Book review

IN this book three kinds of unexplained perceptiveness are studied - telepathy, sense of direction, and premonitions - all well documented and the studies carried out under scientific conditions to produce credible conclusions.

To begin with a hard and long look is taken at the dog's sense of smell, known to be many, many times greater than our own. But in order to scent an owner on the way home the dog would have to have a sense of smell bordering on miraculous - a sense that worked even when the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. This of course is not possible.

One of the dogs studied was Jaytee, who often waited by the window for his owner, Pam, to arrive home from work. The study covered times when he was at her parents' house and when he was at home in Pam's flat. It was found that he did not always wait there for her, but his behaviour was a matter of degree. In both places, he sometimes waited by the window when Pam was returning and sometimes failed to wait there. In Pam's parents' house the waiting to not-waiting ratio was about 80:20, whereas when he was alone in Pam's own flat it was 30:70.

Experiments with Jaytee concluded that when he was at her parents' house Jaytee usually seemed to know when Pam was coming home, even when she returned at varying times of the day, when she set off at random selected times, and when she travelled in unfamiliar vehicles. His reactions usually began in the 10-minute period before she left work, suggesting that he detected telepathically when she was preparing to go home before she actually started her journey.

The results support the idea that Jaytee knew when Pam was coming home, although he did not always react to her. He did so least when he was left on his own in Pam's flat, and most when he was left with Pam's parents, who paid attention to his reactions, seeming to indicate that the response would be influenced by the circumstances in which the dog found itself.

Another example is the story of Kate Laufer, a midwife and social worker in Solberginoen, Norway, who works at odd hours and returns home at unexpected times. But whenever her husband Walter is home, he greets her with a hot cup of freshly brewed tea. Her husband's uncanny timing can be attributed to the family dog Tild the terrier: "Wherever he is, or whatever he's doing" says Dr Laufer, "when Tiki rushes to the window and stands on the windowsill, I know that my wife is on her way home".

This is a book of recognition - recognition that animals have abilities that we have lost. One part of ourselves has forgotten this; another part has known it all along.

The author as a child was intrigued by the way that pigeons homed. His father often took him to see a liberation of them. At Newark-on-Trent in the English Midlands, racing birds from all over Britain would be waiting in wicker baskets, arrayed in stacks. At the appointed time the porters opened the flaps and out burst hundreds of pigeons in a great commotion of wind and feathers. They flew up into the sky, circled around and set off in various directions towards their faraway homes. How did they do it? No one seemed to know. Their homing ability is still unexplained today.

That and other youthful experiences fed the author's interest in the natural sciences even at that early age. At school he studied biology and other sciences and continued these studies at Cambridge University. But a great gulf began to open up between his own experience of animals and plants and the scientific approach that he was being taught.

As a consequence this is not a book of scientific theory, neither is it a book of psychic animal claims bordering on the fantastic. It is, however, a book that can marry science and nature to study animal behaviour in a logical, ordered and scientific way - a book that has drawn proven conclusions from studies of the facts presented.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard. He took a PhD in biochemistry at Cambridge and was a Research Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. The author of several books and over 50 papers in scientific journals, he is married, has two sons and lives in London.