human ear, and so is unable to record the
rich range of frequencies being emitted
by these animals. The other problem is
speed.
It is often difficult to separate out,
from among all the sounds blasting out
from a pod, which dolphin was ‘speak-
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ing’ at the time. This makes it difficult to
Lesson 20 marry up behavior with the sounds.
Current equipment also has problems
in working out the amplitude of the signal
or even the position of the dolphin’s head
in relation to the signal.
Finally, as the recording equipment is
attached to a boat, it is almost impossible
for it to move freely to follow the sound.
At present, researchers can listen in to
dolphins using a ‘hydrophone’, a device,
which ‘hears’ sounds in water by convert-
ing the physical oscillations of the sound-
waves into voltages, thus converting
acoustical energy into electrical energy.
Michiel Schotten is now in the
process of developing devices that can
provide man with his first real glimpse
into the exquisite world of dolphin fre-
quencies in all of its enormous range. The
information he and others are uncovering
may demonstrate nothing less than how
dolphin frequencies may be able to ‘re-
tune’ our own.
Lynne McTaggart
Lesson 21: Dolphin healing:
the latest evidence
1 Cognition, 1984; 16: 129–219

Dolphins in ‘3-D’
Michiel Schotten and others solved the complicated problem of recording dolphin
sounds by constructing a ‘hydrophone in the round’. To do this, they set up four
hydrophones into a letter ‘Y’ configuration—with one placed in the center, and three
extended out from the central one positioned at 120 degrees apart—and digitized the
acoustical signals it picked up.
The device allowed Schotten and his colleagues to work out which dolphins were
making which particular noises by measuring the differences in time it took each click
to arrive at each hydrophone, and matching the times to photographs taken by an
underwater camera.
Matching all of the results allowed them to make a ‘three-dimensional’ image of the
appropriate dolphin making the noise, its location from the target and, most important, its
reason for making it.1
1 Schotten M et al. Echolocation recordings and localization of wild spinner dolphins (Stenella lon -
girostris) and pantropical spotted dolphins (S. attenuata) using a four hydrophone array. In: Thomas
JA, Moss CF, Vater MM, eds. Advances in the Study of Echolocation in Bats and Dolphins. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004: 393–400

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LIVING THE FIELD
Powered-up by dolphin energy
In the last lesson, we reviewed the
s o u rce of dolphin frequencies—an intri -
cate sonar system purported to have
p rofound physiological effects on
humans, even aiding in their physical
and mental development. In this lesson,
we examine the evidence amassed thus
far suggesting that dolphins have spe -
cial effect on humans besides the feel-
good factor.
D
olphins have long had a mythical
status as special healers. Indeed,
the lore has it that dolphins orig-
inated in Atlantis, that mythical seat of
power and nobility. However, more
recently, the status of dolphins took an
unexpected twist when Dr Betsy Smith,
an educational anthropologist, witnessed
an improvement in her mentally retarded
brother after he waded into the water with
two young dolphins in 1971. Neuropsy-
chologist David Nathanson was intrigued
enough to investigate whether dolphins
could help disabled children to develop,
both physically and mentally.
At a facility in Key Largo, Florida, he
began some basic research, testing
whether dolphins could help two children
with Down syndrome process and retain
verbal information. The dolphins were
used to provide the stimuli and reinforce
behavior: when a child’s response was
correct, he was allowed to feed a dolphin.
Nathanson discovered that the children
learned four times faster with dolphins
than they did in their more conventional
educational settings, and retained 15 per
cent more information as well.1
Nathanson went on to replicate his
work with six other children with Down
syndrome or other severe physical and
mental handicaps. As with his original
study, the dolphin interactions elicited up
to 19 times more correct speech in these
children than did the usual classroom set-
ting, with a nearly 3 per cent greater
retention.2
With the use of larger numbers of
children, Nathanson also discovered that
Animal
Energies
Lesson 21
just two weeks of dolphin-assisted thera-
py—or DAT, as it is now referred to—
outperformed six months of conventional
speech and physical therapy—and at less
cost.2
Between 1988 and 1997, he went on
to treat 700 children with 35 different
diagnoses, including cerebral palsy,
autism, Angelman’s syndrome, and brain
and spinal cord injuries.3
Although critics maintain that the
effect of treatment is brief, a 15-point
questionnaire filled in by the parents of
the treated children concluded that the
skills learned with DAT were maintained
or even improved upon in 50 per cent of
the cases a year after the treatment had
ended.
Nathanson’s initial premise was that it
was simply the pleasurable experience of
interacting with an animal in water that
appeared to increase the children’s atten-
tion span.
“There are three categories of stimuli
that we know from both research and
clinical experience that the kids really
respond to very well: music, animals,
water. And here we’ve got two of the
three: dolphins and the water,” he says.
As immersion in water is also known
to develop mental and physical perceptu-
al patterns, Nathanson decided to attempt
to isolate some of the factors that could
have been responsible for the improve-
ments. He tried out his experiment using
just water or even favorite toys—but
without the dolphins. Although some
advances were made, they were not as
dramatic as they’d been with the dol-
phins.2
He also wondered whether the effects
were simply down to interaction with
such a fascinating and intelligent animal,
as research has shown that the presence of
animals of every variety are an aid to
learning. However, the study children
enjoyed far greater improvements in lan-
guage and motor skills after encounters
with dolphins than after interactions with
other types of animals.2
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Since Nathanson’s groundbreaking
Lesson 21 research, a variety of therapists have
attempted to use captive dolphins to aid
every sort of troubled or handicapped
patients. DAT has been used to treat
anorexia nervosa and chronic depression,
autism, post-traumatic stress disorder,
dyslexia and even cancer.4 One research
facility in the Ukraine using dolphins to
assist in the therapy of 1500 patients
reported a 60 per cent improvement in
childhood phobias, and a 30 per cent
improvement in patients with infantile
cerebral palsy.5
Nevertheless, although Nathanson
himself is a undoubted fan, he himself
admits that DAT doesn’t work in every
circumstance. He has concluded that
autistic children, for instance, enjoy the
sessions, but don’t show measurable or
lasting improvements compared with
children who have other disabilities.
Although a number of organizations
such as Nathanson’s Dolphin Human
Therapy, Living From The Heart in
Morrison, Colorado, and the Dolphin
Reef Facility in Eilat, Israel, offer regular
short- or long-term DAT programmes,
only recently have several organizations
attempted to study exactly what happens
to humans when in close proximity with
these special mammals, and how this can
accelerate learning or healing.
David Cole, a computer scientist at
Fort Myers, Florida, was fascinated by
the possibility that dolphins might have a
profound physiological effect on humans.
He developed a neuromapping electroen-
cephalography (EEG) instrument to
enable his AquaThought Foundation to
study the neurological effects that close
contact with dolphins might have on the
human brain.6
Using this technology, the Foundation
has been carrying out EEG testing at three
of the four dolphin swim facilities
licensed in the US. Those humans tested
have their EEGs measured at 16 points on
the scalp and are then placed in direct
contact with dolphins—swimming,
touching, playing or diving with them.
Immediately after the activity, EEG read-
8
ings are then taken again. Aqua-Thought
also records the hand and eye contact
with the dolphins, blood pressure and
temperature, and even makes a simple
psychological profile of each participant,
before and after contact with the dol-
phins.
Although the data were preliminary
when presented at the International
Symposium on Dolphin-Assisted Thera-
py, the researchers discerned several sig-
nificant trends. A participant’s dominant
brainwave frequency slowed significantly
after interaction with dolphins—from a
beta frequency to something resembling
an alpha state, the brainwave frequency
of light meditation or dreaming. The
researchers also found that the brain
hemispheres synchronize, so that the
brainwaves emitted from both the left and
right hemispheres are in phase (peaking
and troughing at the same time) and of
similar frequency (speed).
Studies into psychoneuroimmunology
have demonstrated that alpha states
strengthen the immune system—one pos-
sible reason why cancer patients swim-
ming with dolphins report successful
treatment outcomes. Other research
shows that an increased number of alpha
and theta waves can enhance learning.
The Florida Back Institute has also
studied the endocrinological effect of
human–dolphin contact. This research
has demonstrated that the production and
uptake of the brain’s neurotransmitters
are strengthened by dolphin contact.
AquaThought has postulated that a dol-
phin’s acoustic emissions, or sound
waves, cause chemical changes at the
boundaries of cells in living tissue—what
Cole terms ‘sonochemistry’—the interac-
tion of sound with matter through the
process of cavitation.
“Sonochemistry . . . may explain both
the chemical and electrical changes that
have been observed in the brain,” says
Cole. The cavitation is caused by micro-
scopic bubbles 100 microns in diameter,
formed as a result of the intense sound
waves, which implode in less than a
microsecond.7 The effect of this is to heat

the liquid (in this instance, a cell) to 5500
degrees C—approximately the tempera-
ture of the sun’s surface.
Some researchers suggest that the
effect of sound waves on developing tis-
sue causes neurons to migrate.8
Thus far, we know that cavitation
helps hormones to pass through cell
membranes more efficiently. Further-
more, leukemia research shows that cavi-
tation can help to disintegrate the mem-
branes of cancerous cells, which may be
another reason for the reported positive
DAT effects on cancer patients.9 It is also
thought to stimulate the production of
immune system T cells and to release
endorphins, hormones involved in coping
with stress and modulating the perception
of pain.
Research has shown that the bot-
tlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), the
particular species of dolphins most often
used for DAT, are capable of soundwave
intensities that can produce cavitation,
especially as water is able to transmit
soundwaves 60 times more efficiently
than does air.
Nevertheless, cavitation may not be
the whole story. Many behavioral and
electrophysiological changes have been
observed in people exposed to dolphins at
much further distances, from which they
could not have experienced these sound-
wave intensities.
Also, Nathanson’s original research
doesn’t actually address whether DAT is
only effective on children with learning
difficulties and not ordinary children, or
whether it can aid adults who have cogni-
tive problems.
Another possibility suggested by dol-
phin researchers is a process called ‘reso-
nant entrainment’, a situation that is anal-
ogous to when one tuning fork hits a pitch
at which other tuning forks subsequently
vibrate. We know that bottlenose dolphins
produce low-frequency electromagnetic
and scalar waves (or standing) waves.l0
For the Hello Dolphin Project in
Florida, the researchers constructed spe-
cial wide-band sensor and recording
equipment to record all signals emanating
Animal
Energies
from dolphins. They then also recorded
the brainwave frequencies of the children
Lesson 21
participating in the study.
When the dolphins were present, they
recorded an electrical, magnetic and
acoustical extremely-low-frequency sig-
nal of about 16 Hz in nearly three-quar-
ters of all the trials. When the researchers
then examined the brainwave recordings
of the participants, they found profound
brainwave shifts to a predominant fre-
quency near 16 Hz after the interactions
with the dolphins.
From the material they gathered, the
researchers concluded that dolphins
simultaneously emit acoustical, electrical
and magnetic fields, and that dolphins
sense electrical fields from humans and
attempt to communicate using the same
frequencies (in the human brainwave
band of 6–30 Hz).10
We feel better around dolphins
because we are placed on their wave-
length—the natural state of The Field.
Lynne McTaggart
Lesson Twenty-two: More on
dolphins
1 Nathanson DE. Dolphins and kids: a
communication experiment. Proceed-
ings of the XVI World Assembly of the
World Organization for Preschool
Education, 1980: 447–51
2 Anthrozoös, 1993; 6: 17–29
3 Anthrozoös, 1997; 10: 90–100
4 Dobbs H. Dance to a Dolphin’s Song.
London: Jonathan Cape, 1990
5 Lukina, L. Results of using Afalina dol-
phins with a purpose of rehabilitation,
social adaptation and medical treat-
ment of children in the program called
Dolphin Therapy. Presentation at the
Second Annual International Sympos-
ium on Dolphin Assisted Therapy,
Cancun, Mexico, September 5-8, 1996.
6 Cole D. Neuroelectical effects of
human–dolphin interaction and sono-
chemical hypotheses. Presentation at
the International Symposium, Cancun,
Mexico, September 8–10, 1995
7 Sci Am, 1989; 260 (2): 80
8 Lancet, 1992; 339: 85
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9 Int J Radiat Biol, 1994; 66 (2): 221–8
Lesson 21 10 Byrd E. The Hello Dolphin Project.
Presentation at the International
Symposium on Dolphin–Assisted
Therapy. Cancun, Mexico, September
8–10, 1995

On the trail of the dolphin

Here are some websites for dolphin-assisted therapy programmes:
! www.dolphinhumantherapy.com
This is the website of the DAT Program by Dr David E. Nathanson, at Key Largo in
Florida.
! www.aquathought.com
This website contains information that can clarify the options available to those seek-
ing DAT, and provides contacts details for the community of therapists and facilities in
the field.
! www.dolphinswim.net
This site offers programmes at Krim (a half-island in the Black Sea) and at Nuweiba in
Israel, which costs about 4000 bzw ( 5000).
! www.cancun.com/Dolphins/Cancun/
Although not offering DAT as such, Parque Nizuc at Cancun, in the Mexican Caribbean,
offers various interactive swimming events with dolphins.

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LIVING THE FIELD
Holographic healing: virtual dolphins
The last lesson revealed the pro m i s i n g
evidence of dolphin-assisted therapy in
treating children who have a vast array
of learning difficulties. Researchers are
experimenting with 'virtual dolphins' in
an attempt to simulate this transforma -
tional experience.
O
ne of the most troublesome
aspects of dolphin-assisted
therapy (DAT) is the undeniable
aspect of exploitation—the animals in
question heal us at their own expense.
Dolphins in captivity live for only four to
five years, compared with an average
lifespan of 45 years in the wild. There is
also the fact that dolphins drastically
curtail their use of sonar in captivity—to
acoustical ranges between 30–60 Hz, far
lower than they would use in open
w a t e r s — l a rgely because the signals
bounce off the walls of their holding tank
and confuse them. As Dolphin Project
International has described it, this situa-
tion is analogous to a human living in a
prison cell of mirrors.
In addition, if captive dolphins are
released into the wild again, they need to
relearn how to use their sonar to locate
food sources. There is even the possibili-
ty of that we humans could transmit our
diseases to dolphins, although dolphin
researchers claim they have carefully
evaluated the genesis of most human-
borne infectious diseases and such a pos-
sibility is deemed remote.
Clearly, the only beneficiaries in this
relationship are humans—and wealthy
humans, at that, who are able to afford the
expense of traveling to a facility that
offers DAT.
The answer, believe many dolphin
researchers such as David Cole of
AquaThought, is a ‘virtual’ dolphin, or
Virtual Reality Dolphin Encounter
(VRDE), as it is known. This attempts to
recreate the auditory and visual experi-
ence of a dolphin encounter in the partic-
ipant’s head. There are a number of such
‘virtual’ programs, employing computers,
Animal
Energies
Lesson 22
videos and special sound systems, but all
have one thing in common: the need for
the participant to suspend disbelief and
act as though he is witnessing the ‘real
thing’.
In the ‘virtual’ environment, the
patient is immersed in a complete world
of one kind or another, often with the sim-
ulated feeling of being immersed in
water, but without any ready reference to
the ‘real’ world. The aim of virtual reality
is to create ‘presence’—a psychological
state in which the participant has no dis-
tractions from outside, and so can con-
centrate on—and ultimately believe in—
what seems to be in front of him. Virtual
systems also tend to create an environ-
ment conducive to maintaining the
patient’s attention and improving his con-
centration for longer periods of time than
would be possible in an ordinary, actual
environment.
Virtual reality has been reported to
improve short-term memory, attention
span and perceptual processing, particu-
larly in children with attention-deficit/
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or
autism.1 Very preliminary evidence
shows that virtual dolphin therapy may
improve the tendency of ADHD children
to be visually distracted.2
One study using a VRDE was recent-
ly carried out at Swinburne University of
Technology in Melbourne, Australia. The
test involved 26 ADHD children and a
group of children without ADHD as con-
trols.
Parents completed a questionnaire
(Conners’ CPRS-93 Rating Scale) on
attention and behavior a week before, and
48 hours after, the children had their vir-
tual encounter: a 32-minute 3-D film of
wild dolphins near Hawaii.
The researchers then analyzed the
before and after questionnaires, control-
ling for many factors, including age and
medication. They claimed that the ADHD
children’s behavior after the sessions was
dramatically improved and to a far greater
degree than that seen in the control chil-
11
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Energies
dren. Indeed, there was a 25 per cent
Lesson 22 decrease in hyperactivity and a 16 per
cent decrease in disruptive conduct.
In addition, the researchers attempted
to informally evaluate whether the partic-
ipants experienced ‘presence’ by record-
ing the number of head or tracking move-
ments made during each of the sessions.
The children with ADHD seemed to have
made far more such movements than the
non-ADHD children.
Tactile sensations created during vir-
tual reality are known to enhance the
experience. The Australian researchers
are looking into the possibility of using
‘mixed-reality’ methods such as immers-
ing the participants’ hands in a container
of water while they’re watching the virtu-
al movie.
One of the difficulties in creating vir-
tual DAT is that we don’t really under-
stand what it is about real dolphins, which
heals us. We also don’t yet know whether
any improvements will persist in an ordi-
nary setting. Those projects now being
developed tend to reflect the inventor’s
view of exactly how, physiologically, dol-
phins affect humans.
Dr Horace Dobbs, known for
researching dolphin encounters to allevi-
ate chronic depression and cure anorexia,
3 for instance, holds a fairly conservative
view. He believes that the key to the heal-
ing effect is the ‘feel-good’ factor, which
boosts a patient's psychoneuroimmunolo-
gy response (mind–body immune func-
tion). Dobbs‘ Virtual Dolphin Project
attempts to recreate a dolphin encounter

Dolphin therapy: a mystical experience

Birch and others studying the transformational experiences of interacting with dolphins
have explored the idea that the sonar pulses emitted by dolphins cause transcranial mag-
netic stimulation (TMS), pulsed magnetic fields that can temporarily activate certain por-
tions of the brain, bringing on a mystical experience.
This theory is supported by the work of Michael Persinger (see Living the Field Lesson
Sixteen), who discovered that a low-intensity TMS applied to the temporal lobes of
the brain can evoke mystical experiences or altered perception by causing tiny micro-
seizures in the brain, ultimately causing the two hemispheres of the brain to synchronize.
This simulates the same brain patterns as those achieved during meditation or mystical
awakenings.
Researchers have found that dolphin electromagnetic (EM) emissions fall within the
range of the low-level fields required to produce this effect in the human brain.
Steve Birch, a doctoral student from Monash University in Victoria, Australia, is
researching the effects of dolphin sonic and EM emissions on humans. He has found that
transient temporal-lobe stimulation appears to parallel patterns of proopiomelanocortin
(POMC) neurochemical microseizures—that is, changes in hormone production through
low-level EM fields on the pineal gland.1
In this case, the body releases endorphins (feel-good neurohormones) and ACTH,
which stimulates nerve regeneration. This would explain the analgesic effects and cogni-
tive improvements observed, particularly in autistic children, as synthetic ACTH given to
such children has brought about similar improvements.
Other researchers believe that certain resonant frequencies emitted by dolphins acti-
vate specific proteins in the body, causing a number of positive biomolecular alterations.
1 Birch S. Dolphin therapy effects: An hypothesis. Proceedings of the Second Annual International
Symposium on Dolphin Assisted Therapy. September 5–8, Cancun, Mexico, 1996

