Pippa White
The Canine Early Warning System
When our darling lurcher, Ellie, was alive she had an extraordinary capacity for knowing when my husband was turning off the motorway. C commuted weekly to Kent, leaving very early on Monday morning and coming home Thursday or Friday after work.
Whether she heard the telephone calls or knew the routine or read me, I shall never know, but exactly 12-15 minutes before he would arrive home, Ells would start to agitate and tell me that he had turned off the motorway.
She was ever thus. Knowing when we arrived to meet her in Rutland that she would be going home with us (her decision – which you can read about in The Dog With The Wind In Her Hair), when we were having people to dinner and when we were going to leave her to go to church.
But the interesting point about this was that the instinctive knowing cut both ways. On our first wedding anniversary I had just finished preparing dinner for a little party, looked up at the clock, saw it was three o’clock and thought “Just time for a little…”. I never finished my thought about a rest, for another immediately flashed across my mind, “Get your Barbour and wellies now”.
At that precise moment C rang and told me to come to the front door. My reply: “I already know. I’m there.”
Rushing out of the door, I jumped in the car to find Ellie with a huge gash in her leg and bleeding profusely. C told me she had been chasing a young deer who had clearly turned upon her. We were very lucky to find a vet in 15 minutes, despite our normal vet being closed, and she was in the operating room within half an hour.
I still suspect that had I not picked up the SOS signals they, C and Ellie, was emitting we might not have been so lucky. She recovered beautifully thanks to the very good vet who came in the moment she was paged.
So, in an effort to unravel this I turned to a book by one of my favourite writers and researchers, Rupert Sheldrake, whose theory of morphic fields is deemed unscientific and revolutionary. (I think we should remember that Einstein’s theories were rejected in 1905 and Sheldrake’s bear a great deal in common with his, positing the morphic field as a space/time construct.)
Sheldrake’s take on the doggie instincts is that social groups are organised by morphic fields, and these groups may be inter-species such as the human-canine bond. (Peter Tompkins goes even further in his famous book The Secret Life of Plants, who has been similarly ostracised by some members of the scientific community, that plants possess a knowing instinct too.)
Sheldrake relates a lovely story of Lord Beaverbrook’s black Labrador who would always know when his master, who was the RAF's No. 68 Squadron Commander, was returning back from an operation during World War 11.
There are many other lovely stories in the book, which discounts any theories about smell or hearing a car or engine, and there are stories which demonstrate “spooky action at a distance” in terms of canine behaviour in anticipation of the loved one’s homecoming.
Robbie, my first Bedlington lurcher cross, was even quicker on the draw when I first got him. I had visited the kennels where he was being housed as a “rescue” the day previously and turned up early to collect Robbs to take him home for the first time. Imagine my surprise when I merely presented myself in the office to confirm my details and there was the most extraordinary howling going on from behind the locked gates. Without even seeing me, and just briefly hearing my voice, Robbie started to bark loudly. The girl at the kennels said to me “He knows that you are coming to take him home!" Indeed, I did and for fourteen happy years.
And Ellie, in Rutland, how did we know that she had made the decision to live with us? Whilst we were still inside the house talking to her foster mother, she slunk out and we emerged to find her standing by our car with a most determined look on her face. Doggie decision indeed and maybe telling telepathics too!
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