RUPERT: My interest in the unexplained powers of animals goes right back to my childhood . . . and my interest in homing pigeons. This was really the first area that I started investigating. When I was at Cambridge working on plants I was still very interested in animals, and I used to ask people about homing pigeons. I found that my colleagues in animal behavior really just didn’t know how pigeons found their way home. They didn’t know how navigation occurred in animals. Then, when I was thinking about it, I had the idea that maybe the pigeons were linked to their home in some way through a field, a kind of morphic field. That led me to think of an experiment which is the opposite of the normal experiments with pigeons. The normal experiments involve taking the pigeon from the home. My experiment was the opposite—taking the home from the pigeon. So even while I was at Cambridge doing work on plants, I actually started a project on homing pigeons. I set up a homing pigeon project with a mobile loft in 1973 on a friend’s estate in Ireland.
So I started working on this unexplained aspect of animal behavior right then. This got me into the whole subject of other unexplained aspects of animal behavior. The more I asked people, the more I thought about it, the more such examples came to mind—including the phenomenon of animals knowing when their owners are coming home. So that became the basis really for my investigations that I set forth in my book Seven Experiments That Could Changethe World, published in 1994, in which three unexplained areas of animal behavior are three of the seven experiments—dogs that know when their owners are come home, homing pigeons, and the social behavior of termites. That started me off on a whole new phase of research looking experimentally into these unexplained animal abilities.
DAVID: Why do you think studying the human–animal pet bond is particularly important?
RUPERT: Because there’s a lot we don’t understand about animal behavior, and the animals we know best are the pets that we keep in our houses. There’s a huge amount of information available on these pets from people who keep them. We know far more about them than we do about wild animals—which, after all, we don’t watch that much—or laboratory animals, which are kept under extremely artificial conditions. The behavior of laboratory animals is usually not really observed very closely, and their behavior is always very constrained by the cages they’re kept in and the artificial situations they live in.
Domestic animals are the animals we know best, and which have most to teach us I think.
They also form bonds with their owners, which mean that people are not just external observers, they interact with their animals. This interaction is very interesting to people. It’s one reason they keep pets. After all, they want to have interactions with their animals, and they’re interested in it. So this provides a huge amount of potential material for research. By working with pets, and the bonds between people and pets, we can find out a great deal just by asking people what they’ve noticed. I have a huge database with now more than five thousand cases of unexplained behavior in pets and other domestic animals, and this information really is the starting point for my natural history of unexplained abilities. In cases where it’s possible to test what people observe about their animals and their behavior, we then move on to do experiments.
DAVID: Can you talk a little bit about some of the latest developments in your research with the unexplained powers of animals?
RUPERT: I summarized the main phase of my research in my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home in 1999. Since then I’ve gone on working with animals, most particularly with parrots, and in particular with the parrot Nkisi, belonging to Aimee Morgona in New York. This parrot turns out to be one of the most remarkable animals in the world. He’s an African gray that now has a vocabulary of more than 950 words, which is a world record, and he speaks in sentences. He’s used at least 7,000 different sentences, and he uses language creatively. He also seems to have a concept of self; he uses the word “I.”
So this a completely astonishing situation, of an animal that talks and uses language in a meaningful way—better than chimps or gorillas that have been taught to use language through American Sign Language. He does it in English. You can hear what he says. All this is in itself totally amazing and mind-boggling, but most amazing of all is that he picks up what his owner’s thinking telepathically and comments on her thoughts and intentions—even on her dreams. Sometimes he wakes her up from her sleep by commenting on her dreams. She noticed this and got in touch with me in 2000, and of course I went to visit her as soon as I could in Manhattan to see for myself. And sure enough, what she told me seemed to be true.
We set up a whole series of controlled tests to see if he really could pick up what she was thinking. In these tests we filmed the parrot continuously in one room, and she was in another room—with all the doors closed, on another floor of the house, so there was no sound transmission possible. She looked at a series of photographs that she hadn’t seen before, which were in sealed randomized envelopes. In each trial, she was filmed as she opened an envelope and looked at the picture in it for two minutes. She didn’t say anything. Then we had independent transcription of what the parrot said. Three independent people transcribed it, blind, not knowing what was going on. We then saw whether the words the parrot said matched the picture she was looking at. In some tests the parrot didn’t say anything. But when he did, we could check and see if the words corresponded—and in an astonishingly significant way they did.
In some trials, for example, she was looking at a picture of a man on a phone, and the parrot said, “What’cha doing on the phone?” In other trials she was looking at pictures of flowers, and the parrot said, “Those are flowers. It’s a pic of flies,” and went on talking about flowers. In other trials she was looking at water, and he said the word “water.” When you see the videos it’s pretty obvious that something really astonishing is happening, but of course we had to have them evaluated in an objective way. All the statistics were evaluated independently by a professor of statistics in Amsterdam, and, sure enough, the whole thing is a hugely significant statistically. A paper on this research was published in January 2004 in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and the text is available on my Web site for anyone interested in the details.
From An Interview with Rupert Sheldrake in the book
Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse
Interviews by David Jay Brown
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