12

with a recording that includes music
using dolphin sounds.
Although Dobbs’ tape hasn’t under-
gone rigorous scientific study, according
to a self-reported questionnaire, three-
quarters of listeners claimed to have sig-
nificantly improved. Dobbs plans to com-
bine his listening tape with holographic
images of dolphins that participants can
watch while sitting in a warm-water tank.
David Cole of AquaThought, who has
been studying the effects of dolphin
encounters on the human brain, has
developed a more holistic sensory experi-
ence in partnership with InnerSense
Technology. His Cyberfin Dolphin
Encounter Immersive Simulator recreates
the feeling of being in an underwater
sanctuary.
Cole developed his prototype from a
converted flotation tank in his garage.
The participant straps on 3-D goggles,
lies down on a water mattress inside the
tank, and observes a TV monitor over-
head while ambient music blares out of
speakers.
Although a full-scale study still needs
to be performed, Cole’s system has had
anecdotal success with patients who are
cognitively impaired.
Cyberfin has the added advantage of
not requiring a head-mounted display
(HMD) unit to be worn. This is important
because a common complaint with VRDE
is a ‘cybersickness’ headache, which may
be due to visual distortions from the
HMD screen. It’s also known that the
equipment changes the mass of the head,
requiring far more effort to move the head
about.
Doctoral student Stephen Birch (see
box above) developed a Dolphin Virtual
Reality Telepresence (DVRT) system,
Animal
Energies
and tested it on 10 volunteers to deter-
mine whether just viewing images of dol-
Lesson 22
phins could cause changes in electroen-
cephalography (EEG) brainwave record-
ings as seen as a result of actual encoun-
ters with wild dolphins (see Living The
Field Lesson Twenty-one). Although the
participants reported feeling more
relaxed, their EEG patterns did not
change.
One factor not usually considered is
the input of the animals themselves. In
Birch’s research, when humans were held
in a dorsal position (floating on their
stomachs), dolphins approached on their
own initiative and positioned themselves
so as to aim their ‘melon’, which contains
their sonic mechanism, towards the back
of the floater’s skull, presumably to send
pulsed electromagnetic (EM) fields
directly into the occipital lobes.
Although it may ultimately be kinder
for us to conduct our research with dol-
phins virtually, we still require a clearer
understanding of the EM effects of dol-
phins before we can recreate the real
experience on Playstation.
Lynne McTaggart
Horace Dobb’s website (www.idw.org)
contains teaching aids and virtual dol -
phin systems, including a Dilo Dome, an
igloo-shaped plastic structure containing
pictures of dolphins, which may be filled
with sea and dolphin sounds.
1 J Autism Dev Disord, 1996; 26: 651–9
2 North MM, North SM, Coble JR. Virtual
Reality Therapy. Colorado Springs: IPI
Press, 1996
3 Dobbs H. Dance to a Dolphin’s Song.
London: Jonathan Cape, 1990
13
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Energies

14
LIVING THE FIELD
Precognitive pet sounds
The most remarkable aspect of the 2004
Far East tsunami disaster concerned
re p o rts that few animals or traditional
native inhabitants numbered among the
24,000 dead from the enormous tidal
waves that swept the Far East. Do ani -
mals possess a ‘disaster sense’ and can
humans develop their own ‘dre a d ’
sense?
Animal
Energies
Lesson 23
The fabled sixth sense of animals has
existed since Ancient Roman times, when
the sudden arrival of owls was viewed as
an omen. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake,
who has studied the predictive power of
animals (see Dogs That Know Their
Owners Are Coming Home: and Other
Unexplained Powers of Animals,
Hutchinson, 1999), cites the fact that hun-
dreds of reports can be found in history

A
fter the 2004 tsunami disaster, books of the sudden agitated evacuation
one of the worst hit areas includ- of animals up to three weeks prior to
ed Yala National Park, Sri earthquakes.
Lanka’s largest wildlife preserve, where Although the United States Geologi-
tidal waves flooded up to two miles cal Survey (USGS) has conducted sever-
inland. Nevertheless, not a single wild al studies on animal prediction,3 the best
elephant or leopard was found among the data have been gathered in the Far East.
dead. Hundreds of elephants, leopards, The Chinese, whose traditions hold that
tigers, crocodiles and smaller mammals such animal behavior is one of the most
escaped to safety or hid in their shelters. vital elements of earthquake prediction,
Of the hundreds of animals at the pre- have used observations of animal behav-
serve, says Ravi Corea, president of the ior to predict earthquakes since the mid-
Sir Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society, 1960s. The Chinese State Seismological
only two water buffalos died. Three ele- Bureau established a station in the
phants ran away from the beach an hour Xingtai Province in 1968 for earthquake
before the tsunami struck. The World prediction that monitors biological obser-
Wildlife Fund, which has tagged some of vations. In the early 1970s, the govern-
the elephants, plans to track them to ment trained large groups of amateur
determine when and how they moved to observers to monitor and report on unusu-
safety. al animal behavior. These reports would
Other eyewitnesses told stories of bats then be analyzed by scientists.
flapping away excitedly and flamingoes In 1974, the Chinese researchers put
fleeing for higher ground before the their programme to the test in Haicheng,
waves struck, of elephants screaming and an area in the Liaoning Province in
breaking constraints to rush for safe Northeast China. After warning the popu-
haven, and of dogs refusing their daily lation that an earthquake was due within
walks on the beach. the next few years, their network of some
At India’s Coddalore coast, where 100,000 monitors were told to report any
thousands of people numbered among the unusual animal behavior, as well as other
human casualties, dogs, goats and buf- geological changes and unusual weather
faloes were also found unharmed. patterns.
The tsunami is only the latest report of In mid-December and January, the
animal presentiment of catastrophe.1,2 government received thousands of reports
Twelve hours before Hurricane Charley of unusual animal behavior: hundreds of
hit the Gulf Coast of Florida in 2004, 14 snakes were emerging from hibernation,
electrically tagged blacktip sharks, living even though they were likely to freeze in
off the coast of Sarasota, suddenly rushed the wintry weather; and cows, horses,
off for deeper waters. After staying away dogs and pigs were restless and acting
two weeks, they returned, once the hurri- strangely. Altogether, some 20 species
cane was over. demonstrated signs of fear.

15
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
As the reports of this strange behavior
Lesson 23 began flooding in, the government decid-
ed it was time to act, and they evacuated
Haicheng’s half-million inhabitants on 4
February. Later that day, a massive earth-
quake registering 7.3 on the Richter Scale
struck Haicheng County, leaving only
half the buildings standing. Had they not
been evacuated, thousands of occupants
would have died.
According to the Chinese surveys, the
largest number of these kinds of animal
behaviors occurs 24 hours before the
earthquake strikes. However, smaller ani-
mals, such as snakes or rats, show the
most unusual behavior from three days
prior to the earthquake to a few minutes
before it strikes.
After an earthquake in 1976 in the
Tangshan area, a team of scientists,
including meteorologists, biologists and
geophysicists, carried out a survey of
hundreds of people in 48 counties sur-
rounding the affected region. From the
2000 case reports of unusual animal
behavior they were able to collect, the
team identified 58 types of domestic and
wild animals that had shown abnormal
behavior prior to the earthquake striking.
The majority of cases concerned domesti-
cated animals (see box on the right).
Prompted by the success of the
Chinese, the US Geological Survey
decided to carry out its own pilot study at
the Stanford Research Institute. The
USGS enlisted 1200 volunteers between
1979 and 1981, who were told to call in
whenever they noticed unusual animal
behavior. During this period, of the 13
earthquakes that occurred registering 4
or more on the Richter Scale, seven fol-
lowed a statistically significant number of
warning calls—some impressively so.4
According to Dr George Pararas-
Carayannis, oceanographer and former
director of the International Tsunami
Information Center of the United Nations
Educational Scientific and Cultural
O rganization (UNESCO)–Interg o v e r n -
mental Oceanographic Commission
(IOC), the Chinese are experimenting
with new instruments and electronic
solid-state sensors to predict catastrophes,
much in the way that animals do. The idea
is that, eventually, man will be able to
create machines and instrumentation that
can duplicate the sixth sense of animals.5

Signs of a coming catastrophe

The following unusual animal behaviors have been noted by Chinese scientists prior to
earthquakes:
" domestic animals became highly agitated, or pick up their offspring and carry them
outside
" goats, pigs and other animals bite each other, refuse to enter their pens or coops, or
emit strange squeals
" swarms of rats suddenly appear and act strangely
" geese and other birds begin flying into trees
" chickens rush out of their coops in the middle of the night
" birds leave their nests or usual habitats
" reptiles, like snakes and lizards, and small mammals leave their underground nests
" fish swim around aimlessly or move into waters unnatural to their species (deepwater
fish are suddenly found in shallow water, or large fish used to living in a bay suddenly
flee to deeper waters)
" zoo animals refuse to enter their shelters at night
" insects swarm in huge groups near the shore
" cattle tear away at their restraints and rush to higher ground.

16

Where is the sixth sense?
The problem, of course, is attempting to
understand exactly what in the animal’s
biology is providing it with precognitive
information.
Wildlife experts tend to explain away
animal sixth sense as a byproduct of one
of their exquisitely attuned five senses—
dogs, for instance, possess a sense of
smell that is up to 100,000 more sensitive
than that of humans. Others believe that
an acute sense of hearing or a ‘seismic’
gift, allowing them to sense the vibrations
of the earthquake, may have alerted the
animals that the flood was on its way.
According to Sheldrake, three major
theories are proposed:
! Animals can sense subtle sounds or
movements of the earth. Researchers
believe animals, with their superior
senses, can pick up the most minute
physical stimuli—for example, dogs,
they believe, can hear tiny fractures in
rocks before an earthquake reaches
the surface of the earth. According to
Alan Rabinowitz, director for science
and exploration at the Wildlife
Conservation Society in New York,
animals also have the ability to sense
the vibrational changes on land
caused by earthquakes.
Joyce Poll, of the Savanna
Elephant Vocalization Project of
Norway, has carried out 25 years of
acoustic and seismic research on ele-
phants. She believes that animals are
able to sense even the subtlest of seis-
mic changes in the earth. This accords
with Japanese research that animals
have a sixth ‘seismic’ sense.6 Never-
theless, says Sheldrake, a number of
animals that react precognitively to
earthquakes have no better hearing
than humans do. They also don’t react
to small tremors and, if seismic infor-
mation is so accurate, he says, then
why aren’t seismologists also able to
pick up these clues with their highly
sensitive instruments?
! Animals smell the gases emitted prior
to earthquakes. Again, says Shel-
drake, a number of species that react
Animal
Energies
to earthquakes, such as birds, don’t
have an acute sense of smell.
Lesson 23
! Animals pick up subtle changes in
electromagnetic (EM) fields. Other
research has concentrated on whether
animals with high-frequency sensors
like sharks, or those such as birds or
fish, which appear to rely on geomag-
netic signaling to navigate, can sense
the EM changes in the earth before a
quake or the EM changes in the
atmosphere of storms.
In China, scientists have studied
pigeon legs. Biologists know that tiny
nerve bundles in a pigeon’s leg are
extremely sensitive to vibrations of
any sort. In experiments, 50 pigeons
that had their leg nerves severed
remained calm before an earthquake
of 4.0 on the Richter Scale. Those
which had nerves that were normal
became agitated and flew away.
In Japanese studies carried out at
Osaka University, fish and worms
exposed to weak EM fields have
become fearful and begun rushing
away—behavior similar to the type
that occurs before an earthquake.7
Sheldrake argues that the EM the-
ory is the most promising, as changes
in electrostatic fields prior to earth-
quakes are well established.
However, none of these explanations
accounts for animal premonitions that
occur weeks before the disaster strikes
nor, indeed, for the many accounts of ani-
mal presentiments of other types of disas-
ters befalling their human owners, includ-
ing warnings of approaching doodlebug
bombing raids during World War II, or
precognitive awareness of low blood
sugar or epileptic fits (which we’ll
explore in Lesson Twenty-four).
The inescapable conclusion is that
animals are far more in touch with fore-
bodings than we are. As Sheldrake says of
these cases, “Many other examples of
foreboding . . . make the idea of precog-
nition or presentiment almost unavoid-
able.”
Lynne McTaggart
17
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
1 Earthquakes Inf Bull, 1978; 10 (6): Validation Study. Annual report pre-
Lesson 23 231–3 pared for the US Geological Survey,
2 Earthquakes Inf Bull, 1978; 10 (2): 1981
42–50 5 Intergovernmental Oceanographic
3 Evernden JR (ed). Abnormal Animal C o m m i s s i o n – U N E S C O. Workshop
Behavior Prior to Earthquakes. U S Report No. 58
National Earthquakes Hazards 6 Wadatsumi K. Precursory Te s t i m o n y
Reduction Program Conference, 23–24 1519. Tokyo: Tokyo Publishers, 1995
September 1976 7 J Phys Soc Jpn, 1996; 65: 710–2
4 Otis LS, Kautz WH. B i o l o g i c a l
Premonitors of Earthquakes: A

18
LIVING THE FIELD
Psychic pet doctors
In the last lesson, we examined the
'disaster' sense of animals: their ability
to forecast danger. But aside fro m
tsunamis, animals possess a finely
tuned ability to 'read' humans and even
to predict illness in their owners.
C
onnie Standley has epilepsy, and
fits can strike at any moment.
Although she used to be trapped
in her home, a prisoner of her unpre-
dictable illness, she now lives a normal
life, thanks to a unique warning system.
The Floridian has two enormous Bouvier
des Flandres dogs, who’ve learned about
their owner’s affliction. A half-hour
before a seizure is about to strike, the
dogs pull on her clothes and drag her by
the hand to get her to a place of safety
before the seizure begins. Connie reckons
that her dogs predict more than 75 per
cent of her seizures.
Although we like to think of ourselves
as the most well developed of all species
on the planet, most animals have abilities
that far surpass us in almost every regard.
Most of us are aware of the special talents
of different animals—that they can
remember better than us (in the case of
squirrels and nuts), navigate better than
us (in the case of birds) or hear or smell
better than us (in the case of dogs). But
most remarkable of all is the ability of
animals to predict events.
Among the most remarkable exam-
ples is the ability of dogs to predict
epileptic fits. Although doctors tend to
pour cold water on the possibility of ani-
mals predicting illness, cases abound of
dogs predicting seizures in their owners.
Many are trained to be seizure-response
dogs to help their owners get to a safe
place before a seizure has begun. These
dogs have been taught to lie down on top
of their owner or fetch his medicine, once
a seizure has begun.
Such trained behavior is well within
the reach of any dog. But many owners
report that their dogs have moved from
responding to seizures to predicting them.
Animal
Energies
Lesson 24
This has arisen spontaneously; most train-
ers believe it is impossible to train a dog
to anticipate a fit, as humans themselves
have no reliable early-warning system.
Yet, some 10 per cent of people with
seizure-response dogs claim their dogs
have become seizure-alert dogs.1 Indeed,
Florida is considering giving epileptic-
alert dogs the same status as seeing-eye
dogs.
According to Dr Rupert Sheldrake,
the first study of dog epilepsy prediction
was by British vet Andrew Edney, who
studied dogs of all breeds who’d become
seizure-alert, according to their owners.
Of the 21 who responded to Edney’s sur-
vey, all claimed that their dogs developed
this talent without training. In all cases,
the dogs would:
! show concern, apprehension or fear
! show attention-getting behavior, usu-
ally barking or whining
! make frantic attempts to make contact
with the owner either by jumping up,
or licking his hands or face
! stand by their owner, encouraging him
to lie down or shepherding him to
safety.
During the seizure, the dogs either stayed
with their owners, often licking them, or
rushed to get help. According to Edney’s
study, the dogs had a remarkable track
record. One even could distinguish a
‘fake’ seizure from a real one.2
Sheldrake has even had reports of a
rabbit and a cat being able to predict its
owner’s seizures. The Epilepsy Institute
in New York City is attempting to study
this phenomenon using EEG recording
and simultaneous videotaping.
A British group called Support Dogs
has developed a special programme
called Seizure Alert Dogs®. Medical sci-
entist and dog-lover Val Strong founded
Support Dogs in 1992 to train dogs to
help physically disabled owners. Several
years later, when a physically disabled
epileptic contacted them about having a
companion dog, Val hit upon the idea of
attempting to train the dog to predict the
19
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
woman’s seizures. They chose a rescue
Lesson 24 dog (most of the trained dogs are from a
shelter) and, within three months, the dog
was giving the woman a half-hour warn-
ing as well as arriving with a blanket and
the telephone once she’d had her seizure.
Because the woman often finds it difficult
to talk immediately after seizure, the dog
has been trained to bark down the phone
to her friends.
Trainers like Val Strong emphasize
that they don’t train dogs to recognize an
epileptic fit per se. Instead, they simply
observe the dog’s reactions prior to a fit
and train it to accentuate its behavior. So,
if a dog reacts by staring at the owner, Val
will teach it to lick the owner’s face, jump
up or tug on his hand. Some Seizure
Alert Dogs® even jump on top of their
owner and shake, imitating the seizures
they’ve observed. In Val’s experience,
most—if not all—dogs that are closely
bonded with their owner will be able to
predict fits.
According to the US Delta Society’s
National Service Dog Center, Golden
Retrievers and German Shepherds, as
well a variety of mixed Setters, Border
Collies and Samoyeds, tend to be used
most often. Basically, trainers like Val
look for a people-oriented disposition,
and one that is extremely alert and
responsive to its owner’s emotions and
behavior. They also steer clear of a dog
that is shy or overly protective.3
In many instances, the peace of mind

How animals think—a photographic memory

Why do animals have so much more precognitive ability than we do? Much of the res-
earch into animal thinking shows fairly conclusively that animals think in pictures. In one
Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, mice taught to run a maze were implanted
with electrodes to compare their brain patterns while awake and asleep. During the maze
runs, certain brain sections would fire so that the researchers were able to predict whether
the rat was turning right or left.
During sleep, the same firing occurred, suggesting that the mice were dreaming of
running the maze. The researchers concluded that, if mice dream in pictures, they must
also think in pictures while awake.
Other researchers know that ‘verbal overshadowing’, as Temple Gradin calls it, inter-
feres with memory. It may well be that language and thinking in words also suppresses
our cognitive ability to pick up future events.
Learning about your own precognitive ability from animals means developing those
areas of awareness that are beyond language.

Exercise
! Work on studying things in ‘pieces’—the smells, sounds, look, feel and taste of the
component parts
! Draw your dream images without trying to analyze them or figure out at first what they
‘mean’
! Study your partner, friends and children, and see what thoughts you can pick up
without using words
! Study your pets to see how they communicate, and if they are picking up your thoughts
and emotions. Recently, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Ollie picked up my appre-
hensions of some unsavory people walking in front of our house. As soon as I regis-
tered my own fear, Ollie—who was lying in another part of the house—began barking.

