A Wonderful Account of an NDE

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

I still can’t write without pain – it seems I may have a pinched nerve and am having an MRI today – but I wanted to take just a moment to share a very inspiring NDE account with you that I recently received from a friend. Just the thing to lift our sagging spirits during these dispirited times. It will reassure you that much better times are ahead for us – someday – no matter how the election turns out and what may follow in the short term.

It will take a half hour. You won’t regret taking the time to watch it.

A Farewell to Arm

 By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

About seven weeks ago, after a stint of over-zealous typing, I found that I had developed a very painful condition in my right shoulder – actually, it turned out, with my trapezius muscle – that made it very difficult, and indeed often painful, to type. Soon I was forced to forego all but the most essential e-mail, and even then had to keep it brief. I was completely stymied, flummoxed, and frustrated. It’s been that way ever since, and nothing I have tried, including a cortisone shot and physical therapy, has seemed to help. So I remain a one-armed involuntarily retired blogger.

Some people have suggested that I should try dictating my blogs, but unlike our unfortunate President who, at this writing, is hospitalized after contracting the COVID virus, I have never yearned to become a dictator. I believe I should retain my mouth mostly for eating; I still prefer to let my fingers do my talking, but alas, they seem to be connected to my arm, and that’s the rub, literally.

Perhaps this is simply God’s way of telling me to shut up and be quiet for a while. Since He is inscrutable in these matters, who knows? In any case, I will have to suspend writing any more blogs for the nonce, and maybe for good. I had not really planned to write any more blogs, anyway, after this year, so I will just have to take my leave of you a bit earlier than I had planned. However, for those of you who receive my monthly blogs on the 15th of each month, since they have already been written, they will continue until December, even if I don’t.

I sometimes think I will never recover, but I have been told that perhaps in a couple of months or so, I might. Although I am not religious, I devoutly hope so. I know that a number of you who have been kind enough to comment on my blogs have wanted to correspond with me. Ordinarily, I would have been happy to oblige, but, as you can understand, that is not possible for me right now. However, if you would still like to write me, please send any messages to my webmaster, Kevin Williams, who will then forward them to me. I will save them and hope to answer them eventually. Kevin’s e-mail address is:  webmaster@near-death.com

A once famous general, when he gave his retirement speech, concluded it by saying, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." Perhaps the same thing might hold true for old NDE researchers and late-season bloggers. In any case, friends, "so long, it’s been good to know you…"

A Whale of a Story

 By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

If you’ve been following my recent series on the lives of animals – admittedly, an escape and distraction from the dreadful sorrows of our time under the COVID cloud and the cruelties and violence in America these days perpetrated by us human animals – you will know that so far I have concentrated on the smaller and familiar creatures in our everyday world. So we have explored a bit about the lives of bats, prairie dogs, crows, cats, and the occasional stray dog who has managed stealthily to stroll into my stories. Now maybe it’s time to increase the scope of our focus to something in the megafauna range where we find animals of truly super-size dimensions. How about if we swim with whales for a while?

Lately I’ve been re-reading portions of the book, Beyond Words, that I alluded to in an earlier blog. Just to remind you, it was written by the naturalist and ecologist, Carl Safina, who works as a self-confessed hard-headed scientist but can’t help writing like a poet.

One section of his book describes his experiences while spending time with a man named Ken Balcomb who is a well-known marine biologist and one of the world’s leading experts on killer whales, which he has been researching for the last forty years. Balcomb lives up near Vancouver Island where in one of the straits off the particular island on which he lives, many killer whales make their home. Balcomb spends a lot of his time hanging out with these whales, whom he now knows well enough to identify individually, and Safina spent a lot of time hanging out with him, learning about these marvelous creatures.

Just as I drew extensively on a book by Rupert Sheldrake when I was writing about cats, so I will base this essay almost entirely on what I learned from Safina’s book. But to prevent confusion, let’s get one thing straight from the outset.

