Join Our Experiment

We're sponsoring a university experiment to determine if some dogs know when their owners are coming home.

Does your dog have the unexplained ability to know when you’re coming home… even when you come home at odd hours… even when she couldn’t possibly hear your car? If so, then we urge you to join our study.

The first step to joining the experiment is to self-test your dog to see whether they know when you're on the way home. The easiest way to do is to have someone at home with your dog while you’re away running errands. Have the person watching your dog call you on your cell phone and tell you to come home. You might observe your dog 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 normally observe) should be much more noticeable when you’re returning home than when you were out. For example, in experiments carried out by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake of Cambridge University, one dog spent 70% of his time by the window when his owner was on her way home, versus only 20% when she was not.

Other Considerations

While testing your dog, make sure to watch out for:

• 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.

Next Steps

If you’re dog makes it through this first round of testing we'd like to hear from you. Contact us at: info@dogsthatknow.com.

We’ll send you the equipment and resources you need to perform more rigorous testing.

Thanks for participating and good luck.