Dogs That Know: Participate

From OpenSourceScience

Contents 1 Testing Your Dog 2 Other Considerations 3 Next Steps 4 Tell Us Your Story

Testing Your Dog

Do you and your dog have a special connection? Does your dog seem to know when you’re coming home, even at odd hours? If so, your dog might be a good candidate for our experiment, and could earn a $1,000 prize offered to dog owners who successfully participate.

The first step to joining the experiment is self-testing your dog to see whether they can anticipate your intention to return home. The easiest way to do is to have someone at home with your dog while you’re away running errands. Then, have the person watching your dog call you on your cell phone and tell you to come home. If your dog is tuned-in to your return trip home you should observe them spending more time at the door or window when you’re on your way.

This anticipating behavior (e.g. sitting at the window, or door, or anything else you observe) should be much more noticeable when you’re returning home than when you were out. For example, in Sheldrake’s experiments he found that Jaytee spent 80% of his time by the window when his owner, Pam, was on her way home, versus only 20% of his time by the window other while she was out running errands.

Other Considerations

• Routine. Try and make sure your dog isn’t cluing into your normal schedule. If you always come home at 5:47 pm, allow your schedule to slip by 15 minutes and see what happens.
• Distractions. Take note of ordinary distractions (e.g. other dogs walking by) that interrupt the normal patterns your observing.
• Hit or miss. Make sure to keep track of the times when your dog doesn’t pick up on your trip. Recording misses is just as important as recording hits.

For additional pitfalls to avoid take a look at these tips by Skeptic Dr. Richard Wiseman.

Next Steps

If you and your dog make it through this first round of testing we'd love to hear from you. Contact us, we’ll send you the equipment and resources you need to perform more rigorous testing.

Thanks for participating and good luck.

Tell Us Your Story

Do you have a great psychic dog story? Or, want to tell us about experience with these experiments? Drop us a note, or create your own page right here on the OpenSourceScience website. Here are some of the stories we've recieved:

• Canela
• Gunner
• Soliloquy (a.k.a. Lily)
• Bella