Every animal owner has their (excuse me) pet theories about their hairy companions—you’ve probably heard the like from friends, if you don’t harbour the same thoughts yourself: “She’s psychic! She always knows when Rebecca is coming home, even if she’s working late and arriving at a whole bunch of different times.”
For a non-pet-owner like me, this is cause for some suppressed eye-rolling. And if you’re a rationalist, you might have ground your teeth over the attempts of pseudo-scientists like Britain’s Rupert Sheldrake to lend credence to these tales of the tail.
And of course gamblers, whose dependence on the fickle humours of fate lends itself to all manner of superstition, are especially susceptible to the promise of tips from the realm of non-human instinct. Seemingly every major sporting event spawns another prognosticating beast, as was demonstrated again the past couple of weeks during the Sochi Olympics, where any college student with a rat and a box could attract story-starved reporters by claiming the rodent could predict which nation would triumph on the rink.
This week, though, reports came out of a study that, while saying nothing of critter precognition, did indicate a neurological basis for a special canine capacity for tuning in on human emotions. And if your imagination runs wild and sloppily like mine, it’s difficult to look at a headline like “How Dogs Read Our Moods” without wishfully substituting “Our Minds.”
It’s a standard feature of humanity’s existential loneliness—and discontentment with the company of one another—that we love to fantasize about alien intelligences, whether from distant galaxies or on the cat mat in the den. Psychic dogs and cats are not only standard tabloid fare (as parodied by unexpected satirist Joe Jonas on the BBC a few years ago—“My psychic dog has healing powers,” he sings, along with the chorus line, “I’m so fat I broke the toilet”). They’re also an irresistible go-to for fantasists and science-fiction speculators.
There are mind-reading fauna all over both genres, from the Star Ka’at books of feline fancier Andre Norton (i09’s tribute puts it well: “Every Kid in the Universe Wants a Psychic Alien Cat Friend”) to the various psychic dogs in Dean Kootz bestsellers, the spaceship-piloting cats of the Instrumentality in the works of Cordwainer Smith, and even, I’m told, telekinetic unicorns in the My Little Pony universe (#NoBrony).
Fans of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy comics are crossing their fingers that Cosmo the telepathic Soviet dog will survive the translation to the upcoming movie version, and from this sample page, I can’t blame them:
But go ahead and disagree—I won’t bite. And you can’t say that for everybody.