20

in knowing that your pet will warn you of
a fit in good time reduces stress, which, in
turn, dramatically reduces the rate of
seizures. The experience of one of Val’s
clients is typical. Gillian McCluskey had
a very restricted life from the age of nine.
By the time she contacted Support Dogs,
Gillian was having from six to 10 seizures
a week. Her worry over becoming over-
stressed often brought on a fit.
Support Dogs arranged for her to have
a jet-black mixed dog called Harvey. “It
wasn’t long before Harvey was able to
give me an alert of 15 minutes,” Gillian
says. “Harvey’s alert is to stare at me and
whine. As I am coming out of the seizure,
Harvey licks my face until I can say
‘Good boy’, then he looks for his reward.”
After three-and-a-half years of having
Harvey, her attacks have dramatically
reduced to just a few in the last two years
with no change in her medication. “I can
now lead an almost normal life and do
things that anyone else would take for
granted,"” she says. “To think it’s all down
to a little black dog.”
Besides epileptic fits, dogs—and even
cats—have learned to monitor blood-
sugar levels in diabetic owners. Sheldrake
recounts one 1992 study by Gloucester-
shire doctors who interviewed diabetics
with pets. Of 43 owners, 15—nearly a
third—claimed that their animals gave
them warning by either barking to get
their attention or seeking a neighbor for
help.
In one instance, a dog named Max
lived with a severe diabetic. If her blood-
sugar levels plummeted in the middle of
the night, Max would shake her husband
until he woke up to give her the medica-
tion.1 Perhaps the most remarkable cases
are those where a pet has helped to diag-
nose cancer or an emergency like appen-
dicitis. In 1989, The La n c e t published a
report of a Border Collie–Doberman
mixed dog that kept licking and sniffing
at a mole on his owner’s leg, and even
attempted to bite it off when its owner
wore shorts. Eventually, the mole was
found to be malignant, but at an early
stage, so it could be treated.4 Since then,
Animal
Energies
retired orthopedic surgeon Mr John
Church has set up a Canine Olfactory
Lesson 24
Detection Center, following another
anecdotal report of a dog sniffing out its
owner’s melanoma. 5
The Center, in the Department of
Dermatology at Amersham Hospital, has
carried out the first cancer- d e t e c t i o n
study using six dogs to sniff the urine of
patients suspected of having bladder can-
cer. As a group, the dogs correctly chose
the urine of patients with bladder cancer
on 22 out of 54 occasions—an average
success rate of 41 per cent compared
with the 14 per cent expected by chance
a l o n e .6
Although the doctors at Amersham
Hospital assume that the dogs are picking
up some odor unavailable to humans, the
answer may be more subtle. Sheldrake’s
database contains many stories of dogs
who predicted appendicitis, heart attack,
fainting, common-or-garden illnesses
like flu and even sudden death. Val’s
Support Dogs is now investigating other
avenues: seizure-response dogs for chil-
dren; hypoglycemia-alert dogs for diabet-
ics; and even canine help for people with
emotional conditions. Although tradition-
al medics believe it mostly has to do with
smell (see box, page 16), a heightened
sense of smell doesn’t account for where
animals have made these predictions long-
distance. As Sheldrake says, it may be
closer to the same information source that
helps pets read their owners’ thoughts and
intentions—a non-local clue from The
Field.
Lynne McTa g g a rt
1 Grandin T, Johnson C. Animals in
Tr a n s l a t i o n. New York: Scribner’s,
2005
2 Sheldrake R. Dogs That Know When
Their Owners Are Coming Home and
Other Unexplained Powers of
Animals. Hutchinson, 1999
3 Alert. National Service Dog Center®
N e w s l e t t e r, 1995; 6 (4)
4 Lancet, 1989; i: 734
5 Lancet, 2001; 358: 930
6 B M J, 2004; 329 (7468): 712
21
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD

How do dogs sense fits?

Epilepsy is a temporary disruption of normal brain activity characterized by abnormal
electrical activity in the brain. Without warning, an epileptic’s brain erupts into uncontrol-
led waves of electrical activity, causing involuntary movements or loss of consciousness.
These convulsions, or fits, can be severe (in the case of grand-mal seizures) or simply
a brief loss of consciousness (petit mal). There is no mechanism to allow epileptics to
predict their own fits, other than the ‘aura’—physical symptoms such as twitching or
strange behavior that sometimes occurs just before the onset of a fit.
Rupert Sheldrake, who has extensively studied animal predictive behavior, says there
are several possible explanations of how a pet can predict a fit.1
The animal:
" somehow senses electrical changes in its owner
" notices minute changes in his owner’s behavior or physicality
" smells a different odor in his owner. This is the most well-accepted theory among the
medical profession. According to Hywel Williams and Dr Andrew Pembroke, of King’s
College Hospital in London, who first reported on dogs being able to sense melanoma
(see text, page 17): “It might well be that dogs have such high acuity of smell that they
can smell things like the immune system can sense antigens. Their sense of olfaction
may be in a sense akin to the immunological ability to recognize different things on
the basis of molecular constituents.”
Cancer cells, for instance, are known to produce far different chemical compounds
than those made by normal healthy cells. Some might even produce distinctive odors
detectable by dogs, even at the tiny amounts found in a few rogue cells.
A British study of bladder cancer concluded that ‘tumor-related volatile compounds’
released in urine give off a smell distinct from those associated with secondary effects
of the tumor, including bleeding.
Nevertheless, says Sheldrake, these possibilities don’t account for reported cases
where dogs have picked up such clues from another room and have come bounding in to
warn their owners.
1 Sheldrake R. Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Hutchinson, 1999

22
LIVING THE FIELD
Telepathic terriers
Over the last several lessons, we’ve
examined the precognitive abilities of
animals to forecast personal or global
disaster. In this lesson, we move on to
their powers of extrasensory percep -
tion.
S
ome months ago, I was walking my
dog in the large common near us
when I met up with one of my
neighbours. At the time, Ollie, our small
tricolour Cavalier King Charles Spaniel,
was a ‘teenager’ in dog years, with a
teenager’s rebelliousness. A few months
before, he’d gone chasing after another
dog and soon ran out of sight. We’d lost
him for more than a panicky half hour,
after which he’d had the good sense to
make his own way home.
My neighbour introduced me to a
friend and then introduced Ollie as a good
example of failed dog training. (We’d had
many sessions with a dog trainer, which
had worked, but then we’d got a bit com-
placent and hadn’t reinforced them.)
“They’ve spent all this money training
their dog and none of it worked at all!”
my neighbour said, by way of introducing
us. “Their dog’s just useless.”
As soon as she made this statement,
Ollie did something unprecedented in his
short life. He walked up to her, cocked
one leg on one of her Wellingtons, and
urinated. He then walked around her,
cocked the other leg, and urinated on her
other boot. For the first time in some min-
utes, she was speechless—as was I, but
for entirely different reasons.
Somehow, Ollie had completely
understood this exchange and responded
utterly appropriately. His was the canine
equivalent of utter distain—a perfect put-
down. Only a complete understanding of
the situation could have been responsible
for his reaction.
But what was it that Ollie had grasped
about the situation? Was it that he under-
stood that she was insulting him? Had he
cognitively understood the words? Or
was it the derision in her tone of voice
Animal
Energies
Lesson 25
that he’d picked up? Or my discomfiture
at her implications? Was he simply being
protective of me?
It came down to one of two extraordi-
nary possibilities—either Ollie has
advanced cognitive understanding, or he
has an ability to read my thoughts.
It may have been that he was simply
exquisitely sensitive to my mood—and
knew I was annoyed at the implication
of the conversation, even though it was
partly in jest; I was being introduced as,
in effect, an inept dog-handler. However,
if Ollie was simply reading my mood, he
might have known I was annoyed, but not
necessarily the cause of my annoyance.
Furthermore, I was smiling and friendly
throughout the exchange, so there was no
external evidence of any upset or con-
frontation.
When I relayed the story to our train-
er, he attributed it to smell—that dogs like
Ollie, whose smell is 100,000 times better
than that of humans, in essence smell
their owners’ moods. But if his sense of
smell told him I was irritated, it wouldn’t
have told him why. He’s been in my
presence when I’ve been irritated before,
and not urinated on anyone. He’s never
cocked his leg on a person before. Given
the circumstances, it is difficult not to
conclude that Ollie picked up the infor-
mation by extrasensory means.
The scientist who has most thorough-
ly investigated the extrasensory percep-
tion (ESP) of animals is undoubtedly
British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He
has interviewed several thousand animal
owners and trainers about their percep-
tions of their pets.1
His strongest evidence for animal ESP
comprises the database he has amassed of
anecdotes and subsequent studies of dogs
who know when their owners are coming
home. At the time of his writing the book
on the subject, Sheldrake had collected
nearly 600 accounts of dogs that know
when their owners are returning—even
when they keep irregular hours. In some
instances, the dogs wait by the door; in
23
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
others, they rush out to the street. In many
Lesson 25 instances, their excitement occurs hours
and even days before their owner returns.
With some dogs, this anticipatory
behaviour is a daily activity; in others, it’s
a response reserved for special occasions,
such as when their owners return from a
trip or long absence.
According to four surveys carried out
by Sheldrake and his colleagues, some 51
per cent of all dog owners have dogs that
regularly anticipate their arrival. This
capability is spread across many breeds,
although Sheldrake found a slight (statis-
tically non-significant) bias towards ani-
mals that, like Ollie, were traditionally
bred as companion dogs, compared with
the large breeds that tend to be more
restricted in the home or are simply kept
outside.
Traditional scientists argue that this
perception stems from routine, or from a
heightened sense of smell or hearing.
Nevertheless, many of the dog owners in
Sheldrake’s database report that their
dogs are able to detect their return even
when they keep irregular hours, or from
many miles away. Furthermore, Shel-
drake quotes Malcolm Fish, of the Essex
Police Dog Section, who has conducted
trials of bloodhounds for the Home office
showing that the best a dog can do is to
sniff someone from a half-mile away—
and only if the wind is blowing in the
right direction. So, the sniff theory cannot
account for the many dogs that begin their
anticipatory behaviour while their owners
are still miles away from home.
As for hearing, although a dog may be
able to pick up the sounds of his owner’s
car or footsteps, it would not account for
those dogs that can anticipate their
owner’s return in a taxi or a friend’s car,
or those who use public transport.
None of the usual explanations can
adequately account for the many
instances on Sheldrake’s database where
dogs begin their anticipatory activity the
moment their owners intend to leave. In
17 per cent of Sheldrake’s cases on his
database, the dogs begin reacting the
moment the person begins the journey or
even starts preparing to return home.
In one instance, Louise Gavit, who
keeps an irregular schedule, asked her
husband to carefully observe their dog’s
reactions to her comings and goings, and
to keep a careful record of the time. They
discovered that the moment she leaves
wherever she is and thinks about return-

Pet telepathic research

! If you suspect your animal is reacting telepathically to you in any way, keep a journal
of your intentions and your pet’s response. Although most of Sheldrake’s database
concerns dogs, he also has heard from many owners of cats, horses, sheep and the
like.
Late one night, when I was in our front hallway locking up, at the exact moment that
I noticed some unsavoury-looking people across the street, Ollie, who had been asleep
at the back of the house, jumped up and started barking furiously. He had never pre-
viously barked at people walking by, and certainly not those across the street. We
could find no other impetus for his distress.
Although we were separated by two rooms, it appears that he somehow sensed
my apprehension.
! Note the date and time of your pet’s response and any other important details about
your own intentions. Make a log of the date, time and precise circumstances. If it
concerns your arrival home, where were you coming back from? When did you decide
to leave? What was your mode of transport? How and when did your pet react? Check
out Sheldrake’s methods on his website at www.sheldrake.org.

24

ing, her dog BJ awakes from his nap,
shifts his spot to one near the door and
points his nose outwards, waiting. As she
gets closer to home, he begins to pace
excitedly, so that whenever she opens the
door, he is poking his nose through, ready
to greet her.
Although one could attribute this
behaviour to the precognitive abilities of
animals as evidenced in Lessons Twenty-
three and Twenty-four, Sheldrake believes
these data point firmly to telepathy. “One
way of teasing apart the possible roles of
telepathy and precognition is to look at
what happens when people change their
minds,” he says. A number of his case
reports show that the dogs begin their
usual reactive behaviour at the point
where the owner has decided to come
home but, when the owner changes his
mind, or decides to take a detour, the dogs
become confused, grow disinterested and
eventually revert to ordinary behaviour.
Perhaps Sheldrake’s strongest case
concerns Jaytee, the mongrel terrier that
lives outside of Manchester with Pam
Smart, who has been the subject of a
number of Sheldrake’s studies (see box,
page 22).2 At Sheldrake’s suggestion,
Pam and her parents, who live in the flat
next door and take Jaytee when Pam is
out, have kept a careful log of Jaytee’s
actions and compared them with that of
Pam’s erratic schedule. Regardless of the
time or place, Jaytee begins anticipating
her return when Pam is between four and
40 miles away.
Sheldrake has filmed Jaytee’s actions
in relation to Pam’s movements with the
help of two videocameras, one constantly
trained on the dog and the other on the
travelling owner. In some of these studies,
Pam’s movements were controlled by
Sheldrake, who would cue Pam to return
home by signalling her with a pager. In
one such instance, virtually the moment
Animal
Energies
after Pam is told to return home, Jaytee—
who had been languishing beside Pam’s
Lesson 25
mother—begins pricking up his ears.
Eleven seconds later, while Pam is walk-
ing toward a taxi, Jaytee assumes his
usual posture next to the window, antici-
pating her return, where he waits until her
arrival.
With the help of other scientists,
Sheldrake went on to conduct some 45
trials with Pam and Jaytee, using double
videos. In some instances, Smart herself
makes a spontaneous decision to return
home; in others, experimenters located at
a distance signal her to leave via pagers;
and in three cases, the studies were con-
ducted by researchers who were sceptical
of Jaytee’s claimed abilities. Independent
judges were used to assess the results,
which demonstrated that, without a doubt,
Jaytee somehow often knew when Pam
was beginning to travel home.
In 45 controlled studies when Smart
did not return home, Jaytee’s waiting time
at the window did not increase.3
Even more bizarrely, in a significant
number of cases, Jaytee began reacting
20 minutes before Pam was paged. Shel-
drake went on to demonstrate that
Jaytee’s anticipation of the bleep was
related to Pam’s; when she was thinking
about it or possibly expecting it, he also
seemed to as well—more evidence that
the bond between man and dog extends
over many miles for a dog’s most impor-
tant moment: when his owner is home-
ward bound.
Lynne McTaggart
1 Sheldrake R. Dogs That Know When
Their Owners Are Coming Home and
Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.
Hutchinson, 1999
2 J Soc Psychical Res, 1997; 61: 353–64
3 J Soc Psychical Res, 1998; 62: 220–32
25
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
Lesson 25

A giant magnet
Although Jaytee was remarkably adept at determining when Pam was coming home, in
a number of instances, he missed the signals. The ‘misses’ caused Sheldrake’s colleague,
parapsychologist Dr Dean Radin, to wonder if any outside disturbances were responsible.
A large body of evidence shows that psi perception in humans decreases during
days when the atmosphere is geomagnetically stormy, and increases on days of geo-
magnetic calm. Furthermore, geomagnetic activity apparently affects the navigational
skills of animals such as homing pigeons, which ‘crash’ during geomagnetic storms (see
Living the Field Lesson Thirteen).
Radin wondered if Jaytee’s telepathic ability were related to a system akin to ‘satellite’
navigation, which would be disrupted during high geomagnetic activity or affected by local
‘sidereal’ time. Sidereal time is measured by the apparent motion of the stars (instead of
the motion of the sun). Local sidereal time (LST) is measured by the ‘right ascension’ (an
equatorial coordinate) of a star on the ‘local meridian’ in your sky—the hour angle of
the vernal equinox. The daily movement of this point gives us a measure of the earth’s
rotation in relation to the ‘fixed’ stars, rather than the sun.
After studying the geomagnetic activity on the days Jaytee was being filmed, Radin
discovered that high levels of geomagnetic flux in one of the two series of studies was
indeed significantly correlated with Jaytee’s inability to sense Pam’s return. His ability was
also affected by the LST—it was worse between 12:00 and 14:00 LST.
When keeping your animal journal, make sure to calculate geomagnetic activity and
local sidereal time.
! To compute the LST, work out your longitude, then consult http://tycho.usno.
navy.mil/sidereal.html.
! For the best display of daily geomagnetic activity, consult www.sec.noaa.gov/
radio/radio.html.

26
LIVING THE FIELD
Animal hospital
Animals appear to have an instinctive
sense of how to maintain their health
and even heal themselves with particu -
lar plants or herbs.
S
tories abound of animals eating
just the right things to heal them-
selves. After witnessing sick bears
eating the roots of Ligusticum plants and
getting better afterwards, North American
Native Americans gave the plants a name,
which means ‘bear medicine’.
Most conventional scientists have dis-
paraged anecdotes such as these, putting
them down to myth—until recently.
Animal behaviorists have discovered that
animals appear to have a natural instinct,
across species, for determining which
plants can be used to heal different dis-
eases.
Animal behaviorist Dr Cindy Engel
spent years gathering scientific evidence
that animals self-medicate—the result is
her book Wild Health (Houghton Mifflin,
2002). She found that animals instinctive-
ly know how to maintain optimum health.
Given a smorgasbord of choice, animals
like rats will choose a nutritionally bal-
anced diet. A number of animals also
know to make compensatory choices
when the food supply changes with the
season. For instance, she says, deer graze
in summer on grass, but switch to ivy and
holly when the grass dies back. Similarly,
she discovered that, when the energy con-
tent of food drops in winter, animals like
the Madagascar primates aye-ayes will
double their intake; before droughts,
camels and rhinos will switch to eating
foods rich in salts and water.1
What is also remarkable, however, is
animals’ instinctive sense of extraordi-
nary nutritional needs—even before they
need it. Animals like birds and squirrels
will change the fat content in their diets
before migration and hibernation, respec-
tively. When their nutritional needs
increase, such as during pregnancy, they
increase their consumption of mineral-
rich foods. When moose and deer need to
Animal
Energies
Lesson 27
grow antlers, their bodies raid the calcium
and phosphorus from their bones to feed.
The animals would then develop osteo-
porosis if their diets weren’t extraordinar-
ily mineral-rich and, because soils are
often so depleted of these minerals, the
animals resort to chewing on cast-off
antlers, or chew soil from around decom-
posing bones or eat salty fish.
Even vegetarians will resort to eating
meat if they cannot get the nutrition they
need from plants. Engel recounts the
shocking research by University of
Glasgow researcher Robert Furness who,
while researching birds on the Shetland
Island of Foula, discovered dozens and
dozens of decapitated bodies. It tran-
spired that sheep were chewing off the
birds’ heads; on another similar island,
the deer were killing birds and chewing
off their limbs. In both locations, the poor
soil failed to provide enough minerals for
the animals, which then sought to replace
the phosphorus and calcium they needed
with live bones.
Numerous other studies show that
many vegetarians among the deer family
become carnivorous when necessary, and
animals that are ordinarily conservative in
their diet will become more adventurous
when deprived of a particular nutrient.
Perhaps more extraordinary is the evi-
dence suggesting that animals know how
to self-medicate against parasites, infec-
tion, skin conditions and poisons. Engel’s
data show that animals have learned
which substances—such as clay, soil and
charcoal—can absorb and neutralize par-
ticular plant toxins. They understand how
to deal with certain pathogens—either by
increasing body temperature or, in the
case of the honeybee, by coating the hive
with propolis, a potent antimicrobial.
Engel has also uncovered ample evidence
that animals rub bioactive compounds
into their fur or skin to discourage
unwanted insects, ticks and mites.
Scientist Dan Janzen began collating
evidence that animals somehow are able
to differentiate the thousands of toxic
27
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
secondary compounds in plants that kill
Lesson 27 internal parasites. For instance, a number
of species, including rhinoceros and wild
bison, feast on a certain bark known to be
toxic to the microbes that cause dysen-
tery. Even animals in captivity often have
a native sense of self-medication superior
to their doctors. In one instance, a captive
capuchin monkey that had a severe skin
infection did not get better until he was
given access to tobacco leaves (which
contain nicotine, a potent toxin), which
cured the skin condition permanently.2
Kodiak bears have been known to
make an herbal paste from osha roots,
then to rub it onto their skin and fur as an
antibacterial.
Given a natural instinct for the
healthy, one wonders what animals would
make of our current tendency to consume
toxic junk as food and toxic chemicals as
medicine.
Lynne McTaggart
1 Folia Primatol, 1994; 62 (1–3): 115–24
(quoted in Engels C. Wild Health. New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002: 30
2 Engels C. Wild Health. New Yo r k :
Houghton Mifflin, 2002: 125

Taking a cue from monkeys

We tend to believe that we need professionals to keep us fit and make us well, but we
can improve our instincts.
! Listen to your intuition when it comes to eating, and allow your children to do the
same. If you have food cravings, you may be deficient in a nutrient that your body is
trying to tell you about. That is thought to be behind the many cravings of pregnancy.
Those who are extraordinarily deficient in certain minerals may even develop pica, the
need to eat coal or wood. Chocoholics are often deficient in magnesium.
Meditate on what you really feel you need to eat, not what you think you ought to
eat or any temporary ‘feel-good’ boost such as junk food.
If you really have an aversion to a food, don’t eat it. Chances are, you are sensi-
tive/allergic to it, or it won’t agree with you in some way.
! Don't force a family member (or yourself) to eat when unwell. Animals instinctively
know to fast when they are ill—often for good reason. If they are infected with a
parasite or microbe, eating will only feed it.
! When you have a condition, investigate your options and spend time meditating
on them. Let your heart tell you which potential therapy ‘feels’ right to you. Not only will
you be tapping into your instincts and native intelligence, but you’ll be investing your
choice with your own belief—which will have a powerful placebo effect.
! Look to the natural. It goes without saying that bears and deer are smart enough not
to fight illness with things that will make them sicker. Whenever possible, consider
natural substances to fight problems such as infections. Recently, propolis—a natural
antibiotic—cured my husband’s infected tooth.

