5
A Dance that Becomes a Song
ACROSS A WIDE EXPANSE OF GREEN FIELD something magic is happening. On this bright sunny day in North Carolina, just cool enough to allow the warmth of the sun, a dog and a man seem bound by some invisible cord. The dog is so far off as to be nearly invisible to the man. Only an occasional command or whistle reaches through the distance between them, piercing the sound of the breeze. To an untrained observer, even this minimal communication is indecipherable. Yet somehow it's obvious that these two beings are truly connected in an intricate dance.
Brio's seemingly miraculous recovery had changed my fundamental bias regarding telepathy with animals. Subtly—and perhaps subconsciously—I found myself shifting from the position of curious investigator to almost-believer in the possibility that there might truly be some invisible line of communication between humans and dogs. But I needed more than my own limited experience. The insatiable reporter in me wanted to know the bigger story. First, I wanted to question animal experts about their thoughts on the subject. I also decided to seek out well-known dog trainers who were also writers. They would have thought about the relationship between humans and dogs and the ways in which they communicate and understand each other.
With some trepidation I went to meet with renowned sheepdog trainer and author Donald McCaig. Craggy-faced, crusty, and bearded, McCaig is a down-to-earth sheep farmer on his land in Virginia. I didn't know how he'd react to questions about psychic communication with dogs. He'd asked me to meet him at a sheepdog trial, and I soon saw why. He knew that having me watch the dogs and their handlers in action could explain in a way that words could not what he felt was going on.
It was spellbinding to watch as dogs and humans worked the sheep. The handlers used whistle, voice, and hand signals. Donald McCaig explained this language of the physical senses. But still the communication between species seemed somehow invisible and inaudible, deeper than hand gestures and sound. “You can't write about what's truly going on between human and dog,” McCaig said. “You can't be verbal when it's not. I'm convinced that communications with dogs are very profound.” He mostly spoke about the communication between the two species that we were watching in terms of art and even mystery.
Another border collie handler, Robin Queen, says of the teamwork between dog and human working to herd sheep: “Honestly, it's like magic. When it works, well it's like nothing I've ever experienced. A lot of shepherds refer to it as ‘grace.' It is the epitome of grace.”1
Queen is actually, by profession, a linguist at the University of Michigan. So she decided to look beneath what did seem to her like magic and see if it could be explained, at least to a degree, in linguistic terms. Were the dogs in fact understanding the whistles and gestures of the handler as a kind of language—an organized communication system? Did the whistles have specific meanings for the dogs? Were they able to interpret them if used with a different volume or inflection? To Queen it seemed that they could. But the research in this area is early.
Of course there is other new research on the cognitive abilities and intelligence of dogs. In Europe, a border collie named Rico drew the attention of scientists in the early 2000s when his owners said he knew the names of two hundred different objects. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany tested Rico. In their experiments, Rico could retrieve specific objects with no clues given to him other than the objects' names.2 A psychology professor in South Carolina, John Pilley, heard about Rico and decided to train his own border collie, Chaser, to learn words. Chaser did in fact learn to identify more than one thousand different toys and other items by name.3
From these and innumerable other studies it seems that we and dogs are more alike than we ever thought. This observation goes beyond the realization that dogs have cognitive and perhaps even linguistic abilities. It extends to social cooperation—like the teamwork of border collie and handler. It's been thought that a key factor that makes us human and allowed our species to survive is our social nature, our inclination to communicate with each other in order to work for a common purpose. We may be better at it than other species, but perhaps not totally unique. Out on those fields as the border collies work, it's hard not to feel that the two species are bound together by some invisible cord and to a common end.
Donald McCaig keeps returning to the idea that there is something inexplicable going on out there, something that reason and even scientific experiments cannot help us totally understand. “That kind of communication between handler and dog,” McCaig told me, “is just like music, two musicians working with each other, improvising behaviors. It's a dance that becomes a song.”
