8

On the Far Side

AS THE YEARS PASSED, I WOULD SEE BRIO running in his dreams, legs twitching, running with the wind. I could feel his spirit; he was one with the wind, out there in some other world, on the far side, some other dimension. He was in his “teens” now—older, of course, in dog years. But inside I knew he was out there at the ocean—alive to every gust, ready to catch the breeze, always ready for what would come next.

I could see it in his eyes. He never settled, never stopped trying, never gave up, never turned away from life. I watched him, making note of his ability to savor each moment, to find joy in just being. He did not fight against growing old, did not complain of his joints or back aching, and didn't feel afraid that his time on Earth was nearing an end. During these days, he taught me about valiance and how important it is to keep playing no matter what. He couldn't walk much without help, but he would lie and wave his paw at me, just as he always had.

I kept checking in with the communicators, asking them what he was feeling. And as if Brio himself wanted me to hear what he had to say, an inexplicable, apparently telepathic incident occurred.

One day Brio again collapsed on the sidewalk in New York and just lay there, unable to walk. Within an hour, I got a call from Alecia saying she'd “heard” from Brio. When she was out on a walk, she “saw” Brio in the clouds. Alecia said she felt she had to call me to find out what was going on. Perhaps, I thought, he had called to her for help. I asked Alecia how in the world she thought that could have happened. She remembered that there had been other times when she “heard” from Brio and felt she had to contact me. “There would be times when I would call you and ask, ‘Is everything okay?' because I'd kind of get a message from Brio. It wasn't anything I was consciously thinking of, it was just because I was open to the energy. Brio found a way to allow my consciousness to recognize that he was trying to talk with me.”

He was trying to talk to her.

Animal communicators have moved past the question of if animals have special abilities that lie outside the realm of the five physical senses. Even those who had initial doubts say they now believe in the profession they practice and accept animal ESP as a fact. Mainstream science is starting to accept that animals do in fact have certain kinds of “sixth sense.”

There were times when I felt, without the shadow of a doubt, that Brio definitely had a sixth sense and that it was fully functional. One instance was during one of his energy/chiropractic treatments. He seemed unusually drawn to a human patient in the treatment room. He kept going over to her to sniff and sit and watch her. I wondered what was going on. David Mehler, the practitioner, said the woman had an especially “elevated” energy—very open and joyful. The woman, in the midst of her treatment, never reacted to Brio. So it was not like a normal dog-human greeting interaction. There was just no mistaking that Brio was strongly drawn to her for a reason not evident to our five physical human senses.

In the same way it appeared that Brio could read this woman's energy, animals also appear to be able to read the energy of their immediate environment. They seem to know when natural disasters are looming, enabling them to predict when an earthquake or tsunami is coming. They may be responding to subtle vibrations and tremors that are beyond the range of human perception but within their own natural biological abilities—for example, the ability to detect changes in the atmosphere or different vibrations. We know that other species certainly have abilities not accessible to humans. Dolphins and elephants, for instance, communicate with sounds not audible to the human ear.

In Brio's case, there were times when he and I were away at the beach and a large storm or hurricane was predicted. I had the advantage of weather reports in these cases. But I could have gone by Brio's behavior. A day or so before the winds picked up, Brio's attention changed. He seemed alert to every breeze, sniffing and looking as if anticipating something. I grew to expect this behavior and even to rely on it in advance of the weather forecasts.

Then there was 9/11, that day when everyone's world in New York City seemed changed forever. I was living in Manhattan, well uptown from the World Trade Center. I had to walk Brio of course. He locked his legs when we got to the front door of the building, refusing to go out onto the street. It could have been the smell from the burning towers. I believe it was also that he sensed the change in energy. There was an eerie silence—no traffic except for the sound of jet fighters overhead. Certainly my energy along with everyone else's on the street was drastically altered, shadowed by fear and panic and grief. Surely he sensed danger. I finally had to give up and eventually got him out a bit later. He himself didn't exactly seem panicked. It was as though he was saying, “No, we shouldn't go out there. Listen to me.” I felt he was communicating; sending a message to me.

Margrit Coates, a well-known English animal communicator, elaborates on this sixth sense that animals may possess. In her book, Communicating with Animals, she writes, “Information that comes to us through our five senses frequently muffles information that is transmitted to our conscious awareness via faint and elusive wavelengths, but which is nevertheless equally important. It is through a subtle frequency that our intuition operates, and this is our sixth sense. The sixth sense frequency is received by animals more clearly than by humans, owing to our dependence on gadgets and verbal language.”¹

Linda Gnat-Mullin, the intuitive, brings up the matter of quantum physics when she tells me what she thinks is occurring when she picks up information from another species—even over the phone. “It's the non-locality of events first and foremost.”

