Of course, most people communicate with animals all the time; pet lovers are famous for cooing baby talk to their animals and repeatedly asking banal, rhetorical questions like, "Do you want some food?" or "Who's a good boy? Who's a good boy?"
But pet psychics claim to do something more remarkable: They speak to animals and get information back. This is done, they say, by some sort of interspecies psychic power or telepathy.
Of course, psychic communication between humans has never been scientifically proven, so claims of psychic communication between animals and humans begins on very shaky ground. At least humans can share a common language; how a psychic could possibly translate the thoughts and intentions of a parakeet, fish, hamster, horse, spider or any other animal into human language is a mystery.
Yet thousands of people in real life claim to have exactly such a remarkable ability. For example, a Canadian woman named Lauren Bode claims she's a real-life horse whisperer.
Bode says that several horses at Toronto's Far Enough Farm telepathically told her that they are upset about plans to move them from their current location to another farm nearby. They are anxious about the June 30 move and worried about whether they will like their new home.
Bode did not explain how exactly the horses told her this, nor how they got wind of the news about the planned relocation; perhaps they learned enough English to eavesdrop on their trainers' conversations. If so, it would not be the first time that a horse was able to fool humans into believing it could understand languages.
Human-Animal Communication
A 2008 poll found that 67 percent of pet owners say they understand their animals' purrs, barks and other noises, and 62 percent said that when they speak, their pet understands them (or at least their intent).
One in five owners claim that they and their pets understand each other completely. One-quarter of cat owners said they completely understood their pets' sounds, while only 16 percent of dog owners said they were fluent in barks. This is not necessarily psychic power, but intuition, guessing and common sense.
Even something as simple as tone of voice carries a huge amount of information about intent; sharp, loud phrases like "Stop!" convey a clearly different meaning than a smooth, sing-song phrase like, "Hey buddy!"
Most animals (including humans) pick up plenty of accurate nonverbal cues about each other's intents. And, of course, just because pet owners (or psychics) think they communicate great with their pets doesn't mean that the other party feels the same way; just ask any couple.
Testing Pet Psychics
One major problem with trying to prove pet psychic abilities is that usually there's no way to know if the information they give is accurate or not. For example, if a concerned pet owner consults a psychic about her kitty's unusual behavior and is told that her cat says he's acting out because he doesn't like the color of the new drapes in the living room, or a neighbor dog looked at him menacingly, or he senses tension in the marriage, who's to say the psychic is wrong? The psychic could be misunderstanding the cat's messages -- or even making it all up -- and there's no way to prove otherwise.
Read more at Discovery News
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