“So is it a kind of telepathic communication?” I ventured forth with the question.
“It's beyond rational behavior, that's for sure,” came the answer that surprised me. For all the training that goes into the making of a good sheepdog, McCaig insisted that the training itself cannot entirely explain the poetry and beauty when there is perfect coordination between a handler and his dog. “There are times . . . [when] you're not in their world.
“Telepathy,” McCaig continued, “is getting to a place where it's impossible to decode. The first part is training, but then it goes beyond that.” He quoted an old handler who once told him, “I've never had a year when I didn't say, ‘My God, I don't know much about this.'” “A good run,” McCaig said of dog, man, and sheep working together, “is like being in a trance; it's like a dream.”
As the day on that green field wore on, McCaig revealed more of what clearly is his conviction that human-dog communication can and does go beyond the realm of the visible and the rational. He told me about an instance during a recent winter when he sent one of his dogs to a neighboring field to retrieve a bunch of young sheep who'd escaped from their home territory. “The dog came back,” McCaig said, “with a report: ‘There are no sheep there.' He understood what I wanted and I understood his report. That's pretty profound stuff.”
McCaig's openness to the mystery that lies within the deep bonds and understanding between some dogs and some humans contradicted my assumptions that dog trainers would tend to be very practical and wedded to training practices based on domination over and control of the dog.
Certainly, there are trainers who do not believe that the idea of telepathy explains any kind of close communication, even between humans, much less between two species. I spoke with one widely respected trainer/handler of search and rescue dogs who did not even want her name used in a book about psychic communication. She told me, “As a trainer I find [that idea] insulting because it denigrates the possibility of genuine nonlinguistic communication with the animal.” This trainer does, however, strongly believe in that possibility. Search and rescue—SAR—training, she said, “is not about getting a dog to do what you want to do, but directing the dog toward a goal you mutually share, burying your ego and believing what the dog says.”
Moreover, this trainer did acknowledge that there is sometimes something about the connection between a dog and a human that goes beyond explanation in terms of the physical senses—beyond verbal commands, beyond body language—beyond sound, sight, and smell.
She felt such a remarkable connection with one of her dogs, a German shepherd who was “very technically skilled.” This trainer came to believe also that the shepherd dog “had a profound sense of duty and obligation” to her work. She recalls an experience when she and the dog found a man's body in the woods. The trainer “thought he would be dead from the look on his face.” But somehow the dog got to him through thick rose shrubbery. She started licking the man's face; he turned out to be alive. The trainer told me that her canine partner “was a different dog from that day forward. What changed her was that she knew that she had found a human being who was not fine, who needed help.”
This trainer has had several dogs and several working partnerships. She and her training partner both work with these dogs. It took the German shepherd longer than some other dogs to become fully proficient at her work. But it was clear that she was special. The trainer says her human partner “likes to joke about the spooky connection that the three of us had and this dog's ability to know what each of us was thinking. As with anyone who has a profound relationship,” she told me, “it happened in a way with her that hasn't happened with any other connection in my life.” That connection took place through—in the trainer's words—“genuine nonlinguistic communication.”
Surely there is body language between trainer and dog. Just as surely, body language alone doesn't seem to fully explain the depth of the invisible tie between some of these trainers and their dogs. Telepathy, I was led to remember, is defined as “the purported transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction.”
Bash Dibra, the dog trainer who worked with Brio initially, spontaneously brought up his belief that humans and dogs can connect on a spiritual level, a declaration I hadn't expected from a professional dog trainer. “What will happen in that spiritual communication level,” Bash explained, “is it's like a special channel or airwave that opens up. It's a special language. When you create that language sometimes you think your thoughts and the dog does it.” Bash went on. He, like Donald McCaig, used a musical analogy when talking about the dialogue that can occur between species. “There's something wonderful, very poetic, very musical in that bond between a human and a dog,” he said. “It's like when you tune a tuning fork; you are creating music that is in harmony, so perfect, so in sync that it just flows. That's the spiritual journey of a dog and a human that can develop.”