Killer whales (often called orcas, though Safina prefers to call them killer whales) are actually dolphins. They’re just whale-sized denizens of the ocean. In fact, they are the largest species of dolphins in the world. They can range in size from 23 to 32 feet and can weigh up to 6 tons! Like elephants, they can live up to 50 or 60 years, though some, if rarely, have lived beyond 80. Killer whales, like bats, use echolocation to communicate and hunt, but they can also communicate by making sounds that can travel for many miles.

As their name implies, they are ferocious predators. Up where Balcomb lives, there are two main types of killer whales. One is called "residents" and they feed primarily on salmon. The other, dubbed "transients," feast off of mammals. These two types tend to steer clear of each other.

One last thing before we begin to explore the lives of these mammoth but magnificent mammals. Their name is misleading. Although they can indeed be savage when it comes to their prey, they can actually be very gentle and playful, as we shall see, and there is no record of any human being having been attacked much less killed by any killer whale in the wild. In fact, quite the opposite, as we shall also discover.

For a brief introduction to some of the basic facts about the nature of killer whales, let’s begin with what Safina has to say about them on the first page of his account:

[Killer whales are] intelligent, maternal, long-lived, cooperative, intensely social, devoted to family. They are, like us, warm-blooded milk-makers, mammals whose personalities are really not much different from ours. They’re just a lot bigger. And notably less violent.

Now let me begin to elaborate on some of these features and eventually illustrate them through some of the stories about killer whales that Safina relates.

First, consider the social structure of the resident killer whales who particularly fascinated Safina. Like elephants, their basic social unit is a family headed by a matriarch around whom swim her children and her daughter’s children. But where the family unit differs from that of elephants is in regard to the male killer whales. They never leave their mothers; they remain with her for their entire lives. Thus, the mother-child bond among killer whales is extremely strong as long as the mother lives. But if she should die, so often do her children, especially her male offspring; they can’t live without her nurturance and guidance. The death rates for male children, thirty-years-old or higher, are anywhere from three to eight times that of comparably aged males with intact families. 

Now, let’s talk about how killer whales behave.  

One of the most striking things about them, and from an early age, is how sexual they are. They often masturbate against objects and males regularly engage in sex play with one another. They just seem to love sex, as one whale researcher commented: "Dolphins love to have sex and they have it a lot."

Not surprisingly, dolphins are very playful. They seem to love to cavort. Balcomb jokes that "they love to party." And their play tends to be frolicsome, and not aggressive at all. In contrast to chimps, for example, Safina says that they are more peaceful and goes on to comment:

For all their heft and dental weaponry, when they find themselves in close proximity they either socialize or leave. Researchers have long been impressed by the absence of aggression among free-living killer whales.

As the foregoing comments imply, dolphins have a highly developed need for social contact. Some researchers think it is even stronger and more intense than in humans. And research shows that if killer whales are deprived of social interaction, they suffer and can go into physical decline.

One of the points that Safina makes repeatedly about killer whales is that each of them has a distinct personality. They are individuals, just as we are, with their own personal ways and behaviors. And many researchers who have been able to "get up close and personal" with killer whales have been struck with their undeniable presence. Here are just a few such observations:

Dolphins and humans have not shared a common ancestor for millions of years. Yet for all the seeming estrangement of lives lived in liquid, when they see us they often come to play, and we greet them and can recognize in those eyes that someone very special is home. "There is someone in there. It’s not a human, but it is someone," says [whale researcher] Diana Reiss. 

[One researcher said] You realize this is not a reptile … This is somebody. When he looked at you, someone else said, his gaze "had need in it, and your empathy lit up right away." People saw "an awareness, a presence, a longing" [for contact].

It was hard to accept that level of awareness and intention in something that did not look in any way human. A sense washed over me that this orca was just as aware of living as I was … This was overwhelming.

Finally, according to Ken Balcomb:

A whale’s stare is much more powerful than a dog looking at you. A dog might want attention. The whales, it’s a different thing. It’s more like they’re searching inside you.