Non-locality refers to the theory of interactions—say between particles—that seem to occur at a distance.² Some physicists believe that non-locality thus allows objects to know each other's state even when separated by long distances. The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung cited synchronicity as an explanation of the paranormal. His theory of synchronicity argued that events may be connected by meaning—“meaningful coincidence”—and are not necessarily the result of cause and effect.³

Non-locality, of course, is also a quality of Sheldrake's proposed “morphic” resonance theory. Sheldrake proposes that the social bonds both among species and between species are social fields that hold collective memories—like Jung's collective unconscious concept. Memory and other information is transferred, Sheldrake believes, across space and time.⁴

Today scientific research is delving into communication—and not just among mammals or even just between other animal species—but between other types of living organisms, such as trees! There's new research showing that trees actually communicate with each other in ways that had been previously unknown.

Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist, and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia recently discovered that trees and plants actually send messages to other trees of their own species. She found a web of underground fungi connecting to the trees and plants of an ecosystem. Many of the fungi help nourish the tree roots, and experiments showed that the fungi actually move carbon, water, and nutrients between trees as needed. Older trees, for example, can use the fungi network to help younger trees.

And there's more. Scientists say that trees send electrical signals to other trees through their roots. These signals can warn of trouble—for example, a creature that's chewing on the tree roots.⁵ So the trees, according to these studies, have formed a social bond with their relations and are using a communications network to help each other. Here again, we hear about “a social bond” as the foundation for communication.

How remarkable! If trees and plants can communicate this way unbeknownst to human recognition, then why should we not believe that other species can do that too? Perhaps these communications among trees can be explained purely in terms of biology. But intuitives and others who believe that extrasensory communication between living beings is certainly possible, if not a fact, argue that among all lifeforms there is an interaction that is extrasensory—that is, unheard and unseen and beyond the five senses of human beings.

Joan Grant, a well-known clairvoyant and twentieth-century author, said that she was not interested in blind faith or blind belief. She argued that you must develop the five senses before you attain the sixth.

But for some, the point is that we humans often become too reliant on those physical five senses, shutting off access to a sixth sense.

Donna Lozito, another animal communicator I would meet, believes that all beings communicate telepathically by nature. “It's telepathy,” she insists. “Plants communicate plant to plant. Animals communicate animal to animal. Most humans have interrupted that natural process.”

What is striking is that there's clearly a movement under way—a growing urge to connect with other living beings. It's driven not only by committed believers in interspecies telepathy, but by scientists as well. Did you ever imagine a dog in an f MRI machine having a brain scan? Well it's happened! A neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Gregory Berns, wanted to find a way to see brain activity that could give clues to what dogs are thinking and feeling. To me, his decision to devote his professional skills to this exploration held echoes of my own journey with Brio. He says he was inspired by the death of his favorite dog, Newton, a pug. “I thought about him a lot,” Berns told Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times. “I wondered if he'd loved me, or if our relationship had been more about the food I'd provided.”⁶

This was exactly the question that had set me on my own journey. Of course, Berns could actually perform scans of dogs to seek empirical evidence of what was going on in their brains. So he trained selected dogs for months so that they would be comfortable in the scanner and able to stay still. Over the past five years, he and his team have scanned about ninety dogs with no restraints and no drugs. One experiment was designed to see what gave dogs pleasure.

The scans focused on the rewards center of the dogs' brains, comparing the activity when they were given food and when they were given praise. Most responded equally to the two rewards. But about 20 percent responded more strongly to praise. Berns's conclusion? Most dogs love their humans just as much as food—and some love us even more. Berns also discovered that dogs are born with a dedicated part of the brain for processing faces. So when our dog looks at us with that intense stare, it's their way to see what's going on with us, to connect with us, and build the bond between us. Berns says, “When you look at [dogs'] brains, you realize how similar some of their processes are. You recognize that they are not just things.”⁷

Other researchers are working to decipher other “languages,” or communication systems, of other species—to understand them. In past years, there have been well-known research studies that tried to communicate with animals by teaching them human language. There was Washoe, the female chimp who became the first nonhuman to learn American Sign Language. There was Kanzi, another chimp, who learned to use a keyboard showing images to represent human words.⁸

And dolphins as well are known to be highly intelligent and capable of understanding artificially created languages. There were well-known studies aimed at teaching them to communicate using English—for example, the controversial research of neuroscientist Dr. John Lilly in the 1960s.⁹

But now one dolphin researcher, Denise Herzing, uses an underwater mobile communication system to try to translate human language into “dolphinese.” Dolphins communicate, and whistles and Herzing's CHAT system are designed to allow dolphins to ask things—to talk to humans. It's two-way communication.

Herzing says, “Interspecies communication happens every day between many species: between plants, nonhuman animals, and between nonhuman and human animals. What seemed to be lacking was our acceptance of our interdependence and mutual interactions with the natural world.”¹⁰

Herzing started researching two-way communication with dolphins in 1997. At first, the researchers used human-created whistles and taught the meanings of the whistles to the dolphins. It was hoped that the dolphins would then mimic the “whistle words”—for example, to ask for a toy they wanted. Still, all of those efforts were using a human-created “language” to try to communicate with the dolphins.

