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Your Pet’s Sixth Sense: Extrasensory or Extra-Sensitive?

You may have heard stories about cats hissing at something unseen on the ceiling, dogs growling at the stairs down to the basement or pets refusing to enter the spare room at the end of the hall. You may have laughed those stories off or even enjoyed a good shiver. Either way it’s likely you’re at least a bit skeptical about them. But have you heard about pets acting peculiar moments before an earthquake? How about a dog that always seems to know when its owner is coming home? Or one that can smell cancer?

A look at the phenomena of the heightened senses of animals or possible sixth sense of your pets may have you thinking twice the next time you catch your cat intently watching nothing coming down the stairs.

Heightened Senses or Sixth Sense?
Why do some animals exhibit behavior consistent with what we would consider extrasensory perception (ESP)? It’s well documented that animals have access to a perceptual range far greater than that of humans. Perhaps, given humans’ relatively high visual orientation, we may be less apt to rely on other senses and thus miss cues or other indicators readily apparent to an animal with an acute sense of smell or hearing.

Such a sensory advantage could make an animal’s response to certain stimuli seem amazing, even miraculous, to us comparatively insensitive humans. Yet some people argue that in many cases, animal perceptions defy traditional explanations; they are pursuing answers using less conventional perspectives.

Animals, Earthquakes and ESP
Instances of odd, often fearful behavior of animals prior to earthquakes have been recorded for centuries. Geologists are skeptical regarding reports of this erratic behavior, citing “the psychological focusing effect,” whereby people recall certain things only because of the occurrence of an incident like a disaster. Though others think that animals’ premonitory reaction to earthquakes may be caused by subtle vibrations in the earth, subterranean gas releases or shifts in the earth’s electromagnetic field.

The devastating December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, (which killed nearly 187,000 people) is used as an example because of the striking lack of animal deaths that accompanied it. Many natural phenomena like earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis generate infrasound, which are low-frequency sounds below the range of human hearing. Thus, many animals, like elephants, that use infrasound might’ve been tipped off and literally headed for the hills. In some cases, humans who heeded the animals’ unwitting warning survived the tsunami’s impact.

Research on the use of animals in disaster prediction is ongoing. Japanese researchers are working with mice. Chinese researchers have had notable success with dogs; however, while they have established a reproducible link between animal behavior and earthquakes, the disparate character of earthquakes means not every event triggers prescient animal behavior.

Many people remain unconvinced by traditional science’s efforts to explain the heightened senses of animals. Controversial British biologist Rupert Sheldrake's research on the paranormal has identified three broad categories of unexplained animal perceptiveness:

• premonitions
• sense of direction
• telepathy

He backs his theories with empirical data, and his work has been published in various academic journals. Sheldrake’s work has been criticized sharply by skeptics, including the British psychologist Richard Wiseman who has reached opposite conclusions when conducting the same studies as Sheldrake.

Animal Walk
While science suggests that migratory animals’ sense of direction is attributable to the processing of numerous stimuli and cues, instinct or even to some kind of innate compass based on actual magnetism, very little conclusive empirical evidence exists to prove these theories. Even if such evidence existed, it would not explain how a pet could find its way home from a strange and distant place or locate an owner who moved hundreds of miles away.

Cancer Detection: The Dog Nose Test
Research on a dog’s ability to detect cancer has been conducted since 1989, after a pet likely saved an English woman from a malignant melanoma on her leg. The dog constantly sniffed at a mole until the woman sought dermatological treatment. Rather than anything paranormal, what’s at work here is a dog’s keen olfactory sense, which is 10,000 to 100,000 times superior to the human sense of smell.

Rigorous studies have yielded dogs trained to use their noses on samples to identify biochemical markers, possibly metabolic waste products, which are indicative of bladder, lung and breast cancer. Given the robustness of their findings, researchers are confident about the genuine existence of this canine gift, yet they remain concerned about devising a feasible detection system centered on dogs.

Feelings, Nothing More Than Animal Feelings
While many researchers reject the idea that animals have a sense of self or are capable of sophisticated secondary emotions, many pet owners would argue that their animals have feelings and are sensitive to their moods.

Here are examples of how dogs might sense human emotions:

• Dogs can often sense human fear.
• Guilt-ridden dogs sometimes hide to avoid punishment, sensing owner anger and disappointment.
• Some dogs’ behavior changes when their owners are depressed.
• Some dogs react unhappily when humans argue.

More Sensitive Than Humans
It’s unlikely your parrot will squawk, “I see dead people,” anytime soon, but there’s enough evidence to suggest that animals are more sensitive to the world than humans.