And any number of persons, whether they be researchers or simply others who have interacted with killer whales, have commented on the sense of awe and wonder that they inspire. 

One reason that killer whales evoke these reactions must surely be their obvious intelligence. Safina devotes a whole chapter to this subject, and although it’s clear that the intelligence of killer whales is different from ours, it is equally evident that it is highly developed. Furthermore, their neocortex has a greater amount of surface area relative to total brain size than humans brains do, and although humans have more cortical neurons than killer whales, the difference is only marginal. In any case, there is no doubt about how intelligent they are; they are fully conscious beings – like us.

And there is more to their intelligence, too. As with some of the other animals we have considered in this series, there is strong anecdotal evidence that they are telepathic. And since my previous blogs have explored this subject – which professionals call "animal psi," -- let’s now take some time to recount some of the stories that not only suggest that this faculty is highly developed in killer whales, but often gives rise to a sense of the uncanny. 

Because Safina is an avowed skeptic in these matters, he can’t resist entitling a long chapter in his book, "Woo Woo." Nevertheless, by the time he reaches the end of it, he is forced to admit that there are mysteries here he cannot quite explain away. And although he hangs onto his skeptical worldview, his last words are, "What in the world is going on?" Well, let’s see what you make of it. 

In fact, Safina seems to go out of his way and against his own prejudices to make a number of references to animal trainers who have worked with dolphins who cannot shake their sense that dolphins are telepathic. So we find statements like the following: "Then something happened that made me careful about my thoughts about whales ever since … They can read your mind. We trainers see this kind of stuff all the time." And again, "When the trainer at Marineland of the Pacific said that killer whales can read your mind, she wasn’t joking." Another researcher, who had given no indication that she was about to finish her work, wrote "the dolphins seemed to know that we were leaving and gave us a grand send-off. I have often wondered how they knew." And still another trainer, who confessed she was stupefied at how dolphins had seemingly intuited what she had wanted them to do (perform a novel trick) said "we don’t know how they do it." Safina himself could only wonder: "dolphin telepathy?"   

Safina does recount some stories to illustrate these mysteries that seem to point to the telepathic sensitivities of these whales but because of space limitations, I would prefer to focus on one other remarkable type of their behavior: rescues of people or other animals in distress. 

Perhaps one of the most paradoxical things about killer whales, despite the fact that they have been hunted down and savagely killed by humans for many years, is not only do they not respond in kind, but only with kindness itself. As Safina remarks, "The fact is, killer whales seem capable of random acts of kindness." However, I don’t think that’s quite accurate. Their acts of kindness are not random; they are targeted and deliberate.

For example, Balcomb told Safina of a number of instances, including one where he himself was involved, of getting lost in terrible fog without a GPS, when suddenly a group of killer whales appeared. Balcomb followed them for fifteen miles and found, when the fog lifted, he was home. In some cases, whales have led lost sailors safely to their port without even knowing the seaman’s destination – or did they?

For another, let me quote one that Safina himself was told by his own editor. He was kayaking off the Georgia coast  when…

"the wind and tide suddenly changed and conditions became challenging. He didn’t know the area well and was beginning to grow worried. Soon dolphins appeared, flanking him, seemingly piloting him. He went with them, and they brought him to an inlet where he could get to safely."

Now let me cite one such story at length in order to provide a sense of how uncanny some of these rescues seem to be.

Once, Alexandra Morton [a whale researcher] and an assistant were out in the open water of Queen Charlotte Strait in her inflatable boat when she was enveloped by a fog so thick she felt like she was "in a glass of milk." No compass. No view of the sun … A wrong hunch about the direction home would have brought them out into the open ocean. Worse, a giant cruise ship was moving closer in fog so reflective Morton could not tell where its sound was coming from. She imagined it suddenly splitting the fog before it crushed them.