28
LIVING THE FIELD
Feeling like an animal
In our series on animals and their
special cognitive abilities, we now turn
to a subject of heated debate—animal
emotions. What exactly do animals
feel? And what can we learn about
their holistic attitude toward life? Can
we learn to feel at one with them?
O
nce there lived a cow whose best
friend was a blind sheep. So
inseparable were they that the
cow acted as her friend’s ‘eyes’, leading
her around the farm all day like a seeing-
eye dog, wherever she needed to go.
When the old blind sheep finally died, the
cow stopped eating and refused to move
from the spot. Eventually, distraught with
grief, the cow herself died.
Psychologist Irene Pepperberg owned
an African grey parrot called Alex.
African greys are a species known for
their ability to use cognitive language and
also for their psychic ability. Alex needed
a lung operation but, when Pepperberg
turned to leave after handing him to their
veterinarian, Alex cried after her, “Come
here. I love you. I’m sorry. I want to go
back.” Like a child, he felt that he was
being abandoned and, more to the point,
that it was his fault.1
If all animals could talk as well as
Alex, would they also register that level
of sophisticated emotion? Ask any pet
owner or kindly farmer, and they will
consider their animals as conscious
beings capable of a range of complex
emotions—joy, grief, playfulness, sulk-
ing, even embarrassment.
However, to the scientific community,
an animal is still perceived as nothing
much more than a robot with an array of
chemical processes, without the ability to
register much more than the crudest pain
or fear—certainly none of the more com-
plicated human feelings such as excite-
ment, boredom, annoyance, anger or sus-
picion.
Only Charles Darwin maintained that
animals have sophisticated emotions2—a
theory that, unlike his views on evolution,
Animal
Energies
Lesson 28
never caught fire. Mark S. Blumberg, of
the University of Iowa, and Greta
S o k o l o ff, of Indiana University in
Bloomington, number among the most
vocal proponents of the behaviourist
view, claiming that the idea that animals
process emotion is pure fiction and
‘anthropomorphic’.3
A variation of this theme is the sug-
gestion that animals have a kind of ‘ani-
mal consciousness’ that is far less sophis-
ticated than ours.
However, these attitudes are now
being challenged with the advent of
sophisticated brain-imaging technology
that can reveal brain function in specific
areas of the brain in people with emotion-
al disorders. A number of scientists, in
studying the brains of both animals and
humans, has discovered remarkable simi-
larities in emotional biology between
species. Increasingly, scientists are com-
ing to believe that animals have sen-
tience—the ability to have a conscious
experience, to compare and understand
experience, to have an internal represen-
tation of what is going on in their lives—
in effect, to know that they know.
Indeed, this was the subject of the
conference entitled Animal Sentience,
held in London in March 2005. The vari-
ous speakers and delegates, who num-
bered among them veterinarians, repre-
sentatives from government and interna-
tional institutions, animal-welfare organi-
zations and even the meat industry, tend-
ed to agree that animal sentience is now
one of the most important and necessary
new areas of biology to explore.
At the forefront of this underexplored
area of research is Jaak Panksepp, profes-
sor emeritus of the department of psy-
chology at Bowling Green State Univers-
ity, in Ohio, who first coined the term
‘affective neuroscience’ to describe the
science of where and how emotion devel-
ops at the neural level of the brain.4 It
was also Panksepp who first proposed
that brain neurochemical research could
provide a window through to an under-
29
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
standing of emotion and from where it
Lesson 28 derives.
Neurochemical research across
species has demonstrated that, in both
animals and humans, all the core ‘prima-
ry’ emotions —rage, fear, the drive to
chase prey and curiosity—are centred in
an elemental ’paleo-mammalian’ part of
the brain. The amygdala, a tiny almond-
shaped portion of the brain, is part of the
limbic system, the seat of all emotions. It
is present not only in birds and mammals,
but also in more ‘primitive’ species such
as fish, reptiles and amphibians. The lim-
bic system helps us decide whether we
like or dislike something, and is also the
keeper of emotional memory.
Paul McLean, director of the
Laboratory of Brain Evolution and
Behavior in Poolesville, Maryland, first
carried out research showing that humans
and higher mammals have three brains:
the reptilian brain (all the autonomic
functions); the paleo-mammalian brain,
the limbic system; and the neo-mam-
malian brain, the core intellectual brain,
which has abstract thought, reasoning and
language.
Stimulating one part of the amygdala,
according to the work of neuroscientist
Joseph Le Doux, a professor at the Center
for Neural Science at New York
University, can cause a state of intense
fear; humans and rats with damage to this
portion of the brain are unable to feel fear,
even in appropriate circumstances.
According to Panksepp, aside from
the core emotions which sit in the more
primitive portion of the brain, the ‘higher
brain centres’ lie in the newer sections of
the brain, the ‘neo-mammalian’ cerebral
cortex. It is here that animals, like us
humans, develop sophisticated secondary
‘social’ emotions: separation distress;
sexual attraction and lust; social attach-
ment and bonding; and play.
These secondary emotions are the
more complicated variety as they require
reflection and choice—a weighing up of
the effects of different actions. Without
human speech, animals cannot prove to
us that they think the same way we do
about a certain situation. Nevertheless,
we do know that the brain biochemistry
connected with certain sophisticated
human feelings are found in a range of
other species, and that the same emotions
cause the same measurable chemical

Like a weasel
Naturalist essayist Annie Dillard, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek, writes of the moment she was sitting by a pond, and she and a weasel spied
each other:1
“Our eyes locked and someone threw away the key . . . It emptied our lungs. It felled
the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled
into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would
split and drop to our shoulders . . .
“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live . . . I don’t think I can learn from a wild
animal how to live in particular . . . but I might learn something of mindlessness, some-
thing of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or
motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at
the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he
should.”
To live like a weasel, she says, is to “stalk your calling in a single skilled and subtle
way”, to grasp the necessity in your life and “not let it go”.
1 Dillard A. Teaching a Stone to Talk. New York: Harper & Row, 1982

30

changes in the brain. Consequently,
Panksepp and others have inferred that
secondary emotion is not a uniquely
human trait.
As noted animal scientist Temple
Grandin says, the difference between ani-
mal and human emotions is a matter of
degree, rather than of kind.5
One of the areas that Panksepp has
studied in depth is animal joy as
expressed through play. In his own lab,
Panksepp has discovered that rats chirp
with joy and laugh when they are tick-
led—the same sound they make when
having sex. “I literally came into the lab
one morning and said, ‘Let’s go tickle
some rats’. Lo and behold, it sounded
like a playground.” Those rats repeatedly
tickled enjoyed themselves so much that
they bonded with the researchers.
Other scientists have discovered that
chimpanzees and dogs also have their
own variety of laughter, often outside the
range of human hearing. Researcher
Patricia Simonet, of the University of
Nevada in Reno, discovered that, to a
dog, a laugh is a sudden breathy forced
exhalation in a burst “like receiving the
Heimlich maneuver”, but which might
seem to the untrained ear like a normal
large pant. While researching the begin-
nings of human laughter, Robert Provine,
of the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in
Atlanta, found that play made chimps
laugh. The chimps’ brand of chuckling
was a mix of panting and grunting on
inward and outward breaths (as opposed
to our rat-ta-ta-tat outward breath ha-ha-
has)—and they would pant in excitement
when anticipating roughhousing.6 Pro-
vine also discovered that dog laughter
piped into a kennel dramatically reduced
stress, and caused the dogs to cheer up
and start playing.
Says Marc Bekoff, a professor in the
department of environmental, population
and organismic biology at the University
of Colorado in Boulder, and author of
The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable
Accounts of Animal Emotions (Random
House, Discovery Books, 2000):
“Animals at play are symbols of the
Animal
Energies
unfettered joy of life.”
Panksepp has also discovered that
Lesson 28
play has a serious social function: the
brain releases opiates in response to play,
and the frontal lobe of the brain grows in
response to the amount of play per-
formed. Play becomes a means of rein-
forcing social cohesion.
Similar studies of rats by Steven
Siviy, from Gettysburg College in
Pennsylvania, also shows that even when
rats are only anticipating play, their brain
shows an increase in dopamine activity.
They also chirp and pace with anticipato-
ry excitement.
Panksepp has demonstrated that when
you isolate rats and then have them re-
socialize with others, they increase their
level of play. Deprived of their social ties,
they increase play to increase their levels
of ‘feel-good’ chemicals in the brain.
Once they’ve satiated that chemical and
feel good enough about themselves, they
stop playing. They’ve reached, says
Panksepp, a saturation point in their need
for ‘social comfort’. Those little rat pups
deprived of play will engage in ‘catch-up’
play longer than their ordinary counter-
parts.
Panksepp believes that human chil-
dren also need hours of rough-and-tumble
play every day. Indeed, hyperactive and
disruptive children may simply be those
who are not allowed to play enough in
our increasingly isolated, competitive and
‘serious’ primary-school environment.
Ritalin and other drugs to control atten-
tion-deficit/hyperactivity disorder may
simply be chemically repressing the basic
drive for play. Panksepp found, in his
own studies with rats, that those with
smaller frontal lobes had attention-deficit,
and had increased levels of both hyper-
activity and playfulness. However, if
allowed to play enough, they developed
into normal animals.7, 8
Through this understanding comes a
moral obligation—to change the way we
treat them.
Jeffrey M. Masson, co-author (with
Susan McCarthy) of When Elephants
Weep: The Emotional lives of Animals
31
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
(Delta, 1996), takes this issue one stage
Lesson 28 further. “What are the implications of
finding that animals lead emotions lives?
Must we change our relationships with
them? Have we obligations to them? Is
testing products for humans on animals
defensible? Is experimentation on ani-
mals ethical? Can we confine them for
our edification? Kill them to cover, sus-
tain and adorn ourselves? Should we
cease eating animals who have complex
social lives, are capable of passionate
relations with one another and desperate-
ly love their children?9 And if we are
going to continue to eat them, aren’t we
morally obligated to only eat meat from
animals that have been humanely reared
and killed?
The most interesting aspect of animal
emotions is that it appears to activate or
charge an animal’s sixth sense. They
reserve their highest precognitive ability
for those they love, usually their owners.
Pets routinely are able to sense danger or
illness in their owners and will usually
attempt to save them (see Living the Field
Lesson Twenty-four).
But if dogs and cats have precognitive
ability through their emotions, it is likely
that other animals do, too. Biologist
Rupert Sheldrake believes that social
fields or groups facilitate the possibility

How to feel like a dog

! If you have a pet, observe it closely when playing—its sense of rough-and-tumble. If
you don’t have a pet, observe animals that are unfettered (dogs off a lead, animals in
the wild—not in a zoo) playing with each other
! Make notes of what they do: rolling over each other, their positions, their surprise
attacks
! Take time out every day to engage in a little unstructured play. If you have children,
engage in some rough-and-tumble with them
! While you’re playing, don’t think about winning. Animals tend to ‘self-handicap’, some-
times winning, sometimes purposefully allowing the other animal to win, to keep the
game going. The point is the game, not the outcome
! During these moments, keep your mind trained to the present. Try to feel the joy of
living in that very moment
! Take time to observe animals in social groups in parks and in wild land. When observ-
ing animals in the wild, attempt to make a connection with them, such as locking
eyes. Really observe every aspect of the animal and try to imagine what these animals
feel in those moments
! Lock into the necessity of the present (see box, page 26)
! Observe everything that happens, including your feelings, and write it all down in your
journal.
Jeffrey Masson says that he often attempts great imaginative leaps to imagine how crea-
tures very different from him might feel. “And sometimes, when I think I get it, when I can
suddenly begin to feel the same as my dogs, I can almost enter another world. I seem to
have no control of such moments. I like to believe that at these moments, my dogs and I
are feeling something very similar, something that escapes language entirely, and is
almost impossible to describe to another person. I feel a bit silly talking about it. Yet it
happens. And I cannot help feeling that it happens to my dogs, too. That creates a
special and deep bond. We are both creatures of feeling.”

32

of telepathic communication.
Perhaps our most important lesson as
beings tortured by choice and cognitive
reasoning is to learn from an animal’s
sense of holism and ability to live in the
moment. Unconditional love comes natu-
rally to a dog or cat; animals aren’t
ambivalent or repressed about their emo-
tions. As Grandin says, there is no such
thing as a love–hate relationship in the
animal kingdom. “If an animal loves you,
he loves you no matter what. He doesn’t
care what you look like or how much
money you make,” she says.5
“When animals are no longer colo-
nized and appropriated by us, we can
reach out to our evolutionary cousins,”
says Masson. “Perhaps then the ancient
hope for a deeper emotional connection
across the species barrier, for closeness
and participation in a realm of feelings,
now beyond our imagination, will be real-
ized.”
Lynne McTaggart
Animal
Energies
1 Pepperberg IM. The Alex Studies;
Cognitive and communicative Abilities
Lesson 28
of Grey Pa r r o t s. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999
2 Darwin C. The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals. London:
John Murray, 1872
3 Psychol Rev, 2003; 110: 389–94
4 Panksepp J. Affective Neuroscience:
The Foundations of Human and Animal
Emotions. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998
5 Grandin T. Animals in Translation. New
York: Scribners, 2005
6 Provine R. Laughter: A Scientific
Exploration. Viking, 2000
7 Dev Psychobiol, 1981; 14 (4): 327–32
8 Curr Dir Psychol Sci, 1998; 7 (3): 91–8
9 Masson JM, McCarthy S. W h e n
Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives
of Animals. New York: Dell Publishing,
1995
33
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies

34
LIVING THE FIELD
Gut hunches, good choices
Although we believe that the logical
portion of our brain guides us in mak -
ing future decisions, studies show that
humans, like animals, use emotions and
intuition to make decisions about the
f u t u re .
Animal
Energies
Lesson 29
Nevertheless, although Gage was to
all intents and purposes his old physical
self, his body appeared to be inhabited by
a totally different person.
Harlow, who maintained a keen inter-
est in Gage’s case, kept a careful record of
the fact that Gage appeared to no longer

O
ne of medicine’s great textbook have a connection between his intellectu-
cases concerns a 25-year-old al capacities and his ‘animal’ propensi-
railroad construction foreman ties. He was invariably socially inappro-
named Phineas P. Gage. [For a full priate and also appallingly profane, with
account, see Antonio R. Damasio’s book little regard for his fellows. He also
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and appeared to be utterly unable to plan any
the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/ future operation without vacillating or
Putnam, 1994]). Gage’s company, the changing his mind.
Rutland & Burlington Railroad, was lay- These new personality traits so dif-
ing new tracks across Vermont in the fered from the thoughtful and well-bal-
summer of 1848, and Gage was in charge anced character he’d displayed before the
of overseeing the controlled explosions accident that his employers were forced
used to blast through the layers of strati- to let him go. Afterwards, he invariably
fied rock covering the uneven terrain. For chose work that did not suit him: on horse
this exacting job, he’d had a special iron farms, as a stagecoach driver, even as a
bar made that was nearly four feet long, freak in a circus act. Unable to secure
an inch-and-a-half in diameter and weigh- steady employment for more than a few
ing more than 13 pounds. After a hole was months at a time, he, like many misfits of
drilled into the rock, and powder, a fuse the time, traveled to California, where he
and sand inserted, the job of the iron bar eventually died of an epileptic fit.
was to tamp down the sand, which con- More than 150 years later, this case
tains the explosion within the rock. fascinated Antonio Damasio, who’d long
One afternoon, a freak accident suspected that cool-headed reasoning did
occurred. Gage was distracted in the not produce intelligent choices unless
midst of what was usually a careful pro- there was an emotional component. And
cedure. On that occasion, he tamped in Gage had not only been incapable of
the powder, but without the sand in place. making good choices, but was also
The striking of the iron bar on the stone impelled to select situations for himself
caused a spark, which lit the fuse, and the that were downright disadvantageous.
entire explosion blew up in his face. As Damasio put it, Gage “worked
The force of the explosion sent the hard at his downfall”. Although his men-
iron bar up like a rocket through Gage’s tal skills for language, memory, percep-
left cheek, the base of his skull and the tion and intelligence had remained intact,
front of his brain and out the top of his somehow all his value judgments were
head. Gage was thrown to the ground but, seriously impaired. He’d been unable to
to the stunned members of his gang, he behave in an ethical manner, observe
was not only still alive, but also awake social conventions and, most important,
and able to speak coherently and to walk. make decisions that were advantageous to
Once he was taken to a local hotel, his his survival.
terrible gaping wounds were dressed by When Damasio and his wife Hanna
a young doctor named John Harlow and, reconstructed Gage’s brain and the route
two months later, he was completely of the tamping iron with the use of mod-
healed, suffering only the loss of one eye. ern neuroimaging technology, they dis-

35
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
covered that the iron rod sliced through
Lesson 29 what Damasio called the ‘ventromedial’
(or underbelly) region of the frontal lobe.
Damage to this area of the brain appeared
to be why Gage could not plan for the
future or successfully decide on the most
beneficial course of action for himself.
Gage had, in short, lost his ability to
act on a gut hunch.
Damasio, who suspected the current
neurological world view—that emotion
and reason operate from two entirely sep-
arate places in the brain—went on to
study a number of modern Gages. One of
his patients, a fellow called Elliot, who
was in his early 30s, was ordinary in
every regard, with a high IQ and good test
scores in all the standard neurological
assessments such as perception, memory,
ability to learn, and language and arith-
metic skills. The only distinguishing
characteristic was a tendency to be
detached and imperturbable, even in
potentially embarrassing situations.
Elliot had had a brain tumor and,
although it had been successfully
removed and he’d physically recovered,
like Gage before him, he had emerged
from his ordeal a changed person. He
seemed utterly unable to manage his time
or keep sight of an overall goal without
becoming hopelessly distracted or
obsessed with detail.
He also seemed unable to operate

Intuitive learning
Developing your intuition can be a learning process, just as it was with Bierman’s card
games. It’s also a matter of honoring the still, small voice in yourself that says to you:
“Don’t do that!” or “Go ahead and take a chance”.
You can teach yourself to listen to your gut hunches by:
! Slowing down. We rush about so much, using cognitive reasoning to steer us around,
that we often don’t have time to listen to our inner voice. When making a decision, mull
it over in your mind and see what comes up.
! Practicing. A tried-and-tested means of improving your intuition is to practice
guessing with a pack of cards. Keep the deck turned over, face down. Concentrate on
each card as you guess what it is. Say the first symbol that comes into your head. If
you wish, you can start off with just 10 cards, so you have less choice.
! Resisting analysis. When you receive an intuition, resist the urge to figure out what
it ‘means’. If a word pops up, write it down, but don’t try to determine its significance.
During a remote viewing session, when I was invited to ‘see’ an object hidden in
wrapping paper, I kept seeing an oval. My analytical mind kept thinking ‘pin’ because
I was wearing a brooch of a similar shape. However, suddenly the word ‘candy’ popped
into my head. I was in the US, where the term is used in place of ‘sweets’. Indeed, the
box contained an array of oval-shaped chocolates.
! Receiving through senses, not your analytical brain. Take the information and first
draw it. Noted remote viewer Ingo Swann tells his RV students that there are different
stages of receiving: in the first, you are aware of very basic outlines of shapes, which
grow in complexity over time. Begin by drawing the first idea that comes into your
mind. After a few moments, draw it again (you should have more information). A few
moments later, draw it again. Some minutes later, try constructing it in three dimension,
with clay.
! Following your gut hunches, no matter how irrational. If you get a strong impression
that you or someone else shouldn’t do something, listen to it.

