Your Dog Might Be Telepathic!

For all of you who wish your dog came with superpowers, your prayers might have just been answered. Have you ever felt like Ruffus understands you more than anyone else? It turns out your hunch might just be right. In a study inspired by some dogs' ability to 'smell' cancer, published in Learning & Behavior, a team of researchers from the University of Florida decided to study this man-dog connection.

In order to make sure that dogs aren't just really good at reading your body movements, the team involved a group of undomesticated dogs (wolves), and conducted two experiments involving the two types of animals. They "were given the opportunity to beg for food, either from an attentive person or from a person unable to see the potential begger." Astonishingly, both the Wolves and Dogs were successful in begging for food, as both approached the attentive person.


The team concluded that "both species - domesticated and non-domesticated - have the capacity to behave in accordance with a human's attentional state," and that this trait is something dogs are born with. It was also noted that this telepathy is less common and less defined in sheltered and abandoned dogs, suggesting that a dog's acceptance of its owner as a 'companion' helps strengthen this telepathic connection.


Source: http://tinyurl.com/3qb8prq

Now for some personal anecdotal evidence of this--I'll keep it short. Promise:

My grandfather owns two German Sheppard dogs, which he occasionally takes out to the family farm where they can run around freely; they obviously love this. The interesting part about this is that every time my grandfather makes a conscious decision to take them to the farm, the dogs (who are outside in a courtyard, physically separated from my grandpa) become ecstatic and wait for him right by the door, as if they know what's about to happen. This also occurs on random days and at random times each day, as to exclude the possibility of the dogs following a pattern (sorry to all you devil's advocates :( ).