Then, as if from nowhere, a black fin popped up. [And then several more.] As they clumped close to her tiny boat, Alexandra followed in the fog like a blind person with a hand on their shoulder. "I never worried," she recalled. "I trusted them with our lives." Twenty minutes later, she saw a materializing outline of their island’s massive cedars and rocky shoreline … The whales had taken Morton to her home.

Morton felt changed. "For more than twenty years, I have fought to keep the mythology of orcas out of my work. When others would regale a group with stories of an orca’s sense of humor or music appreciation, I’d hold my tongue … Yet there are times when I am confronted with profound evidence of something beyond our ability to scientifically quantify. Call them amazing coincidences if you like; for me they keep adding up … I can’t say whales are telepathic – I can barely say the word -- but I have no explanation for that day’s events. I have only gratitude and a deep sense of mystery that continues to grow." 

Why these killer whales are motivated to help us we can never know with certainty, but what is certain is that they do and such stories are legion. For another kind of frequent helping behavior, consider this remark of Safina’s: "From antiquity to recent times, stories recounting dolphins pushing distressed swimmers to the surface are too numerous to track." And then he proceeds to give some examples.

In some cases, they can even alert human beings to a life-threatening situation before it turns fatal. Consider this case:

One foggy day, the biologist Maddalena Bearzi was taking notes on a familiar party of nine bottlenose dolphins who’d cleverly encircled a school of sardines near the Malibu pier. "Just after they begin feeding, one of the dolphins in the group suddenly left the circle, swimming offshore at a high speed. In less than an instant, the other dolphins left their prey to follow."

Berzi thought this was very odd, so she followed, too. The upshot? She found "an inert human body with long, blond hair floating in the center of the dolphin ring. Berzi again: "Her face was pale and her lips were blue as I pulled her fully dressed and motionless body from the water."

Somehow she survived and said that she had been intent on committing suicide. The dolphins wouldn’t let her. They saved her life.

Why? All Safina could say is "Such things are profound."

But after recounting these and other cases, Safina is left to try to puzzle them out.

How do we explain the facts of so unexpected a truce [between killer whales and humans], so unilateral a peace? It seems to me that it is, yes, a big leap to go from the fact of no aggression to the idea that killer whales have chosen to be a benevolent presence and occasional protectors of lost humans. But what do whales think? How is it that all of world’s free-living killer whales have settled upon this one-way relationship of peacefulness with us? Before I encountered these stories, I was dismissive. Now I feel shaken out of certainty. I’ve suspended disbelief. It’s an unexpected feeling for me. The stories have forced open doors I had shut, doors to that greatest of all mental feats: the simple sense of wonder, and of feeling open to the possibility of being changed. 

Perhaps just from reading these stories, you, too, would be moved to wonder why these huge animals who can indeed be killers when it comes to other sea life have nevertheless formed such a regard for the welfare of human beings, which almost seems – dare I say it? – like a kind of love.

Toward the end of his book, Safina lets a psychologist by the name of Paul Spong have the final word about these killer whales, which pretty well sums up Safina’s own view about them.

Eventually my respect verged on awe. I concluded that Oricinus orca is an incredibly powerful and capable creature, exquisitely self-controlled and aware of the world around it, a being possessed of a zest for life and a healthy sense of humor and, moreover, a remarkable fondness for and interest in humans.

This would seem to the point to end this essay, but there is more to the story of these killer whales that must be added.

They are in trouble, and Ken Balcomb has been in mourning because he can see the writing on the water. It appears that these wondrous creatures to whom he has devoted his life, like so many species, may be doomed to extinction. 

Why?

There are several factors at play here. To begin with, in the 1960s and 1970s, many young whales were captured, which has led to a long-term problem. Without these whales to mature and breed, the population has been decreasing. Now their numbers, already down to 80, are continuing to decline. Balcomb says they are losing one or two a year.