Two other renowned dog trainers and writers, Carol Benjamin and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, also shared their thoughts on dog-human communication. Marshall Thomas, an expert on animal behavior who wrote the bestseller The Hidden Life of Dogs, has never used an animal communicator but tells a story that she sees as evidence of psychic communication with one of her dogs.
Some years after her daughter had been in a bad car crash and was paralyzed, Marshall Thomas and her husband went to do an errand at a shopping mall. Her husband went into a travel agency while Marshall Thomas and their dog waited in the car. As her husband came out of the travel agency door, suddenly the dog just “drooped,” as Marshall Thomas put it. And she herself started crying. It turns out the person in the agency had been at the scene of the car accident that their daughter had been involved in just after it had occurred. Marshall Thomas told me, “I thought my dog was a vector. He picked up the grief and sadness from my husband and I picked it up from him. If that wasn't psychic communication I don't know what it would be.”
If psychic communication does include the transmission of emotion and energetic states, then dog trainer Carol Benjamin relies on that kind of invisible dialogue every day. She has Crohn's disease, a debilitating and painful ailment of the digestive tract. She has depended on a series of service dogs to ease her pain. Often her first dog would seem to know when she was having a flare-up of the disease, even if she herself was not aware of the attack or she was trying to block it out. Her second service dog, Flash, a border collie, would ignore her denial. “I'd say, ‘No, I'm fine,' then he'd keep coming back. Then I thought I should trust him,” Benjamin recalls. “He leaned against my gut and I could feel this stuff happening, sure enough. I understood what he was doing.” This is the great service that her dogs provide, Benjamin says. “By leaning against my side, the pressure, heat, and energy, plus the release of oxytocin and endorphins, will usually stop any pain very quickly.”
The ability of dogs to pick up on human physical and emotional states is now widely recognized. We hear all the time about medical alert service dogs who can warn their humans to conditions such as epileptic seizures or dangerous changes in the blood sugar levels of diabetics. Some believe the explanation is a heightened sensitivity to body language, or a dog's fine sense of smell. Perhaps this is not telepathy in the strict sense of the word, meaning transmission of a thought mind to mind. But some would argue that it falls within the same spectrum of an interspecies language, transcending sound or sight. There's no strong research proving how dogs predict medical conditions.
For Carol Benjamin, this “alerting” ability of some dogs is undeniable—something that lies beyond arguing. But she also cannot argue with the fact that she herself has experienced incidents with her dogs that she cannot explain by any other means than some kind of true telepathic—or mind-to-mind communication. Benjamin had noticed that her German shepherd seemed to know intuitively when she was planning to go for a bike ride or run and take the dog along. The shepherd knew not to bother Benjamin when she was writing, but as soon as she'd think of biking, the dog would start to jump up and down.
The first few times this happened Benjamin dismissed it as coincidence. Then, she decided to do a test to see if she was actually somehow communicating telepathically with her dog. She had her sister hold the dog at the other end of her large apartment while she went into the bedroom. “I sat on the bed and closed my eyes and pictured running with the dog,” recalled Benjamin. Then, almost immediately, Benjamin said, “I heard her running down that long double hallway to the bedroom, running at full speed. The dog came into the bedroom. There were two dressers with six drawers each. She went to the one that held only my running clothes and started banging on it with her nose.”
Benjamin was stunned. “It actually scared me so much that I never did it again. It was too not-what-people-talk-about and too weird.” Had Benjamin transmitted her thoughts telepathically to her dog? Had she “spoken” to her animal via a language that surpasses all barriers of speech?