36

within the ‘larger frame of behavior’ in
either home or business. He was inca-
pable of making reasoned decisions or
learning from them, which left his per-
sonal and professional life in tatters.
Eventually, his employment was termi-
nated and his marriage collapsed, and he
was left in the care of a relative.
Damasio finally put two and two
together. As with Gage, portions of
Elliot’s frontal lobes relating to emotion
had been destroyed by the brain surgery.
He was incapable of having any sort of
emotional response to any aspect of his
life. He might hear a pleasurable piece of
music, understand it intellectually, but be
unable to actually feel the pleasure from
it. As Damasio described it, Elliot “could
know but not feel”.
From cases like these, Damasio began
to suspect that reduced emotion has a cen-
tral role in inhibiting the ability to make
sound decisions about the future. In cases
like Elliot or Gage, the loss of the emo-
tional center of the frontal lobes robs
someone of their gut hunches. When
faced with logic alone, people invariably
make the wrong decision.
To test this, Damasio gave Elliot a
popular psychology test called the
Gambling Test. In this test, which imi-
tates ordinary gambling, a subject is
given $2000 to gamble with and four
decks of cards. Certain cards, which are
‘wins’, result in the gambler being paid
money. Others, deemed ‘losses’, require
the gambler to pay the experimenters a
fine.
In this instance (as with most tests),
two of the decks—decks A and B—had
been stacked so that Elliot would get high
wins, but also high losses. Similarly,
decks C and D were laced with small
wins and small losses.
Ordinarily, a normal person will begin
to get a bad feeling about the first two
decks, and his gut hunch will tell him to
avoid it. But, with Elliot, he ended up los-
ing, attracted to decks A and B for the
high wins, but unable to feel that he was
losing all his money with them.
Many animal behaviorists have dis-
Animal
Energies
covered that animals primarily operate on
the gut hunch, using their emotions to
Lesson 29
predict the future. As animal trainer
Temple Grandin says: “Emotions don’t
just give you motivations; they give you
information—information about the
future and what you need to do about it.”1
Animals use their gut hunches—usu-
ally their fear—to guide their actions.
Most animals are gifted with an innate
sense of fear which accompanies an acute
sense of ‘close-up’ smell so that, if they
smell that a predator has been nearby,
their accompanying fear helps them get to
a safe haven quickly. Other evidence
shows that animals have instinctive rather
than learned fears, such as a fear of
heights or of predators to their species.
Perhaps most significantly, the gut
hunches of both animals and humans
appear to improve with experience: our
intuition is intertwined with our experi-
ence. When the Damasios attempted their
card game with normal subjects, they dis-
covered that their participants were learn-
ing to predict from the situation. Their
hunches were anticipating what would be
good or not for the future. But with par-
ticipants whose frontal lobes had been
damaged, there were no such anticipatory
responses.2
Although Damasio does not under-
stand how this predictive capability
develops, he believes that it arises out of
some non-conscious estimate of success
and failure that improves with time.
However, parapsychologists suspect
that intuition arises from information not
contained within the boundaries of time
and space. Dutch psychologist Dick
Bierman has also been keenly interested
in whether our bodies predict bad news.
To test this hypothesis, he used the
Gambling Test, but wired up his partici-
pants with skin-conductance devices that
measure ‘fight-or-flight’ responses. He
discovered that, as the game went on, his
participants became more stressed a few
moments before they selected a bad card.
Although they didn’t show such predic-
tive ability at first, this ability increased
as they got further into the game. Their
37
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
ability to receive a gut hunch improved
Lesson 29 with time.3
As with animals, many of our emo-
tions may be unconscious, picking up
information without our cognitive aware-
ness. According to Joseph LeDoux, of
New York University, fear travels to the
conscious part of the brain slowly, and to
the unconscious part (the more primitive
amygdala) in a few milliseconds. This has
an obvious survival advantage. You run
away from something potentially danger-
ous before you take the time to work out
in your frontal lobes whether it actually
poses a threat.
Many of the emotions that form our
gut hunches could be operating similarly,
so that we are recipients of two types of
information flow—’low-road’ uncon-
scious information to the amygdala, and
38
conscious ‘high road’ cognitive informa-
tion to the neocortex. It may be that our
unconscious intuition is constantly
receiving sensory and intuitive data that
our ‘sensible’ neocortex dismisses.
Unlike animals, which act on their own
highly specific unconscious fears forever,
unless desensitized, humans often ignore
these unconscious warning signals at their
peril.
Lynne McTaggart
1 Grandin T. Animals in Translation. New
York: Scribners, 2005
2 Soc Neurosci, 1993; 19: 791
3 Bierman DJ. Anomalous aspects of
intuition. Presented at the Fo u r t h
Biennial European Meeting of the
Society for Scientific Exploration,
Valencia, Spain, 9–11 October 1998
LIVING THE FIELD
Curiosity won’t kill the cat
Next in our series on animal emotions
and wholism, we explore how animals
e x p ress their joie de vivre thro u g h
curiosity, and what we can learn from it
about ourselves and the further devel -
opment of our psychic abilities.
A
ll I need to do is to walk toward
the drawer where my dog Ollie’s
lead is kept, and he will begin
barking and springing up three feet in the
air. Although he spends much of his time
content to slump at the top of the stairs,
the very thought of having his walk sud-
denly animates him with a joy almost
beyond description. It isn’t even the actu-
al walk that’s good. It’s the very thought
of it. The sheer anticipation of it. It’s so
good that he can taste it.
According to Dr Jaak Panksepp,
Professor Emeritus of Psychobiology at
Bowling Green State University in Ohio
and currently Head of A ff e c t i v e
Neuroscience Research at the Chicago
Institute for Neurosurgery and Neuro-
research, Ollie’s anticipatory joy has all
to do with the ‘seeking’ mode of his brain.
Panksepp has spent more than three
decades studying the physiological mech-
anisms of the so-called primitive emo-
tions in mammalian brains. He’s identi-
fied five such emotions that humans share
with many members of the animal king-
dom.1 They include the:
! SEEKING system (expectancy/
seeking out things)
! RAGE system (anger/rage)
! FEAR system (fear/anxiety)
! CARE system (maternal care/
nurturing)
! PANIC system (separation and
need of care)
! PLAY system (roughhousing play
and general joy).
The seeking system helps animals to
search or investigate, and also to work out
the meaning of their environment. It’s
powered by a variety of stimuli: hunger,
thirst, sexual arousal or thermal bal-
ance—the need for food, water, shelter, a
Animal
Energies
Lesson 30
mate—most of which the animal must
satisfy to stay alive.
The role of curiosity
But the most vital element—the most
emotionally arresting part—is the jour-
ney, not the arrival: it’s the hunt, not the
catch. It is being interested in having a
snoop or a sniff around, being intensely
engaged in the search or the puzzle, or
being curious about something new.
The seeking circuits are fully engaged
when an animal is involved in high antic-
ipation, intense interest or insatiable
curiosity. It’s being fully present and
engaged in life.2
Animals as well as humans have a
profound need to sniff out not only what
they need in life, but also the novel. What
is mostly pleasurable is the curiosity
about and anticipation of exactly what
they will find. Scientists like Panksepp
have carried out electrical stimulation of
the brain to determine exactly where
seeking fires in the brain. They’ve dis-
covered that when animals are curious,
the hypothalamus lights up and the neuro-
transmitter dopamine is produced.
In the past, the scientific community
believed that dopamine was a feel-good
chemical, and that it was the release of the
chemical itself that was pleasurable.
More recently, however, researchers are
beginning to discover the reverse: the
purpose of the neurochemical is to light
up a certain portion of neurocircuitry.
What actually feels good is the activation
of the seeking part of the brain.
On the whole, wild animals have a
more active seeking-circuit than ordinary
domesticated animals. This is likely due
to the fact that wild animals have to use
their wits about them, and maintain a high
level of curiosity for hunting and foraging
to keep themselves alive, whereas domes-
tic animals like Ollie are limited to dig-
ging and foraging just for the fun of it.
Nevertheless, even when survival is not at
stake, mammals of any sort maintain a
fascination with the new.
39
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
Another interesting discovery of
Lesson 30 Panksepp’s shows that the seeking por-
tion of the brain stops firing once the ani-
mal has found food or water. Animals
have been hardwired to enjoy the forag-
ing and the hunt so that they will carry on
doing so until they get what they need to
survive. They find it physically pleasur-
able to be curious so they will persist in
looking, even when the going gets tough.
This evidence has its own parallels
with human needs. Our own hunting and
gathering instincts are no longer impor-
tant for survival, but we have retained our
love of the hunt, whether it concerns
investigating a mystery, having a good
nose around a shop or flea market, study-
ing new ideas or projects, or even prob-
lem-solving. This impulse may even be
behind our obsession with detective yarns
and ‘whoddunits’.
Indeed, a sense of curiosity may be
essential to a long and healthy life.
Science has also confirmed that an endur-
ing sense of curiosity is one of the most
vital elements of longevity. In one five-
year study of more than 1000 men over
age 70, a sense of curiosity was the most
significant determinant of survival, irre-
spective of diet and lifestyle. When the
study examined women of the same age,
curiosity was found to be the most vital
factor in their survival as well.3 A love of
the hunt may also be involved in a sense
of purpose, evidently a mainstay of
healthy old age.
One retrospective study examined 17
American Civil War nurses, including
Louisa Mae Alcott, Dorothea Dix and
Clara Barton, all of whom lived to a ripe
old age. Although the study revealed that
social ties, marital status, religion and a
sense of altruism contributed to their sur-
vival, the most important attribute that
they all shared was their curiosity: a pio-
neering spirit that remained perpetually
fascinated by the new.4
One of Panksepp’s important findings
is the location of the brain’s seeking
mode. The hypothalamus has been known
as ‘the brain of the brain’. It is the brain’s
central hub for the body’s autonomic reg-
ulatory activities—such as the endocrine
and cardiovascular systems, temperature,
hormonal levels and metabolism. But it is
also thought to be the center of the

Kept alive by natural curiosity

The ‘seeking’ circuit described by Panksepp is located in the hypothalamus of the
limbic system, the seat of primitive emotions. It also contains the so-called ‘low-road’
primitive emotions, described by New York University’s Joseph LeDoux as those that help
an animal to immediately assess whether a situation is to be feared and avoided before
the slower, but more accurate, analytical neocortex determines whether the situation
represents a true risk (see Living the Field Lesson Twenty-eight). This area of the brain also
houses the more primitive areas of the ‘gut hunch’.
Some of the latest brain research by Richard Davidson, at the University of Wisconsin,
on Buddhist monks confirms that the brain is highly plastic. Portions change and grow
according to how often they are activated. Meditators who spend a great deal of time
focused on a mantra or on their breathing can expand that portion of the brain dealing with
highly focused attention.1
By the same token, if you work on areas that heighten your curiosity, you can also
reinforce and strengthen the neural circuitry relating to anticipation and your own gut
hunches. So, you will not only be sniffing out new things, but be relatively good at
anticipating what you will find.
1 Psychosom Med, 2003; 65: 564–70

40

‘mind–body’ connection, helping to inte-
grate feelings into a cohesive response. It
is the home of the pineal gland and the
limbic system, as well as the portion of
the brain most involved with picking up
magnetic signals from external sources
(see Living The Field Lesson Two), and
with gut hunches and forecasting.
It may well be that one good way of
developing your psychic hunches is to
maintain a healthy sense of curiosity
about the new. As Bob Dylan once said,
“An artist must always be in a state of
becoming’. This may just as well apply to
life.
Lynne McTaggart
Animal
Energies
1 Panksepp J. The anatomy of emotions,
in Plutchik R, ed. Emotion: Theory,
Lesson 30
Research and Experience, Vol. III.
Biological Foundations of Emotions.
New York: Academic Press, 1986:
91–124
2 Panksepp J. The neurobiology of emo-
tions: Of animal brains and human feel-
ings, in Manstead T, Wagner H, eds.
Handbook of Ps y c h o p h y s i o l o g y.
Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons,
1989: 5–26
3 Psychol Ageing, 1996; 11: 449–53
4 Nurs Forum, 1991; 26 (1): 9–16
41
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
Lesson 30

Curiouser and curiouser

To expand your natural sense of curiosity (and that part of your brain):
! Engage in frequent ‘hunting’. Human hunting includes attending car-boot sales, flea
markets, auctions, trade fairs—where buying activity encourages you to ‘snoop’
around.
! Solve problems for fun. Crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, Sudoku—all engage
that portion of the brain that tries to work out what happens next.
! Watch or read ‘whodunnits’ or thrillers. Perhaps more than any other form of story-
telling, this type of reading or movies focuses entirely on ‘what happens next’ or who
is responsible.
! Keep abreast of the ‘new’. Curiosity is about fascination with novelty. It doesn’t have
to include new things. Keep involved in what is new on the political and cultural scene.
! Avoid routine. Don’t get stuck in a rut: study a new subject, take a new course, try
new recipes, go to new shows, walk new ways to work or put up a new curtain in your
living room.
! Investigate a new area in your town. Look at details. Actively dig out details of its
history, its buildings, their occupants and businesses.
! Hunt for answers. Set yourself an intellectual problem and seek out the answer to it.
! Be nosy. If you’re curious about something, don’t dismiss it as unimportant. Track it
down, look into it, find out about it.
! Learn to listen. Be genuinely curious about colleagues and friends. Ask questions
about their lives.
! Be curious about the big questions. Do some scientific or philosophical searching
into the meaning of life and life’s other big conundrums.
! Revel in the anticipation of things. If something good happens, notice if you felt
excited beforehand. Try to tease out what you were excited about. Notice how you
were feeling. When that feeling comes again, learn to rely upon it.
! Notice when you are apprehensive. Learn to recognize when you are feeling wary of
something. What does it feel like? See if you were right to suspect a certain situation.
When that feeling comes again, listen to it.

42
LIVING THE FIELD
Kindness in the animal kingdom
Animal behaviorists have long arg u e d
that animals only act out of survival
s e l f - i n t e rest. However, new evidence
shows that animals have higher senses
of compassion and altru i s m — w h i c h
humans would do well to learn fro m .
N
eo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins
has argued that only humans
make the ‘error’ of true altru-
ism—acting for a higher purpose, such as
a caring for the well being of others.
Animals, he has said, are merely ‘robot
survival machines’ shaped by the survival
imperative of their genes.1
According to this view, animals only
demonstrate altruistic behavior when car-
ing for their young, or living in a large
pack or herd. Otherwise, animals have no
capacity for compassion or generosity of
spirit. As Woody Allen puts it, the world
is one large cafeteria: eat or be eaten.
The definition of ‘altruism’ is the very
opposite of this survival imperative. It is
to act unselfishly out of a concern for the
needs or interests of others, regardless of
personal consequences. Indeed, in many
instances, the path of altruism can be at
personal risk, or deleterious to the self.
With animals, altruism can reduce their
possibility of survival. Altruism, one
could argue, is ultimately an act of self-
destruction.
We have labored under the delusion
that we are the only species capable of
nobility of action—of grace under pres-
sure. But animal champions such as
Jeffrey Masson have amassed hundreds
of astonishing cases demonstrating that
animals routinely engage in what Gloria
Steinem once referred to as ‘random acts’
of self-sacrifice, compassion, courage
and generosity toward members of their
own species, members of other species
and even toward humans, often to their
own detriment.2
Although Masson’s work has been
discounted as anecdotal, the hundreds of
individual case studies compound into a
convincing argument that animals are
Animal
Energies
Lesson 31
capable of extraordinary self-sacrifice.
Animals routinely evidence moments
in which they put aside the most funda-
mental drive of all: the need to eat. In
innumerable instances, Masson and
McCarthy have discovered instances
where animals have shared food or
ensured that weaker individuals in a pack
or herd be fed, even if it means giving up
their own food. This occurs even in
species like red foxes, known for their
jealously guarding of their own catch.
Indeed, Masson recounts the story of
Tatu, a mongoose, whose paw had been
injured in a fight and so was unable to
fight. The other mongooses in her pack
began foraging close to her, so that she’d
have more food and even gave up some of
their daily food to her.
I have seen this impulse close to
home. I am fascinated by the relationship
between my dog Ollie and my next door
neighbor’s diminutive Affenpinscher
bitch, ironically named ‘T-bone’. When
Ollie gets fresh bones, he will occasional-
ly shove one under our fence for T-bone.
Redolent of Lady and the Tramp, he only
raids our rubbish bin when she is visiting,
offering her a chicken carcass to feast on.
When she is at our house, Ollie gives her
unfettered access to—indeed, first shot
at—his own food bowl, his pig’s ears, his
toys and water. She’s smaller than he is,
but when he plays with her, he’ll often let
her win just to keep her in the game.
The fascinating aspect of this is the
fact that T-bone is neutered, and Ollie is
not. This is not a potential mate for him.
There is nothing he will gain by these acts
of kindness—no survival benefit, no
preservation of the family line. T-bone is
simply and truly Ollie’s greatest friend,
and he loves her with a passion entirely
akin to human love between two insepa-
rable buddies. She brings out the altruist
in him.
Masson has uncovered numerous
instances where animals will give up
more than their food bowl. In times of
danger, animals routinely rescue mem-
43
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
bers of their own species—often at dan-
Lesson 31 ger to themselves. For instance, he
describes a pack of wild dogs that had
chased off a herd of zebra and had sur-
rounded a mare, foal and yearling. They
were beginning to attack the mare (to get
to their ultimate target, the foal), when
some 10 zebras suddenly galloped into
the scene, created a protective fence
around the three threatened members of
their pack, and rushed away with them.
These rescue attempts also occur with
unrelated species. Masson tells the story
of an elephant who repeatedly attempted
to rescue a rhino calf that was stuck in
deep mud during the rainy season in
Kenya. The elephant repeatedly attempt-
ed a rescue, even at its own expense,
since the calf’s mother, misinterpreting
the elephant’s interest, charged whenever
he got near her offspring.
Some of the most extreme instances
of altruism concern examples of animals
adopting other, unrelated animals. In one
study, notes Masson, African researchers
rounded up a batch of young baboons and
set them free in foreign territory. Before
long, all the babies had been adopted by
the adult male baboons, which lovingly
cared for them, exhibiting typical mater-
nal-like behaviour.3
Most astonishing of all, he says, are
the many instances of one species adopt-
ing another. In one extraordinary study
carried out in the 1930s, a group of
researchers presented a mother rat with
unrelated rat pup after rat pup. She went
on to mother 58 adopted pups in all. The
researchers then offered a group of moth-
er rats a smorgasbord of infants: mice,
rabbits and kittens. The mother rats read-
ily adopted the mice. If they were strong
enough, they’d drag back the baby rabbits
to their cages. They even gamely attempt-
ed to nurse the kittens, shoving them
repeatedly into position—without suc-
cess. Kittens are used to suckling while
lying down, unlike rat pups, which nurse
standing up.
The rats even tried to grab a pair of
bantam chicks by the scruff of the neck
and drag them to their nests, although the
chicks became so agitated they had to
abandon this particular adoption.4
Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs
That Know When their Owners are
Coming Home and Other Unexplained
Powers of Animals (Hutchinson, 1999),
has over 200 cases in his growing data-
base of what can only be described as ani-
mal empathy and compassion toward
humans. In hundreds of cases, humans

Does intention require altruism?