But that isn’t the worst thing. These resident killer whales feed off salmon, but there is no salmon protection act, and the stocks have been declining because of over-fishing. When the salmon go to humans, they are not there in sufficient quantity to support these whales. On learning all this, Safina is moved to write ruefully, "First we took their children, then we destroyed their food supply." Balcomb tells him that in one of the three existing pods there is not one matriarch left to breed, and Safina remarks: "He looks at me while it sinks in: this whole family is doomed." Furthermore, over 40 percent of baby whales have died before they reach the age of even one year. If these trends continue, these pods will cease to exist in a few decades.

And that’s not the end of it either. We are also poisoning the oceans with our toxic chemicals, and they, too, are sickening and killing these whales. [According to Rebecca Giggs, in her book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, the earth’s most toxified animals are the killer whales who live in Washington’s Puget Sound.] And since whales are at the top of the food chain, they are particularly vulnerable, and the baby whales that are born are the recipients of this bitter fruit. No wonder so many of them die young.

As if that isn’t enough to break your heart, let me quote this passage to illustrate the latest assault on the lives of these whales.

Balcomb shows Safina some photographs of a three-year-old female named Victoria, and says of her: 

"A sweet little whale. A favorite of whale watchers here, very playful. Jumping all the time. Very outgoing and vivacious. A real charismatic whale. Just a sweetie.

Found dead. Look at these photos." Her young corpse looks battered to death. Hemorrhages all over her head, blood in her eyes and ear canals. These next images show her ear bones actually blown off their attachments. I’m trying to assimilate these images while Ken is saying … "We had whales on the hydrophones. It was night. Then we heard the navy sonar. And then, an explosion."

Ken explains: "When the shock wave hits, rapid compression of air in internal spaces such as the ears creates enough of a vacuum to make the adjacent blood vessels – which are pressurized – burst. Once burst, that’s it; they just continue bleeding … At less than a hundred yards, military sonar alone can also create fatal hemorrhaging."

Our U.S. Navy is killing these whales. It is continuing and getting worse. Balcomb believes that, worldwide, thousands of whales are being killed in this way.

There are more gruesome stories like Victoria’s in Safina’s book, but there is no point to give further examples. You can already see what we humans are doing to destroy these creatures who only want to befriend and play with us.

This, it seems, is what we humans do to our animals, and with impunity since they have no political rights. We either exploit them or eat them or, what we appear to do best, kill them. It goes without saying that there are many good and caring human beings, but as a species, has there ever been a more deadly predator on earth? We seem to have a penchant for destroying everything including now our own planet.

As for our megafauna, there are few left now. Our elephants and rhinos may well be extinguished by the end of the century, and we can only hope that our whales will survive somewhat longer. In the meantime, as we suffer from an increasingly hot planet, they will have to cope with living in waters that are not only no longer healthy for them but full of dangers they have no way to avert. Let us treasure them while we can.

Do Our Pets Have an Afterlife?

 By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

We all know what happens when we die – we don’t.  

At least that’s what most of us believe, whether by religious faith or because we’ve been convinced by the collective testimony of near-death experiencers or perhaps for other reasons. But whatever the basis of our beliefs, we hold that life isn’t a dead end. Upon death, we just continue to exist in another form.

But what about our pets? The philosopher, Martin Heidegger, as you may recall, argued that animals don’t die; they simply disappear, he said.  

But do they? Are they so unlike us – creatures without a soul, according to Descartes – that upon their physical death, they simply cease to exist?

Don’t be too sure. Let’s look at the evidence first before we reluctantly consign our pets to perpetual oblivion.

Janice Holden is the current President of The International Association for Near-Death Studies, an organization I co-founded almost forty years ago, and the longtime editor of The Journal of Near-Death Studies. She is certainly a recognized authority on NDEs. In a recent interview, she asserted that although she was unaware of any systematic research dealing with the perception of pets during NDEs, nevertheless, there are numerous reports that people were reunited with beloved deceased pets during their NDEs. I have also been assured by P.M.H. Atwater, another well-known NDE researcher, that it is not just dogs and cats that are perceived by NDErs, but pet birds as well.    

