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 We’ve all heard the stories. A pet gets lost in wilderness on a family camping trip and finds its way home through hundreds of miles of unfamiliar territory. Your family pet becomes alert at the front door ten minutes before your spouse comes home. Turtles return to the same beach they were hatched to lay eggs after spending years away and traveling thousand of miles in the open ocean. How do they do it? I can’t even find the shop on Main Street with the aid of GPS and my wife can sneak up on me in a lighted room.
In your own home a pet has probably exhibited some extraordinary behavior; predicted an event or noticed something undetectable by normal human senses. Maybe they tried to tell you about it, but you just didn’t understand them. Wild animals exhibit behaviors that defy human logic. Through research we have learned that they are based on complex interactions with the earth such as sensing magnetic fields. To date no special glands have been discovered. Does that mean that animals use their brains in ways we haven’t figured out or has the evolution of human speech and civilization left our minds too cluttered to connect to these abilities? I believe humans can learn from animals and their special abilities. The special skills that animals possess can be divided into three categories: communication, navigation, and intuition.
Communication
The basics of communication state that there is a sender and a receiver (or retriever if you’re talking to your Labrador). Between the sender and receiver is a message that is verbal and non-verbal. It’s the specifics of communication that become complicated.
In humans, verbal communication makes up 45% of the message sent. This is split into intonation and words. Of the aforementioned 45% only 7% of the message is determined by the words used. That means 38% of verbal communication is intonation. Most people can tell the difference between a dog’s warning bark and a playful bark. Cats are more expressive with their voice using upwards to 120 variations in their tone to communicate. Other animals, both domesticated and wild, have vocal intonation abilities. Therefore, animals have the ability to use at least 38% of human communication skills.
Non-verbal communication makes up the other 55% of human communication. It is intuitive to state that animal’s use of non-verbal communication is much higher. When one sense is diminished, another sense is heightened.
Cats are highly expressive non-verbal communicators. You can tell the mood of a cat by looking at the way their eyes are set, ear position, arch of the back, placement of paws, and set of the tail. Dogs and other quadrupeds use similar non-verbal communication. Other forms of animal life have developed their own unique form of non-verbal communication; rattlesnakes rattle, fish blow bubbles, bees dance and whales use tail slaps.
A highly specialized form of non-verbal communication is pheromones, chemical releases that send specific messages via odor. Dogs marking territory with urine is a familiar example of pheromones in use. Chemicals in the urine tell other dogs about the sex, dominance, and the state of health. Other animals use pheromones to mark trails, warn of danger, initiate sexual activity, and a myriad of other information. It is unclear how humans used pheromones in the past. The evolution of hygiene and perfume has masked our pheromones. Often when presented with human pheromones we find them offensive since the main source of pheromones in humans is hypothesized to be from underarm sweat. One possible cause and effect of pheromones in humans is believed to cause females living in close proximity to develop synchronized menstrual cycles.
The form of communication usually not considered by humans is silence. The sound of silence speaks volumes in the animal world and it speaks across species. When one species goes quiet everyone stops to listen. Something important is about to happen.
Navigation
Another part of animal behavior that amazes us and has baffled scientist for ages is how animals navigate. Even today little is known about how animals find their way, but our knowledge is slowly expanding. Birds migrate thousands of miles annually, turtles and salmon spend years at sea before returning to the exact beach or stream where they were born. Whales congregate in small areas of the ocean to breed after living solitary lives for the rest of the year. What are the clues that tell them where to meet? How do they know the time of year? Last time I looked, my whale friends weren’t referring to the calendar on their smart phones. Scientists have not reached agreement to how this happens though there are many hypotheses. The three most popular are that animals use visual navigation, odor maps, and magnetic fields.
Visual navigation is mostly associated with birds and is exactly what it sounds like. As the birds fly overhead it is like looking down on a map. They fly along rivers, mountain ranges and ocean shores. In one experiment pigeons were fitted with GPS devises. When released they found major roads and followed them back to their home. When released in an unfamiliar area, the pigeons would fly in a circular pattern until they found a familiar landmark and then fly along previously established routes.
Navigation by odors has been hypothesized in birds. It is believed that every area of the world has a specific smell or olfactory signature. Birds fly over the patchwork of odors and memorize their location, creating an odor map. When looking to navigate from one area to another they simply catch hints of odor in the breeze and fly to the odor. Several experiments have been conducted and the results are suggestive that odor mapping is possible though not conclusive.