One of the great debates among the various schools of enlightenment concerns whether
altruism is a precondition for extended human potential. In other words, will your Field
effects greater telepathy or precognition, your directed intentions—be equally successful
regardless of whether you are trying to help another or make more money?
A number of schools of thought claim that a sense of higher purpose isn’t necessary.
Most modern self-empowerment gurus concentrate on personal self-empowerment: using
visualization, say, to get yourself a parking space.
However, the work of John Diamond offers proof that the life energy of a person is
raised when they focus on an altruistic purpose—what he calls ‘aspiration’. Furthermore,
the most profound cases of telepathy—say, between a mother and child—involve situa-
tions where someone is in need (see Living the Field Lesson Twenty-six). Indeed, a large
study of successful healers found that they worked best if they were able to shift away
from their own ego and allow a greater force in.1 It may be that animals have an instinc-
tive sense of this greater force, which they see in all other living creatures.
1 J Am Soc Psychical Res, 1992; 86: 99–133

44

describe their pets as instinctively know-
ing that they need comforting, particular-
ly when they are ill. Cats that are inde-
pendent and routinely prowl at night will
sacrifice their own independence if their
owners are sad or unwell.
One of the few instances where an
animal displays human language involves
Koko, a gorilla raised to employ human
sign language. One day, her trainer indi-
cated to Koko that she had indigestion: a
‘sick stomach’. Koko, who would be
given orange juice to cure her digestive
complaints, signed back ‘stomach you
orange’ and later indicated that she could
get it out of the refrigerator. Only after
Koko had been assured that the trainer
felt better would she take some for her-
self. Nearly a fortnight later, when the
trainer returned and offered Koko some
juice, the gorilla again would not take it
until she’d been convinced that her train-
er had fully recovered.
Sheldrake’s database contains numer-
ous instances where animals have acted
as therapists. Chad, a Golden Retriever,
routinely visits a hospice in England. He
instinctively spends the most time with
the patients who are the most ill, and will
sit with his head on their lap or on the
bed. In one case where the woman was
dying, he stood for three hours by her
bedside, his head next to hers, until she
had passed on.
In a number of Sheldrake’s case stud-
ies, animals have prevented their owners
from committing suicide. In one instance,
a woman living in the North of England
with terrible marital troubles decided to
overdose on paracetamol. Although her
English Springer Spaniel William had
been left sleeping in front of the fire, he
suddenly bolted up, jumped in front of
her pills and water in hand and started
snarling, even baring his teeth. Frightened
by this fiercesome aggression, which
she’d never seen before in her dog, the
woman replaced the bottle and sat down
on the sofa, after which William jumped
up on her and began frantically licking
her face.
One of the most astonishing of
Animal
Energies
Masson’s cases concerns Gilly, a Border
Collie. A trained signal dog, she had been
Lesson 31
adopted by the family to assist the father,
and had arrived just a few months before
the birth of the family’s second child. The
evening of the baby’s first night home,
Gilly frantically woke the mother, run-
ning back and forth between her bed and
the baby’s cot. When the mother investi-
gated, she discovered that the baby had
turned blue and stopped breathing due to
mucus clogging his airways. She cleared
away the mucus and the baby’s breathing
was restored.
Of course, the Dawkins’-eye view of
the universe would argue that altruism is
impossible among animals that are not
closely related as it runs counter to sur-
vival. He even offers a ‘cost–benefit’
equation that calculates the point at which
it becomes genetically advantageous for
an animal to display altruism.
However, this reductive arg u m e n t
falls down in the face of many examples
from Masson’s and Sheldrake’s files,
which describe assistance by unrelated
animals for no apparent self-serving pur-
pose.
In these instances, the animal often
risked its own life to save another’s. What
they demonstrate is a being with an
exquisite sensitivity for the sanctity of
life and a will to preserve the living—in
whatever form it has. This would suggest
a sense of humility in the face of the life
force that we would do well to learn from.
Although, on the other hand, other
examples can be found of what appears to
us to be senseless cruelty among animals,
such instances are hardly on a scale akin
to that of what humans do to other
humans.
Considering that the structure of our
lives—our schooling, our businesses, our
societies and countries—are entirely
based on ‘me-first competition’, which
evolves from a sense of separateness, it
could be argued that animals more often
act from a sense of higher purpose than
we do.
Lynne McTaggart
45
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
1 Dawkins R. The Selfish Gene. Oxford:
Lesson 31 Oxford University Press, 1976
2 Masson JM, McCarthy S. W h e n
Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives
of Animals. New York: Dell Publishing,
1995
3 Kummer H. Social Organization of
Hamadryas Baboons: A Field Study.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968
4 Wiesner BP, Sheard NM. M a t e r n a l
Behavior in the Rat. E d i n b u r g h ,
London: Oliver & Boyd, 1933

46
LIVING THE FIELD
When animal minds get together
In the animal community, telepathy is a
normal means of communication and
helps the pack or herd coordinate its
activities. Their ESP relies upon an
exquisite sensitivity to their feelings
and senses, which we humans would do
well to emulate.
O
ne of the most well-attested psy-
chic phenomena is telepathy—
mind-to-mind communication
over a distance. It’s also fairly common.
Most of us have had the experience of
knowing who’s on the other end of the
line as soon as the telephone rings, and
there are literally thousands of cases of
people ‘knowing’ that someone has died,
or is in trouble, long before the actual
news reaches them. So, if humans are
capable of telepathy, what about animals?
On the face of it, there is even better
reason for animals to be telepathic than
humans. After all, their normal communi-
cation system is limited to vocalizations
(calls), smells and simple visual signals,
so it’s apparently much less sophisticated
than human language. Many animals, too,
move about in herds, packs or flocks, so it
would make sense for them to have devel-
oped a range of ways to communicate
among themselves, particularly in an
emergency.
Eighty years ago, Canadian naturalist
Dr William Long studied the behavior of
caribou deer in some detail, and observed
that caribou herds can sometimes com-
municate danger without using calls, fear
movements or other obvious signals. He
tells the story of how he came across a
wounded deer that had become separated
from the herd, and startled it. The animal
made no sound, but he noticed that the
rest of the herd, which was a good mile
away, instantly reacted and fled “as if the
deer had rung a bell for them”.1
Long also did tests with birds. Out in
the wild, he laid down bird food and
watched what happened. He noticed that
as soon as the first birds had found the
food, others quickly arrived on the scene.
Animal
Energies
Lesson 32
On the face of it, that was unsurprising, as
the new arrivals might easily have been
able to see and perhaps even hear their
fellow birds pecking and feeding.
But what intrigued Long was that rel-
atively rare species of birds, which he
knew were unlikely to be in the vicinity,
would also come down to feed again,
very soon after the first birds had located
the food. This led Long to carry out a
whole series of observations, scattering
food at random times and places.
Throughout these tests, he saw the same
pattern. He concluded that feeding birds
send out “a silent food call” that is “felt
by other starving birds at a distance
beyond all possible range of sight or hear-
ing”.1
Some experts think horses are also are
telepathic. The close relationship between
riders and their horses is well known, and
often involves silent communication.
Indeed, the celebrated British horse train-
er Harry Blake was convinced that horses
connect with each other that way, too, and
devised a number of experiments to prove
it. He arranged for two horses that knew
each other well to be separated, and fed
only one of them. Although totally out of
sight or hearing, the unfed horse would
instantly react by becoming excited and
demanding food itself.
Blake carried out 24 such tests, vary-
ing the pairs of horse ‘friends’ and the
feeding times, and saw the same telepath-
ic behavior in all but three pairs of hors-
es. These results led Blake to believe that
horses have this innate telepathic ability
because they are herd animals. “If one
part of the herd should be frightened by
the appearance of a predator, the rest of
the herd can be alerted by ESP,” he said,
having witnessed such extrasensory per-
ception in action when herds are widely
scattered. “Horses will first become dis-
turbed, then prick up their ears, and start
to move away from the area”.2
Blake’s experiments appear to suggest
that horses, like humans, need a bond of
kinship or friendship for telepathy to
47
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
occur. But what about other animals?
Lesson 32 Rabbits don’t go about in herds, but they
do establish communities by building
burrows close to each other. So telepathic
communication might be of benefit to
them, too. The first, rather brutal, experi-
ments to test this idea were reportedly
done by the Russians in the 1960s. Baby
rabbits were taken down into submarines
while their mothers remained on dry land,
wired up to brain and heart monitors. The
baby bunnies were then killed. It was
found that the mothers had stress reac-
tions at the precise time of death of their
offspring, providing strong evidence of a
telepathic link. As an aside, the fact that
there was telepathic communication from
deep inside a submarine shows that the
telepathic ‘signal’ cannot be electromag-
netic, like a radiowave, as radio signals
are totally blocked by seawater—as well
as, of course, by metal submarine hulls.3
Other, less distressing, experiments
with rabbits have recently been done by
French biologist René Péoc’h. He tested
telepathy between sibling rabbits that had
been brought up with each other, and
compared them with rabbits that were

What can we learn from animal telepathy?

Experts such as Dr Sheldrake think telepathy is widespread in the animal kingdom (that
means us humans, too), having evolved primarily as a means of group, community or
herd support. What animal telepathy teaches us is that there are simpler, deeper ways to
communicate with our fellow beings than just language.
To become better extrasensory communicators, it’s vital that we understand the signs
around us and also that we give out the right signals.
Telepathy means feeling at a distance. To develop our extrasensory skills, we need to
become exquisitely sensitive to our feelings and trust our intuitive senses, just as animals
do. We also need to cultivate our ability to tune into particulars. Remember, animals are
cognitive ‘splitters’, not ‘lumpers’ (see Living the Field Lesson Twenty-three) and so are
especially good at noticing detail.
! Know your feelings in every situation. Are you feeling especially good or bad about
a situation? At ease or uncomfortable? Is it the people you’re with or the situation itself?
To find out more about what most affects you, mentally divide the situation into com-
ponent parts, and test out your feelings for each component. Ask yourself in each
instance: how does X make me feel?
! Study the particulars. In any given situation, imagine you are a detective and that you
have to memorize the room. Examine every detail: the environment; the particulars of
scenery or furniture; if indoors, the people or animals there. Resist your mind’s ten-
dency to fill in the details of an experience into a totality. Zero in on specific things—a
vase in a room, a picture on the wall—and study every detail. ‘Feel’ these component
parts.
! Listen with your five senses. Pay attention to the smell, taste and kinaesthetic feel of
a situation, not just the visual and auditory information.
! Cultivate empathy for others. Slow down and learn how to listen to others and to
feel their feelings. After all, sympathy and empathy are telepathy’s soul mates.
! Read body language. When you speak to people, examine what else they’re trying to
tell you besides the words.
! Pay attention to intuitive communication. When you have a ‘gut hunch’ or an inter-
nal message pops into your head, respect it and act on it.

48

strangers to each other. For the experi-
ment, he separated these animals into
pairs, and gave a mild stress to one rabbit
inside a soundproofed cage, while moni-
toring the other. He observed a corre-
sponding empathetic stress reaction
among the sibling rabbits outside the
cage—typically about three seconds after
the initial stress on the sibling. In con-
trast, there was no such reaction between
rabbits that were strangers to each other.4
Dogs, too, seem to be telepathically in
touch with each other. Dr Rupert
Sheldrake, the biologist who has pio-
neered studies into telepathic communi-
cation between dogs and their owners,
has collected a number of examples of the
psychic bonds between dogs themselves.
For instance, there is the case of the nine-
month-old Labrador that uncharacteristi-
cally went off its food and fell silent for a
whole day. The owner was puzzled until
he received a phone call informing him
that the dog’s mother, which lived 100
miles away, had been run over and killed
that very day. Another owner reported
how one of her two Burmese dogs sud-
denly started howling at the very time its
companion was being put to sleep at the
vet’s.5
“Telepathy may be widespread within
the animal kingdom,” says Sheldrake. “I
think it’s a natural ability of animal
groups, to communicate with each other.
It’s a normal means of animal communi-
cation.”6
Sheldrake believes that telepathy has
evolved in groups of animals that are
bonded with each other. It is not “para-
normal”, he maintains. It’s just one more
sensory mechanism to help the group
coordinate its activities. It usually occurs
among closely related animals, but he
believes a form of telepathy is also used
by animals that move together in large
numbers, such as birds or fish.
Nature has many visual marvels, but
among the most spectacular is the phe-
nomenon of schools of fish or flocks of
birds moving in perfect synchrony. Take
this poetic, but accurate, description of a
flock of starlings by British naturalist
Animal
Energies
Edmund Selous in the 1930s: “Each mass
of them turned, wheeled, reversed the
Lesson 32
order of their flight, changed in one shim-
mer from brown to gray, from dark to
light, as though all the individuals com-
posing them had been component parts of
an individual organism.”7
Selous spent 30 years studying flock
behavior in birds, and concluded that
“rapid thought transference” was the only
explanation for a phenomenon he saw as
the product of “simultaneous collective
thinking”.
In his groundbreaking book on animal
telepathy, Sheldrake has added an impor-
tant extra refinement with the introduc-
tion of the concept of information fields.
Using the benefits of modern high-speed
film evidence, he has been able to point
out that the twists and turns of a flock of
birds are not, as Selous believed, simulta-
neous, but more like an extremely fast
wave, which can propagate itself from
bird to bird in just 15-thousandths of a
second.
How do the birds do it? Crucially,
ground-based tests have proved that the
reaction times of birds just aren’t that fast,
so they can’t be responding to the move-
ments of their nearest neighbor. Shel-
drake suggests that the birds’ behavior
may be being governed by what he calls a
‘morphic field’ (‘morphic’ simply means
‘form-shaping’). He likens it to a magnet-
ic field, where its lines of force govern the
position of any iron filings scattered
around a magnet.
Perhaps the most spectacular example
of a field effect is with schools of fish—
especially small ones. Like birds, groups
of many hundreds of fish can twist and
turn through the water as if they were a
single organism. But it’s when they are
being attacked that they behave in a truly
breathtaking way.
Schools of fish have two typical
defenses against predators. In one, the
whole group may suddenly split into two,
and then reform again behind the preda-
tor. The second is even more dramatic, as
it looks like a bomb bursting or a firework
exploding. Each fish will suddenly dart at
49
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
high speed out away from the center of
Lesson 32 the group.
The rapidity of the effect is stagger-
ing, with the whole ‘flash expansion’, as
it is called, typically taking just one-fifti-
eth of a second. And although the fish are
traveling at very high speed, they don’t
collide with each other; each fish seems
to know where it is in the school and the
relative positions of its neighbors. As
Sheldrake points out, “the behavior has
no simple explanation in terms of sensory
information from neighboring fish
because it happens far too fast for nerve
impulses to move from the eye to the
brain and then from the brain to the mus-
cles”.
Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields
predated his studies of telepathy, but he
now believes that the two are intimately
connected. “My own theory is that mem-
bers of groups have what I call a ‘morphic
feeling’ that links them together, a field
phenomenon,” he says. “Members of ani-
mal groups, when they go apart, remain
connected through this field that stretch-
es, rather than breaks, and one can com-
municate with the other, telepathically.
The nature of this field is, in fact,
quite close to a phenomenon well known
50
in quantum physics called ‘non-locality,’
where particles that are part of the same
system, when they move apart, retain a
non-local connection.”6
Tony Edwards
TV producer Tony Edwards is also a
freelance writer specializing in leading-
edge alternative medical and scientific
re s e a rch
1 Long WJ. How Animals Talk. New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1919
2 Blake H. Talking with Horses: A Study of
Communication Between Man and
Horse. London: Souvenir Press, 1975
3 Ostrander S, Schroeder L. Ps y c h i c
Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1970
4 Fond Odier Psycho-Phys Bull, 1997; 3:
25–8
5 Sheldrake R. Dogs That Know When
Their Owners are Coming Home and
Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.
London: Hutchinson, 1999
6 The Telepathy Debate. Royal Society of
Arts, London, 15 January 2004
7 Selous E. T h o u g h t-Transference (or
What?) in Birds. London: Constable,
1931
LIVING THE FIELD
Riding therapy: healing on horseback
When people think of animal-assisted
t h e r a p y, they think of dolphins or
domestic creatures like dogs. However,
as every equestrian knows, horses share
a special affinity with their riders.
Studies have shown that regular contact
with horses can develop cognitive abil -
ities, and help the physically and learn -
ing disabled.
I
was on a two-week holiday with my
family to Bergen in Norway in the
summer of 1993. We were staying
with some close friends, and their house
backed onto a stables and riding school.
My daughter Laura, then six years old,
was very eager to see the horses and I was
very happy to accompany her. The holi-
day couldn’t have been better timed
because I had been enduring particularly
high levels of stress in my mental-health
work. I was exhausted and looking for-
ward to de-stressing in the peace and tran-
quility of the Norwegian fjords. The idea
of visiting the stables had a similar
appeal. Spending time with some horses,
at a safe distance, seemed another possi-
ble route to relaxation.
Our Norwegian hosts quickly
arranged for us to visit the stables. The
riding school’s facilities were quite exten-
sive with a large indoor arena. Laura was
keen to go into the stables and we were
welcomed in by the stable hands who,
like most Norwegians, spoke very good
English.
As we entered, we were confronted
with a large Irish stallion named O’Mally.
He was being groomed by one of the
hands, who began telling us what a won-
derfully gentle horse he was. This was as
close as I had been to a horse for over 25
years. There was no fence between us
either. O’Mally was out of his stall and I
was standing calmly just inches from his
side, but I felt no fear. I began to stroke
him and soon sensed the heat of his body.
His warmth was both calming and reas-
suring.
Without thinking, I put my head on his
Animal
Energies
Lesson 33
flank. As I did so, he turned towards me
and looked me over. I didn’t move and he
gently nodded. All too quickly, the time
arrived for us to return to our hosts. I gave
O’Mally a light hug and told him I would
visit him again during our stay. He cer-
tainly did help me relax. His reassuring
warmth gave me what I can only describe
as a glow of contentment. My meeting
with O’Mally proved to be my first expe-
rience of the therapeutic benefits that can
be derived from horses.
Equestrian or riding therapy as a
means of enabling personal development,
education and healing for people with a
range of disabilities and special needs has
been well established throughout the
world for a number of years. Probably the
UK’s most well known organization pro-
moting this activity is the Riding for the
Disabled Association, or RDA. The
Association grew out of what had been
known as the Advisory Council on Riding
for the Disabled. As of 1999, the RDA
boasted some 700 groups with more than
23,000 riders and drivers, and affiliated
groups in Europe, North and South
America, Africa, the West Indies,
Singapore and, more recently, Russia and
Japan.
The RDA offers the chance to ride to
any person with disabilities who might
benefit from doing so in terms of their
general health and well being. They have
experience of supporting people with a
range of disabilities, including those with
cerebral palsy, spina bifida, multiple scle-
rosis, muscular dystrophy, multiple
injuries, those without limbs (including
victims of thalidomide), as well as those
with learning difficulties and sensory
impairment, both visual and aural. People
who are over 14 years of age and physi-
cally prevented from riding are offered
the opportunity to learn to drive a pony-
or donkey-drawn vehicle.
Probably one of the most celebrated
examples of a rider overcoming disability
is that of Liz Hartel. She contracted polio
in the 1940s and, although confined to a
51
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
wheelchair, she went on to win a silver panion animals share these attributes, but
Lesson 33 medal for Denmark in the 1952 Olympic the horse may proffer a particularly
Games. Her achievement did much to potent therapeutic cocktail.
encourage the establishment of the RDA. The social support derived from hors-
es may be qualitatively different from
A special bond many other companion animals. I’m sure
Sister Chiara Hatton-Hall, the Interna- a pony listens as well as any dog or cat.
tional Liaison Officer for the Association, But they also require an enormous
believes that there is a particular magic amount of grooming and looking after.
about horses, and that most people who For many, the horse provides a much-
become involved with them develop an needed opportunity to care for and nur-
enduring bond and love. She thinks this is ture another living creature.
because we need an affinity with nature, Riding a horse demands that the rider
and the horse is a highly sensitive and controls the relationship. Since the horse
responsive ambassador. If a horse is treat- is the biggest and most powerful compan-
ed gently and with respect, he will ion animal, the sense of achievement, and
respond accordingly. The horse offers a feelings of enhanced self-worth and self-
consistency of response and an uncompli- esteem may be magnified accordingly.
cated relationship. For many, this is a rare For those people with disability or special
commodity in their human relationships needs who are unable or prevented from
and, for those who may have been isolat- controlling many aspects of their lives,
ed because of their disability, the feeling such feelings of accomplishment must be
of acceptance can do much for their feel- profound.
ings of self-worth. The horse is uncritical For most people, riding a horse
and non-judgmental, and has no sense or requires a complete change of environ-
knowledge of past failures. Many com- ment. Stables and riding schools with