Here, however, in line with my previous blogs, we will focus just on cats and dogs. And for this purpose, we can draw on the work of Jeff Long, another prominent NDE researcher. Jeff also hosts the most important and widely regarded NDE website, The Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (or NDERF), and has collected quite a few cases of this kind. Let’s now just consider several of those in his files.

I will not take the space here to quote the entirety of these NDE reports or give the circumstances of their occurrence. Instead, I will just quote the relevant portions concerning their perception of deceased pets.

Michael

As I raised my head up from the ground to look around, I saw my deceased dog from my childhood bounding towards me. I remember exclaiming her name at the top of my lungs as I saw her bounding towards me. It was overwhelmingly wonderful. I felt completely at peace and totally happy. I was so excited to see her again, and I did not question the experience at the time. It was as if she had never died and she had always been waiting for me to wake up from my nap in the grass. The thought "why is my dead dog here?" never occurred to me. The thought "where am I and why am I laying in this field of grass?" never occurred to me. Everything was simply as it was supposed to be. 

The experience was very brief, but VERY real. An entire reality was just as real as our world is now. There was not a single aspect of that experience which did not feel real.

Tracy

A dog's tail weaved through the tall grass. A beautiful fuzzy puppy wagged her tail at me. At first, I did not recognize her. I had never seen our dog as a puppy. I was so happy to see her. We had to put her down two weeks prior to my daughter's birth. She had injured her hip. We had given all the surgery we could to keep her, but it did not make her quality of life better - it had become much worse. We had her put down on my due date. Our hearts were so heavy with the loss of the dog that generously shared her life with us for 12 years. 

Kustav

I saw a piece of floating land in the distance. It had one pine tree and covered in snow. I was still so cold, but decided to go to that tree. Below the tree, I heard a meow. I looked down, and saw Elmar! Elmar was a white Persian cat. I could not believe it. He was watching me. His beautiful green eyes and long, luscious white fur. Suddenly, I realized I had hands. I was surprised by this. I picked up Elmar. While I held him, he purred. No longer did I feel cold. His fur completely warmed me up and I felt the energy of his love. It was just like old times. I began to cry in feeling of happiness. I could even smell him exactly the way he used to smell. I put him down, and could tell from his purring and rubbing up against me that I would be o.k., whether that meant returning to life or staying on this floating Island. Then, I realized Elmar's eyes had the same look as I remembered when something got his attention. 

Wayne

There was a Boston terrier dog standing beside her. We had always had Boston Terriers as pets when I was a kid but I didn't recognize this particular dog. 

As a side-note, I went through a big box of old family photos and I found the dog with my grandmother. Her name was Trixie and she was our household pet when I was born in 1956. I don't remember her though as she was put to sleep around 1958. It was definitely, absolutely Trixie with my grandma.

Jonathan

I then became distracted by figures to my right which were all my former pets (dogs and cats that had died) climbing over each other to get to me, they gave me the impression of me just getting home from a long trip as they seemed very excited to see me.

Yvette

I'm in a park. Green grass was everywhere. It was very pretty and very clean. I see a black cat running up to me. It's my Amigo, my black cat who had passed away 6 months earlier. He runs towards me and leaps into my arms. He feels exactly the same. He was always a solid cat from his years on the streets. I hold him tight, I am so happy to see him. Joy fills me!! I cry a little bit. I hold him, hugging him, kissing him. He's rubbing his cheek on my face. I am so happy to see him. He is so happy to see me. This happiness is as if I've never felt before. I could feel his love and adoration. I have never felt happiness like this before in my life. It was peaceful, comforting, and so fulfilling. 

Scott Janssen is a hospice social worker who has also reported cases of this kind in a recent article on this subject, "Near Death Experiences: Will Our Dogs be Waiting For us?"

Here is just one such case.

