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Can pets foretell the future?

The question has been asked for decades: Do animals have ESP?

It’s hard to answer because it’s never been proven in humans that such a thing as ESP (extra sensory perception) exists, says Dr. Bonnie Beaver, an expert in animal behavior at the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences at Texas A&M University .

It’s been suspected ESP exists in humans, but not unequivocally proven. The same could be said for the animal world, Beaver says. Some people suspect animals have ESP, but there’s no concrete evidence to say it’s so.

“A lot of the unusual phenomena that deals with animal ESP can be explained as something else,” Beaver says.

“Humans and animals may or not may have ESP, but the scientific proof is still not there yet.”

Take earthquakes. Many animals can sense an earthquake before the first windows in a building start shaking. “But what they are feeling are actually pre-tremors and the ground moving — they can detect it before we can because they feel it,” Beaver says.

“In places where tremors don’t occur often, it’s been noted that animals don’t seem to sense what is coming.”

Likewise, many animals — especially horses and cattle — can sense a thunderstorm before it occurs. That’s true, Beaver says, but it doesn’t have anything to do with ESP.

“Animals get skittish before a storm because they can feel the barometric pressure changing, or they can smell the ozone, or even hear the distant thunder,” she explains. “They are reacting to something that affects them physically.”

When it comes to helping people, Beaver says, some pets are genuinely gifted. Dogs and cats have been known to alert some people when a seizure is about to begin.

“It’s common for animals to sense a seizure in their owners, and some dogs can even be trained to warn a person of an impending seizure,” she says.

“Dogs are very aware of what is normal and not normal behavior in their owners. They can sense the muscles tightening up and the oncoming of spasms and other things that might signal the onset of a seizure. Dogs are great about reading body language of their owners and can sense a ‘shift’ change in people.”

Sometimes, she says, animals can detect danger and they notify their owners accordingly. There are hundreds of cases of dogs or cats awakening their owners to alert them of a house fire or gas leak.

“It’s in their animal nature to ‘save the pack,’ and pets consider their owners as part of their animal pack,” Beaver adds. “What they are doing in a case like a fire is showing concern for their own pack members, which happen to be people.”

Beaver says cats can hear ultra-high frequency sounds better than dogs or humans. Dogs, meanwhile, have highly developed noses, and can detect smells humans can’t.

“You have to ask two questions about animal senses,” Beaver says. “First, can the animal detect it? (the high-pitch sound or strong smell). And second, is it motivated to do anything about it? If the animal is not motivated, it goes on about its business.

“There’s a lot we don’t understand about the sensory capabilities of animals,” she continues. “But before you can begin to talk about ESP, you have to eliminate all the other factors, and when you do, you usually find the reason to explain an action the animal makes.”

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Pet Talk is a service of the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Texas A&M University. Stories can be viewed on the Web at http://tamunews.tamu.edu/.