She's had other instances while training clients' dogs when she found she could clearly just “see” something in the animal's experience or feeling that explained its behavior. Once she worked with a little mixed-breed dog that refused to walk by a staircase outside an office building in midtown New York. Benjamin took the dog to the neighborhood. She says, “Suddenly I got a movie in my head of someone picking her up and throwing her down there”—down the staircase. Once she understood this, she was able to work with the dog and ease her fear.
Benjamin believes that, as a trainer, she communicates nonverbally with her dogs through mental images. She, like many animal communicators, says that it's a visual language. “When you think about your dog, you picture the dog and the dog is getting that picture, and when dogs think of things they think in pictures and sometimes we get the picture.”
Benjamin makes no claim, however, to be able to “speak” in this visual language as consistently or reliably as animal psychics claim to be able to do. “What I don't understand about the communicators is that while I've had these experiences with dogs, I can't make it happen. Maybe they're more sensitive,” Benjamin speculates.
The idea of extrasensory perception of communication is, of course, not new. Neither is the belief that it can occur between humans and animals. It's certainly the stuff of popular imagination and myth. Consider Dr. Dolittle and the Horse Whisperer. A 2008 poll by USA Today found that 67 percent of pet owners say they understand the noises their animals make, and 62 percent said that they feel their pet understands them when they speak. One in five owners claimed complete mutual understanding.4 Perhaps they are reading body language. Perhaps one can put it down to intuition. But believers in telepathic communication would argue that it's a form of intuition.
In the 1930s, the writer J. Allen Boone wrote about his relationship with the famous movie dog Strongheart. Enlisted to care for the dog while his trainer was away, Boone developed a powerful connection and way of “speaking” with Strongheart. He was convinced from the start that Strongheart could read his thoughts, even if he could not reciprocate as accurately. Over time, Boone did a great deal of inner work on himself and developed his own “invisible language” skills between man and dog. He wrote that he “had made contact with that seemingly lost universal silent language which, as those illumined ancients pointed out long ago, all life is innately equipped to speak with all life whenever minds and hearts are properly attuned.”5
Boone would ask Strongheart a specific question. When he got the answer “it came as a ‘still small voice' whispering the needed information within . . . or a sudden awareness . . . or as revealing suggestion . . . or swift enlightenment . . . or a clear direction for solving a particular problem.” Skeptics will of course argue that Boone was probably just getting some kind of guidance from his own mind or consciousness.
Stories of apparently psychic animals abound throughout history. For example, in the seventeenth century there was a horse named Marocco, born in England but then taken to France to entertain in shows with his human partner, William Bankes. Marocco supposedly had amazing powers. When coins were taken from audience members, Marocco seemed to be able to identify from whom they were taken and would count the amounts by pawing with his hoof. However, as with Clever Hans, skeptics claimed he wasn't psychic after all but merely following Bankes' subtle hand gestures.6 And in eighteenth-century London a pig and a goose purportedly could read thoughts. Today, mainstream media coverage of animal communicators and the idea that it's possible to read the thoughts of another species certainly tend toward the skeptical if not the disparaging.
Skeptics argue that psychics in general commonly use a technique called “cold reading” with humans to convince clients that they are actually tapping into their minds. In cold readings, psychics may analyze such variables as a human subject's body language, age, or dress in order to make educated guesses. Critics argue that when pet psychics work in front of a live audience, the owners' reactions let the psychics know if they're on the right track.
Linda Gnat-Mullin, a psychic intuitive who reads people as well as animals, says she herself has experienced cold readings. Once a psychic got Gnat-Mullin's own profession wrong. “I look very conventional. I don't go around wearing jangling crystals.” Gnat-Mullin also thinks some communicators do too many readings and lose their intuitive accuracy because of overwork.
It's rational to assume that cold readings do happen in some psychic readings. The fact remains, however, that most of the sessions with animal communicators that I've had over the years took place by phone. I rarely gave the psychic any initial indication of whether the reading rang true. Moreover, as my investigation proceeded, I was a long way from being able to simply dismiss the idea of telepathic communication with humans or animals as hokum.