I run a dog rescue with my wife in Northern New Mexico and part of running a dog rescue means running the dogs. Luckily we have a ton of great, high desert BLM land surrounding our property, and this provides ample opportunity for getting lost and staying lost. To this end, we followed very simple rules, in that there really weren’t any. Mostly I would sight a formation in the distance—a band of cliffs, a particularly tall hoodoo, a dark shadow that might mean a deep canyon—and light out for it. The only thing strange about all of this was that the dogs often seemed to know where we were going before I even made my decision. And this raises some serious questions about the anecdotally purported psychic abilities of pets.
The history of animals with ESP is long and colorful and still a matter of much dispute. Studies have been done. Books have been written. Most scientists still naysay the evidence, but evidence is considerable. There are hundred of stories about telepathic dogs, mostly dogs, sometimes cats, sometimes horses, once in a while a lamb or a goose or a chicken. Snakes and gerbils appear to lack the talent. The most frequent example being dogs who know when their owners are coming home long before they get there. This has been documented in hundreds of cases, caught on film, dissected, analyzed, and still the debate rages on. Personally, I’ve never seen anything like this happen, though no longer dismiss the possibility outright.
There are two reason for this and the first of those emerged from my readings in the field of eco-psychology. For years, researchers have been pointing out that nearly every archaic people to ever walk the earth believed in a time when humans and animals spoke the same language—the so-called dreamtime of the Aborigines being the most famous example. A great many of these cultures also found it completely possible and absolutely normal for people to switch consciousnesses with animals. At first, anthropologists wrote this all off to the abundance of peyote, psilocybin and other psychedelics in traditional religious practices. But this changed when people started realizing that way too many of these cases took place without any drugs involved.
Anthropologist Richard Nelson, who spent many years living with and studying the Koyukukon Indians from northwestern Alaska, wrote of one such occasion in his The Prayers of the Raven: “Rain was falling, and the bird sat on a branch overhead, looking soggy and disheveled. Suddenly it spoke in clear words, ‘My brother. . . my brother, what is going to happen? ’The old man, a shaman, was startled by the voice and worried by its message. Afterward the rain poured down for nine days, flooding bears from their dens and creating general havoc. And then people knew what the bird had meant.”
Ecopsychologists, who see this primarily as proof of our now misplaced relationship with nature, have puzzled this phenomena from dozens of angles. A number of key questions have been raised—like what is meant by a common language for starters. David Abrams, in his excellent book "The Spell of the Sensuous," argues that language emerged from early hunting practices, when knowing how to ape and interpret the animals was often the distance between supper and starvation. “The native hunter,” he writes, “in effect, must apprentice himself to those animals that he would kill. Through long and careful observation, enhanced at time by ritual identification and mimesis, the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and pleasures, its preferred foods and favorite haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of local animals. Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attracts a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and the small scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision…Moreover the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly into the society of other animals.”
What Abrams is also pointing out that traditional people’s outsourced perception. If their information about the world around them came from listening to the language of animals, if they learned to detect a coming storm from the chatter of the birds, if they learned of snakes in the grass by listening to monkey calls in the trees, if they learned basically everything they learned from the animals in their immediate environment, that in itself would bespeak a level of communicative awareness beyond what most of us ever experience. But what I was seeing on those long hikes was slightly stranger.
I would select a destination in the distance and the dogs would frequently head straight towards it, yet they often lit out before I had even moved in that direction. At first I thought this was more of dog’s nearly supernatural ability to detect changes in my body language. If I was selecting a destination from a panorama of desert, then my gaze certainly lingered on that spot longer than it lingered on others. But then I noticed this also happened when the dogs weren’t anywhere near me.
To get to the entrance to the badlands, it requires walking about half-a-mile of road. Since drunk driving is such a problem in my neighborhood (poor farming community), I usually kept the younger, dumber and more rambunctious dogs on a leash for this stretch. They got freed when we got to the trailhead. Usually, they were so wound up by the time I let them go, they would mad dash into the desert and not look back. There were lots of days when I selected our destination in those moments after I unleashed the dogs. What I started noticing was that dogs already long gone, dogs with their backs to me at the time, dogs in a flat out sprint, would change directions if the destination I chose did not lie the way they were heading. They seemed to know where we were going long before I had the chance to tell them.
This is not as bizarre as it sounds. Technically, what I was witnessing is known as flocking—the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities. When a gaggle of geese all lift off and bank South simultaneously this is an example of flocking, as is the behavior of all most other birds, fish, bacteria, insects and occasionally animals that move as packs. Like the evolution of planetary homeostasis, flocking is now considered an emergent behavior. And like all other emergent behaviors, a few simple inputs produce a complex and unexpected, but supremely coordinated output.
Building computer simulations is the main ways that people have learned to study emergence. In 1986, the computer animator Craig Reynolds, who does the special effects for movies, built a simulation program called Boids (bird-oids) in an attempt to study (study is used loosely here as the outcome of this work can be seen in the movement of penguins in Batman Returns) flocking behaviors. The program had three rules governing all the agents involved: separation, alignment and cohesion. Separation is a short range repulsion that helped agents avoid their neighbors. Alignment meant these agents would steer towards the average heading of their neighbors and cohesion mean they would also steer towards the average position of neighbors. These three rules produced all behaviors that futurist and science fiction author Bruce Sterling once described as thus: “they meander around in an unmistakably lifelike, lively, organic fashion. There is nothing ‘mechanical’ or ‘programmed-looking’ about their actions. They bumble and swarm. The boids in the middle shimmy along contentedly, and the ones on the fringe tag along anxiously jockeying for position, and the whole squadron hangs together, and wheels and swoops and maneuvers, with amazing grace…You might say that the boids simulate flocking perfectly—but according to the hard-dogma position of A-Life (Artificial Life) enthusiasts, it’s not a ‘simulation’ at all—this is exactly what birds actually do. This is real ‘flocking’ pure and simple—it doesn’t matter if it’s done by a whooping crane or a little computer sprite."