Centres offering horse-assisted therapy

In the UK
! The Fortune Center of Riding Therapy: Avon Tyrrell, Bransgore, Christchurch, Dorset
BH23 8EE; tel: 01425 673 297
! Riding for the Disabled Association: Lavinia Norfolk House, Avenue R, Stoneleigh Park,
Warwickshire CV8 2LY; tel: 0845 658 1082
! The Elisabeth Svensden Trust for Children and Donkeys: Sidmouth, Devon EX10 0NU;
tel: 01395 578 222

In the US
! North American Riding for the Handicapped Association NARHA: P.O. Box 33150,
Denver, CO 80233; tel: 800 369 RIDE (7433); fax: (303) 252 4610; fax on demand:
(303) 457 8496; e-mail: NARHA@NARHA.ORG
! The National Center for Equine Facilitated Therapy: 5001 Woodside Road, Woodside,
CA 94062; tel: (650) 851 2271; e-mail: info@nceft.org; www.nceft.org
! For more information on centers across North America, see www.narha.org/

In Australia
! Riding for the Disabled Association (NSW): 7 Underwood Road, Homebush NSW 2140;
tel: (02) 9746 0950; fax: (02) 9746 1711; e-mail: stateoffice@rdansw.org.au

52

their particular sights, sounds and smells
form the setting for the most significant
environmental change of all—sitting on a
horse. This position—sitting on an ani-
mal’s back—is restricted to very few
companion creatures. When riding, one
moves through the environment in a dif-
ferent mode and shares the animal’s
rhythm. For many people with disability
who are confined to wheelchairs, sitting
astride a horse or pony may also be their
first experience of literally looking down
on people. A person’s social surroundings
are also altered—by meeting new people,
whether instructors, support staff or fel-
low riders. It is not unusual for the dis-
abled to excel at riding, and this may lead
to particularly significant changes to their
social environment, since a person with
disability may find themselves in compe-
tition with fully able people. In this
respect, the horse can act as an effective
equalizer.
Education
Experience has demonstrated that those
who develop a close affinity to horses
often show greater motivation to learn.
An equine environment can provide a
more stimulating climate for education
and can be more effective in holding an
individual’s attention. Such a comple-
mentary classroom offers an alternative
approach for children and adults who
have not flourished in traditional teaching
settings.
On a simple level, time with or riding
horses has been used as an incentive to
encourage people to attend to their class-
room studies. However, horse-motivated
education can offer much more. Stables
and riding schools present settings littered
with opportunities for applied learning.
Caring for a horse involves counting,
measuring and weighing. How many
bales of hay are needed? What weights
and quantities of feeds are required for
each horse? How many stalls are still to
be cleaned out? I have recently become
aware that letters are used as marker
points when learning to ride. Also integral
to the process is familiarizing yourself
Animal
Energies
with line, shape and distance. These
applied uses of mathematics and letters
Lesson 33
offer a more tangible and less abstract
learning situation.
Physical benefits:
hippotherapy and vaulting
‘Hippotherapy’ refers to the physical ben-
efits derived from riding, where accom-
modation of the swinging motion of the
horse by the rider stimulates and exercis-
es various parts of the body. The natural
movement of a horse produces movement
in the rider similar to walking. Horse rid-
ing offers moving physiotherapy and
encourages body symmetry. Riding a
horse can produce up to one thousand
random body movements in as little as 10
minutes—such a workout would take up
to three months of normal physiotherapy.
The horse has another advantage in that
its natural warmth aids relaxation.
The success of hippotherapy has been
demonstrated by X-ray and electromyog-
raphy [measuring electrical activity gen-
erated by muscles to determine nerve
function]. Vaulting, the assisted perfor-
mance of gymnastics on horseback, can
also offer both physical and psychologi-
cal benefits in terms of balance, coordina-
tion and confidence.
The findings of several research stud-
ies have clearly indicated the effective-
ness of equine animal-assisted therapy. A
study conducted at Queen Mary’s Hos-
pital in London was so unequivocal in its
findings that it led to an almost immedi-
ate expansion of the small-scale pro-
gramme that had been the focus of the
research. In 1969, researchers there eval-
uated the effects of riding on six people,
three of whom were physically disabled
and three of whom were diagnosed with
learning disabilities. After only a few
weeks, there were significant improve-
ments in behavior, language, communica-
tion skills and physical functioning.
In an American study, Natalie Bieber
evaluated the effects of a five-week
equestrian-therapy programme on a
group of 42 children, aged six to 17, who
had a range of disabilities, including
53
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
spina bifida and cerebral palsy. The study
Lesson 33 involved riding for one day on a horse or
in a pony cart, and two days in the class-
room using horses and horse-related
material as an incentive for learning. Staff
who assessed the children found that all
but four of the children benefited signifi-
cantly from their involvement in terms of
communication and motivation. The pro-
gramme also appeared to stimulate the
children physically, socially and intellec-
tually.
In 1975, research was undertaken to
assess horse riding as a risk exercise, and
as a means of increasing self-confidence,
courage and motivation. It involved 102
physically disabled children at therapeu-
tic riding centers in England, Ireland,
Wales, Canada and the United States. The
study found a high level of improvement
in mobility, motivation and courage. The
morale of many of the children was also
greatly enhanced.
Improved language skills
Besides aiding physical development,
horses appear to help with cognitive
skills. A seven-year study was conducted
in Washington, DC, into the benefits of a
riding-therapy programme for physically
disabled people and those with learning
difficulties. The programme was evaluat-
ed on a yearly basis, using input from
teachers, parents and the students.
Analyses of the evaluations revealed
startling results: as a group, there was an
average gain in physical movement of
7–31 per cent, and 80 per cent of the chil-
dren were found to have improved lan-
guage skills, with the average gain of
9–29 per cent. Average increases of 6–19
per cent were found in emotional control,
social awareness, peer relationships and
self-awareness., while 70 per cent showed
notable improvement in work skills, with
an average gain of 17 per cent. Of the
children’s parents, 87 per cent comment-
ed upon their child’s improved self-confi-
dence, and there was a 52 per cent
decrease in the number of negative state-
ments made by the children about them-
selves. The teachers’ overall evaluation of
54
the effectiveness of the programme was
‘very good’ or ‘excellent’.
Another piece of American research
was done by Ruth Dismuke into the
e ffects of therapeutic horse-riding on
children with language disorders. Thirty
children, aged from six to 10 years old,
were classified as moderately to severely
language-disordered. The children were
matched for age, type and degree of lan-
guage disorder, and were randomly
assigned to the experimental or control
group. All the children received language
therapy for three one-hour sessions every
week for 12 weeks. The controls received
therapy in a state-school therapy setting
whereas the experimental group under-
went a structured horsemanship pro-
gramme in which speech and language
specialists were also professional riding
instructors.
Independent testers, who were
unaware of the children’s group place-
ment, evaluated their improvement
through tape-recorded conversations. The
results indicated that the horsemanship
programme facilitated the language thera-
py.
Although both groups of children
demonstrated more complex sentence
structure following therapy, the experi-
mental group exhibited an ability to use
their language more efficiently and
appropriately. The study concluded that
riding appeared to have enabled an
enhanced development of language skills.
In addition, significant gains in muscle
strength, coordination and self-esteem
were noted.
The particular bonds that horses
develop with disabled humans are often
especially moving. One extraordinary
example involved Carrie, an 18-year-old
with hemiplegia—a fairly extensive
paralysis of the right side of her body.
Against the expectations of her doctor,
she learned to ride and jump at the
Camomile Center near Dartmoor, where
animal-related activity therapy is offered
to children and adults with a range of spe-
cial needs.
Carrie became especially close to

Merlin, and I once witnessed this extraor-
dinary communication. She made several
circuits of the arena, then rode him over
and through a number of obstacles. She
then dismounted and removed Merlin’s
saddle. For a moment, I thought the ride
was over but, within a few minutes,
Merlin—with no lead rope—was follow-
ing Carrie around the arena in different
directions, responding almost instantly to
her every prompt and request.
I had no doubt that she was communi-
cating with Merlin in a language that he
clearly understood. After several minutes,
Animal
Energies
it appeared that Carrie had told Merlin to
stop and stay where he was. She then
Lesson 33
walked about 15 meters ahead of him and
then stopped with her back to him. On her
command, Merlin walked up to her and
rested his head on her right shoulder.
For a grand finale, she remounted
Merlin and rode him bareback for several
circuits of the arena.
Bernie Graham
This article has been adapted fro m
Bernie Graham’s book C r e a t u r e
Comfort: Animals That Heal (Simon &
Schuster, 1999; £9.99).
55
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies

56
LIVING THE FIELD
Take two cats before bedtime . . .
In our series on animal energies, we've
examined how animals offer a re d - a l e rt
system for their owners when they are
unwell. However, pets themselves have
p roven to be the most health giving of
companions—even more so than other
humans.
Animal
Energies
Lesson 34
factors that kept their patients alive
longest after an initial heart attack.
To their surprise, at the top of the list
were not the usual suspects like nutrition
or exercise, but pet ownership. Quite sim-
ply, the heart-attack patients who lived
longest were the ones who had animal
companions.2

A
sk a doctor about the effect pets Why should this be so? The most
might have on your health, and obvious answer was because of the bene-
the question will probably fits of the extra exercise involved in keep-
unleash a diatribe including words like ing a pet. Walking the dog every day is
a l l e rgies, parasites, tummy upsets and clearly healthier than sitting at home wor-
blood poisoning. Pets, for most of the rying over a heart condition. But that
medical profession, are unsanitary things explanation, while certainly true, was
to be kept at arm’s length—with the arm unlikely to be the whole answer as many
preferably wielding Dettol Disinfectant of the heart patients were cat owners—
Spray. and, as every-one knows, you can’t walk
If the world were run by doctors, pets a cat.
would probably be banned. This remarkable finding was followed
But the fact is, pet ownership has up by later studies which showed an even
never been more popular, with almost 50 wider range of health benefits from pets.
per cent of all UK households owning For example, in the early 1990s, Dr James
what officialdom describes as ‘compan- Serpell, of Cambridge University, found
ion animals’. The figure is even higher in that pet owners had many fewer visits to
the US, with about two-thirds of homes their GP than other people. “We found a
now housing a pet. highly significant reduction in minor
Here’s another startling statistic. In a health problems,” he reported. “The
recent American survey, pet owners were results provide evidence that pet acquisi-
asked: “If you were stranded on a desert tion may have positive effects on human
island, but were allowed just one com- health and behaviour.”3
panion, whom would you prefer to be Meanwhile, in the US, Dr Judith
with—a pet or a human?” More than Siegel of UCLA was spending a year
half—57 per cent—ticked ‘pet’.1 tracking the doctor visits of nearly 1000
So, it seems that the medical profes- people. Again, it was revealed that pet
sion will simply have to accept that the owners saw their physicians significantly
human–animal bond is a fact of life, less often than did other people.
unwelcome though it may be. This suggestion of health benefit was
particularly strong for dog owners. But it
Pets for disease prevention wasn’t just due to the extra exercise that
Recently, however, some members of the dogs forced on their owners, claimed
healthcare profession have made a com- Siegel; it was clearly the nature of the
plete U-turn. A few doctors have begun to relationship itself.
ask whether, rather than causing disease, “Dog owners in comparison to owners
it is possible that pets may actually pre- of other pets spend more time with their
vent it. pets and feel that their pets are more
This startling volteface first occurred important to them,” she said. ”Dogs more
about 20 years ago, after an interesting than other pets provide their owners with
observation by heart specialists in the US. companionship and an object of attach-
They wanted to find out what were the ment, in particular, buffering them from

57
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
the impact of stressful life events.”4 For this study, she chose as her exper-
Lesson 34 The anti-stress aspect of the imental subjects 48 male and female
human–animal bond has been investigat- stockbrokers who were all living alone,
ed by another American researcher, Dr all earning over $200,000 a year and all
Karen Allen, of the University of Buffalo, diagnosed as suffering from high blood
New York. She wired people up to stress pressure when under stress. Before begin-
monitors, then provoked rises in their ning the study, Allen and her team
stress levels by giving them a complex obtained readings of the stockbrokers’
maths test. The subjects were tested under blood pressure in response to artificially
three different conditions: alone in a induced stress. She then prescribed them
room; in the company of a close friend; or all the angiotensin-converting-enzyme
in the company of their pet. (ACE) inhibitor lisinopril, used to lower
Predictably, the presence of friendly blood pressure and improve survival after
companions—whether human or ani- a heart attack, for six months. Half of the
mal—reduced stress levels. But, perhaps subjects, however, were also asked to
surprisingly, she found that the more take home a dog or a cat, and to live with
powerful stress-buster was not the pres- the animal for the same six-month period.
ence of a close friend, but that of the ani- At the end of six months, Allen retest-
mal companion.5 ed the stockbrokers’ stress reactions. As
might be expected, all had improved, but
Prescribe a pet? there was a significant difference between
Dr Allen then went on to tackle an even the blood pressures with and without a
more ambitious question: Might pets be pet. The brokers taking lisinopril alone
as good as, or even better than, prescrip- had dropped from a systolic pressure of
tion medicines in combating the effects of 184 mmHg to 141 mmHg, whereas those
stress? who had also cared for a pet reduced their

The pet–human bond

THE RAW STATISTICS

80% say companionship is the major reason for having a pet

72% say affection is their pet’s most endearing trait
79% give their pets holiday or birthday presents
33% talk to their pets on the phone or through the answering machine
62% often sign letters or cards from them and their pets
55% consider themselves as parents to their pets
65% of pet owners have sung and/or danced for their pets
67% celebrate their pet’s birthday, with
45% actually singing Happy Birthday, and
42% wrapping a gift
78% greet their pet at the door before greeting their human partner
43% have a photo of a pet at work
21% sometimes dress their pets
51% have taken time off work to tend to a sick pet
73% of companies say pets create a more productive work environment.

SOURCE: American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) 1999–2000 Pet Owner Survey

58

systolic pressure even further—down to
131 mmHg—a figure that falls within the
normal range of blood pressure.6
“We’ve shown over and over that it’s
beneficial to be with a pet when you’re
under stress, but we really can’t explain it
in purely physiological terms,” says
Allen. “There are lots of theories, but we
honestly don’t know why pets lower
blood pressure. And interestingly, pets
even outperform human companions.
Why? We suspect that having something
on your side, something you can always
count on that is non-judgmental, psycho-
logically creates a beneficial atmos-
phere.”
According to the Society of
Companion Animal Studies (SCAS),
encouraging people to keep a pet could
save the NHS as much as £1bn a year.
“The potential health benefits are being
under-exploited.” says SCAS chairman
Professor Sam Ahmedzai of Sheff i e l d
University. “Studies show that simply
stroking and talking to a pet not only
reduces blood pressure, but also increases
levels of phenylethylamine and endor-
phin (the body’s natural mood-enhancing
and pain-relieving chemicals) and
decreases cortisol, a stress hormone.”
Yet, according to Dr Lynette Hart of
the University of California at Davis,
that’s too simplistic. “You can’t simply
‘prescribe’ a pet to anybody,” she says.
“The benefits only work in people who
actually like animals.” However, non-ani-
mal lovers are clearly in a minority, even
among criminals. “Ex-prisoners who
form relationships with pets have lower
recidivism rates than those who do not,”
comments health guru Dr Andrew Weil.
Making a connection
All the evidence points to pets having a
beneficial effect not just on our physical
health, but also on our mental wellbeing,
too. At its heart is not so much the petting,
stroking, caring and exercising involved
in pet ownership, but the emotional con-
nection forged with another living being.
This was borne out forcibly in a recent
study done by two British psychiatrists
Animal
Energies
from Leicester General Hospital. They
arranged for a group of 30 people who
Lesson 34
had mild-to-moderate depression to
spend two weeks by the sea in the
Caribbean island of Honduras—on the
face of it, a trip guaranteed to lift any-
one’s spirits. And so it did, bringing on a
25-per-cent improvement in mood with
only an hour’s daily swim in the sea.
But 15 of the patients were given an
extra treat. They got to spend a further
hour a day with dolphins, touching them
and snorkeling among them. This experi-
ence produced a far more dramatic effect.
On average, these people had a 50-per-
cent improvement in mood, and some
were completely cured. “Therapy with
dolphins is more effective than water
therapy,” says Professor Michael
Reveley. “The effects exerted by the ani-
mals were significantly greater than those
just of the natural setting [suggesting that]
psychiatric rehabilitation can occur
through the emotional interaction with
animals in nature.”7
But you don’t need to befriend a dol-
phin to get the benefits of an animal anti-
depressant. Studies show that just owning
any kind of pet at all—even a fish in a
tank—will make you less likely to feel
depressed, and better able to cope with
loneliness, particularly in old age.8
So, there appears to be widespread
health benefits with owning a pet. And
the news has even reached the usually
cynical health-insurance companies,
some of whom have even started offering
lower life-insurance rates for people who
own pets.
Tony Edwards
TV producer Tony Edwards is also a
freelance writer specializing in leading-
edge alternative medical and scientific
research
1 American Animal Hospital Association
(AAHA) 1999–2000 Pet Owner Survey
2 Public Health Rep, 1980; 95: 307–12
3 J R Soc Med, 1991; 84 (12): 717–20
4 J Pers Soc Psychol, 1990; 58 (6):
1081–6
5 J Pers Soc Psychol, 1991; 61: 582–9
59
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
6 Hypertension, 2001; 38 (4): 815–20
Lesson 34 7 B M J, 2005; 331 (7527): 1231
8 J Am Geriatr Soc, 1999; 47 (3): 323–9

Pet teachers
“It is the loving devotion, the soft touch, the constant companionship, the attentive eye
and the uncritical ear of the pet that is so attractive to many of us,” say Alan Beck and
Aaron Katcher in their book, Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal
Companionship (Purdue University Press, 1996). “An important lesson for everyone is to
accept ourselves and others in the uncritical way that pets accept us.”
Dr Frederic Desmond, from the University of Florida, agrees. “Loving like an animal
can actually bring out the finer, more altruistic side of your nature,” he says, commenting
on his recent survey of 175 pet owners. “People with a close attachment to their pets
indicate a greater willingness to help other people than owners who keep their animals
at arm’s length. Pet lovers can see someone who needs help, empathize with their plight
and then assist them. It makes sense that one of the ways we learn to feel empathy and
behave in a helpful manner is from having close relationships with pets. It also puts us
more in touch with ourselves.”

