Have you ever noticed that just opening a drawer or cupboard can get your dog excited and running around in circles? Or how you can never find the cat when it’s time to head to the vet’s? It’s uncanny how pets seem to know what you think – but maybe your dog was trying to remind you that you were standing near the “treat” drawer, or the cat heard you pull the pet carrier out of storage.
Nowadays pet psychics are giving the fictional Dr. Dolittle a run for his money by claiming that they can “communicate” with Rover or Kitty. Animals seem to intuitively know when it’s time to get us out of bed in the morning or when we need a cuddle, so it’s not surprising that certain intuitive humans claim they can tell you what your pet is thinking.
A pet psychic, also known as an animal communicator or pet whisperer, is a person who claims to be able to mentally communicate with animals using extrasensory perception. Some pet psychics claim to work supernaturally and communicate with long-dead animals, while others are more like animal communicators or psychologists, helping owners and pets deal with specific issues.
If I could talk to the animals
Pet psychics have appeared regularly in fiction and science fiction, as early as 1920 in The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting, which was made into a movie musical in 1962 starring Rex Harrison, and remade by Eddie Murphy in 1998. Jim Carrey’s 1994 hit movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, co-starring Courteney Cox, was so successful at the box office, it spawned both a sequel and an animated series. The film continues to have a large cult following, and may have contributed to the creation of a whole new profession in North America, judging by the proliferation of online listings of pet psychics.
Among contemporary pet psychics, Sonya Fitzpatrick and her show The Pet Psychic and dog trainer-dog psychologist César Millan and his show Dog Whisperer are two of the more famous. Pet psychics typically claim they can communicate telepathically with animals – living or dead. The number of businesses offering the services of pet psychics has steadily increased but the industry is unregulated and its claims scientifically unverifiable.
No scientific justification
Are pet psychics for real? Pet psychics claim they are communicating with the animals, however, the scientific community has rejected all claims of psychic phenomena. In 1988 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences gave a report on the subject that concluded there is “no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.”
Linguistics professor Karen Stollznow writing for The Skeptic magazine tested a pet psychic with a cat named Jed. Not only was the psychic “completely inaccurate in her reading of Jed’s age, place of birth, background, behavior, health, and my health,…” she was unable to tell that Jed was not her cat. Stollznow concludes that “language is human-species specific. We don’t and can’t ‘know’ what animals think.”
So the next time you think about parting with cold, hard cash for the sake of “communing” with Rover or Kitty, the money might be better spent as a donation to your local humane society or better yet adopt a pet from the shelter.
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