The Art of Purring (The Dalai Lama's Cat 2)

By the time the scientist returned there were ten people seated at a table near the bookstore, waiting to have lunch with him. Along with Serena and Bronnie, the group included Ludo and some of his yoga students, Lobsang from Jokhang, and a couple of others I recognized from the book club. As usual, the mood in the café was lively and upbeat; and when the guest arrived, he was welcomed as a much-honored friend. Meals were ordered, drinks poured, and as everyone waited for their food, Sam turned to the biologist and asked, “Are you able to share with us what you’re working on at the moment?”

“Certainly,” he said. “An avenue of research I’ve been exploring for many years is the sentience of animals—what consciousness means in nonhuman beings and how it differs from ours.”

“Like the way dogs can hear pitches that we can’t?” asked one of the book-club members.

“Differences in perception are part of it,” offered the guest. “And it’s interesting how animals are increasingly being used for their perceptive skills. We’re all quite used to guide dogs for the blind, but now we’re seeing much broader applications—for example, diabetes service dogs that alert people to hypoglycemia by detecting odor changes in their breath.

“And then,” he continued, “there are the marked improvements that have been reported in patients with cerebral palsy, autism, and Down syndrome after direct encounters with dolphins. What is it about these particular creatures that can create such dramatic changes? It has been established that the perceptual consciousness of dolphins is in some ways greatly superior to that of humans. What’s more, cetaceans are the only mammals other than humans that clearly demonstrate vocal learning. By better understanding the perceptual and communication powers of dolphins could we develop different treatment modalities for patients with cerebral palsy?”

Sukie from the yoga studio couldn’t contain herself. “I heard a story of a woman who had an experience swimming with dolphins. A dolphin kept nudging her in the abdomen, then without warning it flipped her so that she landed on her back on the surface of the water. She was winded but okay, though she was taken to the ER as a precaution. When they did a scan they found a tumor in her stomach exactly where the dolphin had nudged her. Fortunately, it was treatable.”

The biologist nodded. “There are many such stories, and part of my work is collecting these in a database and having them properly investigated. As you’re suggesting, there are many aspects of nonhuman sentience that go beyond our current understanding but could be extraordinarily useful.

“Animal precognition is well established,” the scientist pointed out. “Since the earliest times, people have recorded unusual animal behavior before earthquakes. Wild and domesticated animals become fearful or anxious, dogs howl, birds take flight. A fascinating example was recorded by a biologist studying the mating behavior of toads in San Ruffino Lake in central Italy. He found that the number of male toads in a breeding group fell from more than 90 to almost none within just a few days. Then there was a 6.4 magnitude earthquake followed by aftershocks. The toads didn’t return for another 10 days. It appears that days in advance they had detected what was about to happen.”

“Earth tremors. Maybe the toads have especially sensitive feet?” someone suggested.

“If so, you would think that seismologists would pick up the same thing,” said the scientist. “Maybe there was some subtle change in the electrical field that they picked up. But you know, it’s not just toads who have this ability. The big tsunami that hit Asia in December 2004 was anticipated by many different species. There were reports of elephants in Sri Lanka and Sumatra moving to higher ground long before the waves struck, and buffalo doing something similar. Dog owners found that their dogs didn’t want to go near the beach for their usual morning walk.”

“A tsunami alert system could be created using animals,” proposed Ludo.

“I’ve suggested that myself,” the biologist said.

“What if the ability to anticipate earthquakes isn’t about seismology or electrical fields?” asked Bronnie. “What if it’s some kind of consciousness that animals have?”

“You mean, a survival thing?” chimed in Ludo.

The biologist turned to them both. “You may well be right,” he said. “There’s evidence that animals have the ability to pick up on things in ways that other people would describe as paranormal. Like the phenomenon of dogs that know when their owners are coming home.”

“You wrote a book about that,” observed Sam.

“Indeed. There’s little doubt that some animals can intuitively detect such things as when their owners are leaving work to come home. There’s closed-circuit TV footage showing the dogs getting up and sitting near the front door or a window at exactly the moment their owners leave the office, no matter what time that is. In some cases, dogs have gotten excited about the imminent arrival of someone who had been away from home for days or weeks at a time. There was a merchant marine who would never tell his wife when he was coming home in case he got delayed, but she always knew anyway, because the dog told her.”

“I always thought dogs were special that way,” announced one of the book-club members.

Lying on the shelf, I bristled. Then I remembered my dream and didn’t bristle quite so much.

“As it happens, there are also reports of cats doing the same thing,” said the scientist. “There’s a wonderful story of a couple who went on a sailing trip for several months, leaving their neighbor to feed the cat. Not even they knew exactly when they’d be returning. But when they came home, they found a loaf of fresh bread and pint of milk waiting for them in their fridge. The neighbors expected them back because for the first time since they’d gone, their cat had gone out to the parking lot in front of their building and spent all day looking up the road.”

There were smiles all around the table.

“You could argue that knowing where your next meal is coming from is an important element of survival,” the scientist said, glancing at Ludo. “And similarly, there’s a lot of data showing that many animals, especially those most at risk from predators, can sense when they’re being stared at, which could be critically important to their survival.”

“He wrote a book on that, too,” announced Sam.

The author laughed.

“There are other elements of animal sentience that go even further. Like the work by Dr. Irene Pepperberg with an African gray parrot called Alex, described in a book I didn’t write”—he smiled at Sam—“but which inspired other researchers. It’s well understood that parrots have the capacity not only to learn words but also to use them meaningfully. They know the difference between red and green, square and circle, and so on. They also understand, and can communicate, the dif

ference between present and absent.

“Another researcher who had an African gray discovered that the bird seemed to pick up on her thoughts. Once when she picked up the phone to dial her friend Rob, the parrot spontaneously said, ‘Hi, Rob.’ Another time, she was looking at a picture of a purple car, and the bird, which was upstairs at the time, called out, ‘Look at the pretty purple.’ Most intriguing of all was the time the bird owner had a dream in which she was using an audio tape deck. The parrot, which slept near her, said out loud, ‘You gotta push the button,’ as she was about to do that in her dream. He woke her up!”

“Mind reader?” asked Bronnie.

“The parrot was rigorously tested on that. I’m oversimplifying, but basically the bird’s responses were recorded as he tried to identify images his owner was looking at in another room. The images were of things like a bottle, a flower, a book, even a naked body. The bird got the naked body right, by the way. In seventy-one trials he averaged twenty-three hits, way more than chance.

“What all of this tells us,” the biologist said, “is that nonhuman beings not only share many elements of consciousness with us but also have different perceptual skills that in some cases may be even more subtle than ours.”