Horse with ESP...?

[NotAnotherChestnut]

My 3yo gets very excited and neighs and calls when she sees me which is all very sweet... But what I want to know is, how, when I am physically out of view, having not yet seen her or made a single noise, does she know I am there and start calling... As I say ESP..??!

 

[cindars]

Same here. I cycle down to the yard every day and she calls when I get to the bottom of the drive, not always a full neigh but one of those warm chuckling noises they make. Nice isn't it?

 

[Morgan123]

Henry Blake has a book on this and did lots of experiments on his own horses (feeding one of a pair bond out of sight of the other) and thought they did!!

 

[Tickles]

You say ESP, I say better sight/hearing/sense of smell (although I'm sure you're delightfully fragrance-free!?!). Some dogs can def distinguish between car sounds so there is no reason your horse couldn't either. Plus, I'm betting you have something of a routine she knows too.

 

[Sarah Sum1]

Yes i think horses and prob animals in general, have a heightend sense of smell, sight, hearing etc. If you think what a lot of aniamls have to deal with prey wise, they need to keep on the ball. Okay nothing hunts your horse, but perhaps it is a built in security system. Either that or ESP

 

[NotAnotherChestnut]

I've just looked up the Henry Blake book and thie extract from the blurb made me smile... "...to use the language a horse uses - telepathy and extrasensory perception - to convince your horse that he wants to do what you tell him." - Do you think she will read my mind if I think about how much I'd like her to stop kicking hay around her bed and mixing it all in..?!

I'm being flippant - and I'm sure it is down to their superior sensory abilities - but it does cheer me up at 6am on a cold rainy morning!

PS Tickles - you're absolutely right about me being delightfully fragrance free... the same can't be said for my yard coat though...!

 

[Sarah Sum1]

It wouldn't suprise me though, as there is a theory that at one point, humans were able to communicate telepathically, So perhaps animals do. One theory as to why humans stopped doing it is that we were presented with many different language barriers and i suppose with animals their talk is the same everywhere. We also started to overwhelm our minds with too many thoughts, so instead of using our minds as a tool, we now use them too much with thoughts constantly in out minds. No room for telepathy. Just a theory i have read.

 

[Dubsie]

Many years ago I knew a dog, who, about 15-20 minutes before his master got home from work, would get up from wherever he was and go and sit on the corner of the sofa and look out of the window down the hill in the direction his owner would drive. Not unusual you might think if he came home same time every day - but the dog seemed to know if there was a late meeting or he'd been delayed in traffic or wouldn't bother if he'd gone off to a meeting the other end of the country and wasn't coming home. No way could he smell or hear his owner in a car 10 miles away on the motorway

Furthermore, when his owner suddenly died (heart attack), he never went to sit on that corner seat again.

 

[Pearlsasinger]

Many years ago when i was at college, a long train journey away from home, we had a lab who always knew when I was coming home, even if no-one else did. There was more than one occasion, when i just got fed up and jumped on a train, instead of going into college that day. The dog would be 'on edge' all day and waiting for me as I got nearly home. This was long before mobile phones and so usually the first my family knew of my return, except for the dog's antics, was when I walked in though the door.
I agree that animals have much more highly developed senses than we do but also think that they have other means of communication that we don't know about. I have occasionally got thoughts from my horses (if that's the right way to put it), like the time when I got a mental picture of a rat in a water bucket and found one there. Or the day that I dreamed about an injured horse and then found that mine was injured.
There are other instances too but I guess you all think I'm crazy now anyway!

 

[cindars]

Our cats used to all go and sit in the window before I got back from work there they would be all waiting for TEA.

 

[FanyDuChamp]

I was chatting with one of my YOs one day, just checking Cappy had been behaving, and he said "he is as good as gold until he knows you are coming, even before you arrive he plants himself in front of his door and won't move"

Strangely a few weeks later we went up with a visiting friend in her car and I sneaked a peek and there he was watching through the door for us, now how did he know it was us? Different car and different time. I think there is something but whether it is ESP I don't know.