The earth is covered with magnetic fields. In experiments with loggerhead sea turtles is was discovered that they were directed by the direction of the magnetic field. It is known that the turtles upon being hatched instinctively swim from Florida north along the United State coast toward Newfoundland, across the Atlantic towards Europe, south along the coast to Northern Africa, and across the Atlantic again to Florida. A circular current flows along this path and it was long thought that the loggerhead sea turtles were simply following the ocean’s current.
In experiments, the magnetic signatures of the earth were imitated in controlled tanks. When the turtles were exposed to the magnetic fields similar to Florida they swam north in the direction of Newfoundland. When exposed to the magnetic fields similar to Newfoundland the turtles turned to swim east in the direction of Europe. Every time the field was changed the loggerhead sea turtles would swim in the direction of the next location on their circular route. No currents influenced their choice.
To date, no specialized organ has been discovered in the loggerhead sea turtles or any other animal that would explain how they detect the magnetic fields or how they know to follow them in a specific order.
Intuition
Intuition is the ability to understand something without conscious reasoning. Pets have been observed mimicking specific pain in their guardian. Pets seem to know when your spouse is arriving home ten minutes before he/she comes through the door. Just before the Tsunami that ravaged Indonesia and surrounding areas, animals were seen moving to higher ground as if they knew what was coming. Do animals have extra senses, a kind of telepathy, that humans do not or are they using the same senses more affectively?
Studies conducted in Britain by biologist and author, Rupert Sheldrake conclude that pets often become emotionally bonded with their guardian and sense what they are feeling and when they are coming home. Many scientists have questioned Sheldrake’s conclusions stating his experiments were poorly devised with no hard evidence to back his claims. Even with the lack of hard scientific evidence, the fact remains that many animals exhibit behaviors that astound us.
Could animal intuition be an extension of the communication skills noted above? A blind man is known to have heightened hearing and tactical sensory skills.
Doesn’t it make sense that animals that aren’t consumed with higher thought patterns seen in humans are better adept at using their brains and sensory organs to interact with the world around them?
It seems like magic that a pet would mimic the pain of a human that it is closely bonded to. Think about the combinations of senses that we hardly pay attention to that your pet has at its disposal. Back pain for example. You give non-verbal signals that your back is in pain; you move slower, brace your back when sitting, groan with position changes and those are just a few of the visually observable clues. Not much is known about human pheromones, but it is known that there is a chemical reaction in a body in pain. What if your dog can smell the chemical change in you? Your dog has at least five clues that you are in pain and the location.
Take the second example of knowing when your spouse is coming home. Dogs have heightened auditory and olfactory senses, plus the have the ability to judge time. If you doubt that, start feeding your dog at the same time every day. They’ll remind you if you’re even a minute late. Take all this into consideration. Your dog knows the time, not in hours and minutes, but this is the time of day your spouse comes home. They become excited because they love spending time with your spouse. As the car gets closer to the house, they can hear the distinct auditory signature of the car. The last clue is that they can smell you in the driveway. By this time your dog is alert at the door, anticipating interaction from someone they care about.
On December 26, 2004 hundreds of thousands of people were killed by a tsunami resulting from an earthquake near Indonesia. Yet reports indicate that no animal that was free to move was killed by the natural disaster. What did they sense that humans could not? No one knows for sure how the animals managed to predict the danger. Educated speculation range from the ability to sense the vibrations of the earthquake long before humans could, to the ability to sense a change in barometric pressure.
Stories of super animal abilities are fascinating to us. But what can these stories teach us? I think there are two main lessons. Lesson one is that we need to observe and learn from animals. Millions of dollars in research on disaster detection and preparedness have not yielded the results that have been observed in animal behavior. The second lesson is that humans need to become more in tune with their bodies. Learn to quiet the mind and listen. To illustrate my point, how many of you were aware of your breathing and heartbeat before I said anything about it? Now take a second to close your eyes and quiet your mind. How much more pronounced was your breathing and heartbeat? It filled your senses. What would you notice if you concentrated and listened intently to all your senses?
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Friends are the family we choose for ourselves -Edna Buchanan
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