But here's the really exciting part. Herzing and her team are also putting the natural dolphin whistles into the CHAT computer. It's hoped that ultimately the system will let humans decode the dolphin whistles and find out if they really have a language. If so, think of the possibilities! What if we really could have a conversation in the language of a dolphin, or a chimp, or a dog? Then we could ask if they really can read the mind of a human, “hear” or “see” messages from an animal communicator, and how a dog knows his human is headed home.

As Denise Herzing says, “Imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet.”¹¹

There's a remarkable instance of dolphin-human communication that has developed spontaneously to serve a common purpose. It does not depend on any formal translation system of audio language. Consider this: On a river near Mandalay, Myanmar, Burmese fishermen rely on Irrawaddy dolphins to help them make a catch. It's a partnership that's been going on for generations. When a fisherman taps a teak dowel against the hull of his boat, the dolphins come. They evidently know there's a job to be done. The dolphins then signal where the fish are. They do this by turning upside down, lifting their tails out of the water and slapping them down where the fish are. Then the fishermen cast their net. The dolphins catch any escaping fish. This is one of the few confirmed examples in the world of cooperation between humans and wild animals.

Consider this and ask how this communication happens. The dolphins certainly hear the drumming on the boat's hull. But how did they figure out what the fishermen wanted? How did they decide to use their tails to point to the fish and conclude that the humans would understand in turn? Do these human-dolphin interchanges involve intuition, telepathy—some kind of invisible, extrasensory means of understanding each other?¹² To me, it's a question that begs to be asked.

I sense that a growing number of scientists also feel there may be something undetectable that lies beyond the reach of their current research tools.

This is a book about dogs, but the anecdotal stories about other nonhuman animals echo and seem to support the reports about canines exhibiting apparently extrasensory abilities and behavior. Those reports are echoed by observations of other species—not just domesticated animals, but also whales and dolphins, for example. There are stories—many from researchers—of killer whales rescuing dogs from drowning and escorting them back to their people and of whales and dolphins apparently warning humans of trouble and saving them from harm's way.¹³

I believe some scientists feel they cannot speak openly about their belief—or even their hunch—that nonhuman animals have telepathic abilities. One well-known dolphin scientist is an example. She told me off the record that she has experienced behavior by dolphins that she cannot explain by any means except some kind of extrasensory perception and/or telepathic communication. Yet she will not say that for fear of risking her scientific and academic reputation.

Beyond the anecdotal observations of researchers, I've noticed another thread running through the “unofficial,” untested—yes, intuitive—observations of a number of scientists working with a variety of nonhuman animals. It's about some kind of awareness, a “knowingness.” For example, here's what Ken Balcomb, senior research scientist at the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, Washington, had to say about the killer whales—orcas—that he works with.

“I've sometimes come away,” Balcomb told conservationist and author Carl Safina, “with a real ‘wow!' feeling, like I'd just seen something above and beyond. When you lock eyes with them, you get the sense that they're looking at you . . . It's . . . like they're searching inside you. There's a personal relationship that they set up with eye contact.”¹⁴ Balcomb distinguishes that whale “look” from that of dogs. But when I read his words, I instantly recognized what he was talking about. I'd seen that gaze from Brio—that searching look that said, I know you. What are you thinking? How are you? What's going on with you—really?

There is actually research indicating that there's something that's also special about the intent stare of a dog. One distinct difference between wolves and dogs today is that dogs look at our eyes. Wolves do not. At Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, researchers did a study showing that even tamed wolves would not initiate eye contact with humans, even though they'd been raised by them since puppyhood.¹⁵

True, this may not be ESP or telepathy. Perhaps it's a biological trait that evolved in dogs to help them connect to us. But that “wow!” that whale researcher Ken Balcomb felt when looking into the eye of a whale and the thrill of some essential realization that Brio's gaze awakened in me still seem to be telling us something very profound and very essential about these fellow beings.

There's something behind the gaze of nonhuman animals that gives us a frisson—a shiver—of recognition, that lets us know that there is something in that being that is offering what even another human being, even the closest person in one's life, cannot offer. That gaze seems to know things we do not know. And it seems to offer to share its knowledge—if we are open to receiving it.

Leonardo da Vinci remarked on that wisdom in our fellow creatures when he wrote, “Man has great power of speech, but what he says is mostly vain and false; animals have little, but what they say is useful and true.”¹⁶

With all the current research into communication with animals, it seems that at least some scientists are opening this door—a bit. Perhaps ESP and telepathy still lie beyond the realm of acceptability to most researchers. But the stunning amount of new studies looking at animal cognition, emotion, and intelligence surely indicates that there's a desire to explore what is behind that gaze.

Science might just be heeding the words that nature writer Henry Beston wrote in the early years of the twentieth century. “In a world older and more complete than ours, animals move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”¹⁷

I know one thing: That gaze of Brio's is one I shall never forget. It's the look I call when I'm in trouble. It's the look I hold in my mind's eye when I need to feel peace and harmony, and when I need to feel safe.