60
LIVING THE FIELD Animal
Basic instincts: not-so-dumb animals Energies
Lesson 35
Biologists and animal experts charac - Fortunately, animals haven’t read the
terize animals as having a lesser intelli - zoology textbooks, and continue to dis-
gence and little emotions. However, this play abilities that are not just the equal of
attitude, called ‘speciesism’, ignore s humans’ but sometimes far surpass them.
the fact that animals often display abil - One of the most obvious examples is nav-
ities that far surpass those of humans. igation.
Animal genius often results from their Take the life cycle of the salmon, one
g reater ability to tap into The Field. of the true marvels of nature. When it’s
less than a year old, the salmon leaves its

E
ver since man was given dominion river birthplace and heads for the open
over the animals, we’ve always sea, where it will spend up to four years
tended to look down on our non- roaming the oceans. It can travel anything
human fellow creatures as lesser beings— up to 6000 miles away from its birth-
an attitude that philosopher Peter Skinner place, but when its time comes to breed, it
has memorably called ‘speciesism’, the returns to the very river it was born in.
animal equivalent of racism. Exactly how it finds its way back
Paradoxically, it’s often those people across the vastness of the oceans is still a
working with animals who are the worst mystery, but experts believe the fish uses
offenders. The most guilty are, of course, a combination of sophisticated direction-
the animal experimenters, but even peo- finding clues to guide it: the earth’s mag-
ple who claim to like animals can be just netic field, ocean currents, the unique
as culpable. For example, the whole sys- chemical signature of its birth river, even
tem of modern farming is institutionally the constellations in the night sky.
speciesist, with its mechanized brutality Many of these techniques are also
and factory-sized prison camps. But even used by migrating birds. On their annual
naturalists and zoologists have an attitude journeys of thousands of miles, birds rou-
to animals that amounts to disdain. tinely use the sun, stars and the earth’s
For decades, these animal experts magnetic field to steer by. But as every
have propagated the view that animals seaman knows, you can’t navigate with-
are merely machines, driven blindly by out knowing the time of day. So how do
instinct, and lacking any kind of con- birds manage to tell the time? Cleverly,
scious intention. According to this view, they use their internal body clock. This is
if animals display intelligence or emo- the mechanism all living things (includ-
tions, that is simply us projecting human ing humans) possess to regulate their
attributes to them—the crime of anthro- daily bodily processes, but birds seem to
pomorphism. Naturalists, in particular, have developed a particularly clever way
have been so terrified of appearing to be of not only accessing what is unconscious
anthropomorphic that they appear to have information, but also making it precise
lost all common sense. enough to use for navigation.
So, when lions band together to force Bees have developed perhaps the
a wildebeest to run into an ambush, they most accurate animal body clock. These
claim that it is merely random behavior. highly organized, social insects need to
Or when a heron breaks up twigs to drop remember where the best flowers are, for
into the water as bait for minnows, that is the good of their community. From one
characterized as blind instinct, not purpo- day to the next, they must know which
sive intention. Or when vultures pick up direction to fly out from the hive to the
large stones in their talons, fly up high flowers. Their problem, though, is poor
into the air and dive bomb ostrich eggs, eyesight. Their eyes perceive the land-
thus breaking them, that is just coinci- scape as a dull blur, while the sun is mere-
dence, not the product of intelligence. ly a fuzzy glow in the sky. But that sunny

61
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
glow is enough to enable them to com-
Lesson 35 pute direction. Nevertheless, to use the
sun as a compass, bees—like migrating
birds—need to know the time of day, as
the sun moves across the sky hour by
hour. Detailed studies of bee behavior
have shown that they can tell the time to
an accuracy of 15 minutes—an astonish-
ing feat, unmatched by humans.
Memory is another ability where
some animals have superhuman powers.
A crow-like bird called Clark’s nutcrack-
er has to survive the long winters of the
northwestern United States, and so stores
seeds underground during the autumn in
as many as a thousand separate caches.
Naturalists have been astonished to
observe that the crows rarely fail to
remember the exact location of the vast
majority of these hidden stores, even
when the ground is covered by snow.
Squirrels are almost as good at this
feat as Clark’s nutcracker, and researchers
now know how they do it. “They use
information from the environment, such
as the relative position of trees, and they
triangulate, relying on the angles and dis-
tances between these landmarks and their
caches,” says Dr Pierre Lavenex of the
University of California. “People can do
this too, but for only about half-a-dozen
sites—not nearly as many as squirrels.”
Curiously enough, some of animals’
greatest powers seem to show up most
with humans. One of the most famous
examples is of a horse known as Clever
Hans. This extraordinary animal lived
about a century ago, and had a very close
relationship with his German owner,
Wilhelm van Osten. Hans’ claim to fame
was that he could apparently not only
understand German, but could also do
simple arithmetic. Van Osten would ask
Hans a question like, “What is eight plus
three?”, and the horse would tap his hoof
11 times. In fact, Hans could get any sim-
ple sum right, using the hoof-tapping
technique. His fame naturally spread, par-
ticularly when complete strangers were
able to receive correct answers.
But a psychologist called Oskar
Pfungst became suspicious when Hans
began to answer such questions as: “If
the eighth day of the month comes on
Tuesday, what is the date of the following
Friday? Suspecting subtle cueing as the
explanation, Pfungst spent hours minute-
ly observing the horse and his question-
ers, looking for tell-tale changes in the
questioners’ body language. But he could
detect nothing. In desperation, he
arranged for the questions to be put to
Hans when no human was in the animal’s
sight. Lo and behold, Hans failed dismal-
ly.
The moral usually drawn from the
Clever Hans story is that humans can be
very gullible about animals’ so-called
intelligence. But look at the story another
way, and Hans appears even smarter than
humans. The horse was actually picking
up on cues so imperceptible that even a

Man’s best friend—the pig

It’s a popular misconception that pigs are stupid. In fact, they are quite the reverse, with
some experts claiming they are more intelligent than even dogs.
One pig hit the headlines in 1984 when it saved someone’s life. An 11-year-old boy
called Anthony was swimming in Lake Somerville of Texas one hot summer day. He got
out of his depth and started to drown. Priscilla, the family’s pet pig, noticed the boy
struggling and immediately began swimming toward him. When she reached Anthony, he
grabbed for Priscilla’s leash with such force that both of them went under the water.
Although Anthony weighed nearly four times more than Priscilla, she managed to swim
to the surface and pull the boy toward the shore.
Priscilla never forgot the incident. Until the day she died, she became upset whenever
she saw young children playing near the water.

62

psychologist who knew what he was
looking for couldn’t detect them. Indeed,
Hans had never been trained by his owner
to do this trick. He must have developed
the trick himself through extraordinary
intuition, somehow sensing what out-
come his owner wanted, and producing
the required behavior.
Perhaps the best real-life example of
animal intuition in action is with dogs that
help epileptics. These are the so-called
‘seizure-response’ dogs, which have been
trained to do a variety of useful tasks after
someone has had an epileptic fit.
These include things such as lying on
top of the person to prevent self-injury,
removing bedclothes to prevent suffoca-
tion, bringing the person the telephone
and fetching the appropriate medication.
Although superficially clever, all of these
are relatively simple jobs that most dogs
can be trained to perform.
What’s astonishing about the seizure-
response dogs, however, is that some of
them have gone from merely responding
after the event to actually predicting when
a seizure will occur.
Connie Standley is an epileptic who
lives in Florida with her two Belgian
cattle dogs. Originally trained as seizure-
response dogs, they are now able to pre-
dict her seizures about half an hour before
they occur. As soon as they sense an
impending fit, the dogs will start to pull
on her clothes or hand in an attempt to
drag her to a place of safety, where she
can have a fit without coming to harm.
Connie’s dogs are by no means
unique: fully 10 per cent of seizure-
response dogs develop this predictive
ability. Quite how the dogs do this is still
a mystery. People have speculated that
the dogs may be picking up on very sub-
tle changes in behavior or scent before a
fit.
Animal
Energies
What is especially remarkable about
these dogs is not just their predictive
Lesson 35
powers, but the fact that they haven’t
been trained to do this. It’s something
they’ve worked out for themselves. And,
of course, the behavior is not part of their
instinct.
As Dr Temple Grandin says in her
book Animals in Translation (NY:
Scribner, 2005), “This is an example of
an animal using advanced perceptual abil-
ities to solve a problem no dog was born
knowing how to solve.”
Take the case of Max, a dog owned by
an American woman who was a severe
diabetic. With no training, Max somehow
developed the ability to sense when his
mistress’s blood-sugar levels were dan-
gerously low, and come to her aid. This
was particularly useful at night, as Max
was able to wake up her husband and
harass him until he got up and tended to
his wife.
It is strange that it’s mainly in the
context of their relationships with humans
that animals seem to display such extra-
ordinary talents. Perhaps we haven’t
bothered to look closely enough at other
aspects of the lives of animals to see
how they make use of their keen sense of
intuition to communicate and, indeed, to
stay alive. Like many native human cul-
tures, animals routinely make use of
extrasensory information.
Or could it be that they’re trying to tell
us something very profound about the
nature of relationships?
Tony Edwards
TV producer Tony Edwards is also a
freelance writer specializing in leading-
edge alternative medical and scientific
research
63
 Animal
LIVING THE FIELD
Energies

64
LIVING THE FIELD
Every picture tells a shaggy-dog story
During a course in animal communica -
tion, Amelia Kinkade discovered that
she had a special gift for receiving
information from animals, usually in
the form of mental images. She has
gone on to become a highly successful
‘interspecies’ communicator.
Animal
Energies
Lesson 36
return to the stage, gently catch them
and usher them off. Allow the blank
stage to start glowing with a beautiful
white light. The light will become
more and more brilliant as you enjoy
resting in this place without words.
! Visualize your message. Visualize
the object you would like to convey

H
ere are some suggestions for
ways to begin communicating
with animals of every variety—
by exchanging pictures.
! Relax your body. Find a place where
you can feel completely relaxed and
safe. Wear loose-fitting, comfortable
clothing. Turn off the telephone, close
the shades and ensure that you will be
completely undisturbed. You can be in
the same room with your animal or
out of doors, seated comfortably in
your garden, balcony or horse stall.
You may wish to go where your ani-
mal friend already is rather than try to
bring your animal to you. You can be
as close to or as distant from him as
you like.
Sit on a pillow on the ground or in
a chair with your spine as erect as
comfortably possible. Make sure that
your animal is relaxing comfortably
as well, or at least playing contented-
ly.
! Focus on your breathing. Take three
deep breaths, filling your lungs com-
pletely and emptying them complete-
ly on the exhalation. Visualize all the
tension in your body pouring out as
you exhale. Relax your body com-
pletely. Bring your attention to your
heart and to the smooth rhythm of
your breath.
! Enter the silence. Close your eyes.
Visualize your thinking process as a
film that is being shown in a theatre.
See the curtains on either side of the
stage slide closed in your thinking
process. A huge white scrim may also
drop from the ceiling. Now the show
is over. There are no more thoughts
allowed on the stage. If words try to
to your friend by seeing it on the
stage. Let’s begin with your friend’s
food bowl. Visualize the bowl as the
animal’s usual food bowl or bag.
Picture the empty bowl in the center
of the stage and allow it to take shape
in your mind. See it clearly. Make the
image distinct and the edges crisp.
Notice its size, depth, girth and
weight, and any details that would
help describe it. Most important, see
the color of the object vividly in your
mind.
! Reach out with love. Without open-
ing your eyes, move your attention to
your animal and concentrate on loving
your friend. Talk to her silently for a
moment. Think the thought, “I love
you.” Then ask your friend politely,
“May I see what you see?” If you
open with “I love you”, your request
will rarely be denied. In the unlikely
occurrence that you feel resistance, try
the technique again later—never
impose.
Now, if you feel a warm flow of
acceptance between the two of you,
imagine you are slipping into the ani-
mal’s body through a door in the top
of its head. From this perspective, you
are the animal. You can actually see
out of her eyes.
! Ask a simple question. The question
should be one that can be answered
pictorially. For our purposes, we will
ask, “What do you like to eat?”
Picture the empty food bowl you con-
jured on the stage now sitting right in
front of you. Remember that because
you are looking out of your animal’s
eyes, you will see the dish from her
perspective—if your friend is short,

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Energies
for example, you will be very close to
Lesson 36 the bowl. Think for a few seconds
about your stomach and how terribly
hungry you are. Feel your mouth sali-
vating in anticipation of taking a big
mouthful of the most delicious food in
the world. Now project the thought
that the bowl or dish is piled high with
this food.
! Catch the thought! Retreat back into
the silence and immediately receive
the picture. What kind of food is it?
The answer will come to you as fast
as lightning! The transmission is
almost simultaneous. Before you have
even finished asking the question, you
may have already received the answer.
! Trust your first instinct. The first
image that flies into your mind is the
right answer. No matter how out-
landish the image may seem, there
could be some information coded in
the answer that the animal is project-
ing to you. If you are speaking to a
dog and he sends you the picture of a
big juicy steak, there should be little
doubt in your mind that you have con-
nected successfully with your dog.
If you receive something that does
not make immediate sense, don’t
doubt yourself and dismiss the trans-
mission. The animal might be trying
to express to you that she has a vita-
min or mineral deficiency or that she
needs more greens, grains or fiber.
If you received the image of a
bunch of carrots from a horse, you
may have simply contacted the horse,
but if you receive the image of a
bunch of carrots from a dog, he may
be trying to tell you he needs more
beta-carotene or fiber in his diet.

Following up first conversations

After you’ve established your first communication, you can continue to enjoy the experi-
ence of being your animal as he eats, or be adventurous and ask one or more of the
following questions.
! What is your favorite toy?
See your human form from the outside throwing a toy to your friend. From your
animal’s perspective, run after this object with wild abandon. Enthusiastically pick it up
with your mouth. What color is it? What shape? If you don’t receive an answer imme-
diately, send your friend a picture of what you think her toy looks like, and if you are
wrong, she will correct it by sending back what the toy actually looks like.
! Where do you like to sleep when I’m not home?
See your animal preparing to bed down in his favorite place. From his perspective, feel
yourself growing sleepy and look down at the ground or out at the surroundings.
What do you see from this point of view? What color is the bedding, rug, towel, nest or
branch that he’s relaxing on? What is the texture? What does it feel like under his
body? What is its temperature? (You may send the picture of a green rug, and he may
correct it with a picture of a blue bedspread.)
! Who’s your best friend?
Be prepared—this may not be you. See your animal running, crawling or flying toward
the one other animal she enjoys the most. This feeling of love and excitement is the trig-
ger in teasing out whom she loves. In this case, we are not picturing an object so much
as creating a feeling.
An easier way to ask this pictorially might be to ask: who gives you treats? If you
picture the treat being dangled in front of the animal’s nose, he will send you the
picture of the person who is doing the dangling. You may be surprised to find that your #
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Energies
Now is not the time to analyze the will correct the image for you. Your
message. Simply take whatever bowl of kibbles may transform into a
Lesson 36
comes and accept it at face value. You chicken breast.
will try to decipher it with your criti- ! Make a gracious exit. When you’ve
cal mind later. Think of this now only finished your visit, thank your friend
as a game of charades. for sharing her thoughts and desires
In the event that you received an with you, no matter what was offered
image you cannot tolerate, like that up. Tell her that you are grateful that
of a dead partridge or a freshly killed she so generously let you into her
mouse, try to be sympathetic. At this body and that you’d like to practice
point, you may taste the food in your this form of communication with her
mouth from your animal’s perspec- more in the future. Thank her for the
tive. Don’t worry if it’s something you conversation and ask her to be patient
would never eat. No matter what it is, with you. (Don’t think for a moment
if it is your animal’s favorite food, and that animals don’t understand every
you are experiencing your animal word we say.)
from the inside out, the food will taste ! Come home to your body. You may
absolutely delicious. want to practice reentering your body
If you did not receive an image, the same way that you entered your
fill the food bowl with what you think friend’s body, through a portal in the
the animal might like, and the animal top of your head. Focus on your

neighbors are feeding your dog.

! What’s your favorite treat?
Send a picture of what you think her favorite treat is, and let her correct it for you. Often,
this is a real surprise. You might discover that her favorite treat is the neighbor’s cat
food or the french fries she stole off your table last night.
! Who takes you for a ride in the car?
From your animal’s perspective, go for a ride in the car. Sit where he sits. See what he
sees. Remember that he is not your height, so he sees the world from a much lower
perspective. Now look over and see who is driving the car and talking to ‘you’ and
patting ‘your’ head.
! Where is your favorite place to go in the car?
Send the feeling of anticipation and, as your animal, climb out of the car. See the world
around you from her perspective. Are there birds? Trees? Water? Other animals? What
is on the ground? What does it smell like?
! What did you do today?
This is a good question to ask if the two of you are apart all day. Send a picture of
what you thought he did—sleep in his bed, sit by the window—and he may send back
pictures of gnawing on the couch, drinking out of the toilet, tormenting the neighbor-
hood animals. Have a sense of humor. If he is punished after telepathically communi-
cating with you, he won’t confide in you anymore. If you can’t get a clear answer to one
of your questions, don’t force it or get discouraged. Go on to a new question.
Remember that this is a game of psychic charades. If you didn’t receive any picture
in return, you can always try again some other time; if you receive images that you
# can’t comprehend, they will likely make sense to you later.

67
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LIVING THE FIELD
Energies
breathing and bring your attention the future, and you will prove yourself
Lesson 36 back to your heart. Become aware of to be a trustworthy friend.
the feelings and desires inside your Substitute if necessary. If you can-
own body, and remind yourself that not grant your friend’s wish (say, for
the sensations you just experienced a bowl of partridge or mouse), create
inside your friend are not your sensa- the best substitute you possibly can,
tions. Your friend has his own body like a piece of warm, partially cooked
and you have yours. chicken. If you exchanged pictures of
Visualize your friend surrounded favorite treats or toys, find them and
in a field of white light as though he give them to your friend to show him
were wearing a protective armor of that you received his thought. If you
moonbeams. Now, surround your exchanged pictures of a ride in the
body in your very own suit of moon- car, a frolic in the park or a trip to
beam armor. Let communication Grandma’s, make that picture a reali-
through, but keep your identities ty.
divinely separate. Even this commu- ! Positive reinforcement. Always fol-
nion needs healthy boundaries. low up on your conversation with lav-
! Act on your animal’s desire. ish attention on your friend and praise
Whatever your friend requested, make her profusely for sharing her thoughts
sure that when you have completed with you. All this positive reinforce-
your meditation, you give your friend ment will come in very handy when
what she asked for. Whether or not you start to ask questions about sensi-
you believe you successfully made tive subjects, like her health.
contact, your animal will know you ! Build trust first. You must have an
made contact and will be waiting for animal’s trust before you can investi-
you to fulfill your promise. gate negative situations such as med-
Don’t make promises you cannot ical problems or behavioral difficul-
keep. This will just teach your animal ties. You wouldn’t ask personal ques-
to distrust you and not want to com- tions of a new human friend, and you
municate with you. Always follow certainly can’t open a conversation
through with action as soon as possi- with an animal by saying something
ble after making a telepathic commu- that will hurt his feelings or make him
nication. This will encourage your defensive.
animal to communicate with you in I always open with “What’s your

Feline mind games

There’s always a lot of laughter in my workshops. In one of my earlier workshops, my cat
Rodney worked as my assistant, verifying a series of questions for my students. I had
written the answers (or, at least, what I thought were the answers!) on flash cards and piled
the cards face-down on my lap, so that the answers would be unequivocal.
When asked his favorite food, the class gave me accurate answers that I never would
have guessed. Clearly, they were not merely reading my mind, because I had written
‘White chicken chunks’ on the flash card. One student said “Cake icing”, while another
blurted out “Cheese-fish”!
They had no way of knowing Rodney had vandalized my last birthday cake by licking
off an entire row of icing roses. Nor could they have guessed that, during my last cocktail
party, I had reached my hand into a bowl of fish-shaped crackers and found the crackers
soaking wet. Much to my chagrin, Rodney had licked the cheese off of every single ‘fish’.

68

favorite food?” because most animals,
like most people, enjoy discussing
what they like to eat.
If I opened with “So you have
cancer?”, the chances are that could
be the end of the conversation. (Sur-
prisingly, most animals do know the
names for their health problems; I
don’t know whether they get this from
listening to their vets or from a deeper
‘knowing’.)
Sometimes, even after you have
established a rapport with an animal,
he will be put off by nosy questions
and shut down communication any-
way. You may find animals don’t
always want to answer you. You will
also inevitably discover that animals
lie (and pull your leg).
Animal
Energies
When asked questions like “Who
sprayed my shoes?” or “Who chewed
Lesson 36
up the table leg?”, animals may pass
the buck like small children. When-
ever I ask my five cats “Who started
the fight?”, I will hear a chorus of
“Not me!” (then they laugh). So, in
the beginning, be polite and have a
sense of humor. Remember to observe
these starting points:
" Build trust first.
" Investigate problems later.
Amelia Kinkade
Adapted from her book Straight from
the Horse’s Mouth (Thorsons, 2001).
Amelia is also the author of T h e
Language of Miracles (New Wo r l d
L i b r a ry, 2006).
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