Alma

I remember leaving my body. I could see myself on the ground below and the ambulance guys working on me. It was all very strange. Then I felt myself moving away. I saw a beautiful light and heard this amazing music that just brought me such peace. Eventually I found myself in a big yard where I’d grown up. I saw Sadie, my best childhood friend, a cute little Schnauzer. She was running toward me, wagging her tail. I’d missed her so much when she died. Yet, there she was, coming to greet me. She was licking me like crazy and I was laughing with joy.

I don’t need to adduce more such stories, do I, in order to establish the answer to my question. Yes, Virginia, our pets truly do seem to have an afterlife.

But do our pets really live after they die? Perhaps they are just figments of our desires and we simply hallucinate them once we ourselves pass over to the life beyond this one.   

Well, consider: Reports of NDEs often involve the perception of loved ones who appear to greet us when we pass over. You might argue that we hallucinate them, too, but hold on. Not so fast with your skepticism.

What about those cases, and there are more than a few, when an individual is greeted by someone she doesn’t know or recognize, only to be told afterward that that was your grandfather (who died before you were born and whom you never knew). Or say a person returns from an NDE and reports that he was greeted by his sister – only he never had a sister. Except that his mother now tells him what he never knew. He had a sister but she died at the age of two before he was born. Or suppose you see someone during your NDE whom you know still to be alive, only to find that he died three days before when you were ill, and so forth.

No, we are typically greeted by those who have formed a deep bond with us or we with them. And isn’t it true that we often have formed a very deep bond with our pets and they with us? Why shouldn’t those bonds also prevail after death, just as they do with the people we have loved and been attached to?

The bonds we form with our pets in life are not severed by their death. Our separation from them is only temporary. If we can trust these accounts of pets observed during NDEs, it means that we will indeed be reunited with them after we die. And for any animal lover, what could bring greater joy than to see our beloved cat or dog once more to greet us when we pass over?

It’s Reigning Cats and Dogs: The Psychic Lives of Our Pets

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

One day several years ago, as my girlfriend Lauren and I were out on her patio, a cute little stray kitten wandered in and stopped to look at us. Lauren who loves cats smiled encouragingly and bent down to greet our visitor who then tentatively approached. I immediately dubbed her "Petunia," though we didn’t then know her sex. That was the beginning of a love affair -- between Lauren and Petunia who quickly became Lauren’s most affectionate and devoted companion, displacing me in that hierarchy to a secondary position.  

Lauren soon discovered that not only was Petunia exceedingly affectionate, but she was clearly psychic, too. She always seemed to know, for example, when Lauren was planning to drive across the bay to visit me. And when Lauren would sometimes bring Petunia with her, the cat would invariably hide on the day Lauren was to leave for home. It got to be so that we would have to mime to each other so that Petunia would not know Lauren’s plans.

There were, in fact, so many instances of Petunia’s unusual, seemingly psychic, sensitivities that a few years later, I actually wrote a little illustrated book about her I called Petunia, The Psychic Cat. Here she is:

Indeed, there is abundant evidence that cats are telepathic. Rupert Sheldrake, an exceptionally creative and curious English scientist, has collected many cases of this kind, and not only about cats, in one of the most remarkable books on animals I have ever read. It has a most intriguing title, too:  Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. But there is a lot about cats in this book, too, and in the first part of this essay I am going to draw on it extensively. It begins with this story about a professor at a university of which I happen to be an alumnus:

When the telephone rings in the household of a noted professor at the University of California in Berkeley, his wife knows when her husband is on the other end of the line. How? Whiskins, the family’s silver tabby cat rushes to the telephone and paws at the receiver. "Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook and makes appreciative meows that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end," she says. "If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice."

This is not an isolated case. Sheldrake writes that he has collected fifty-nine cases (!) of cats who respond to the telephone when a particular person is calling, even before the receiver is picked up. In every instance, the caller is someone to whom the cat is deeply attached.

Here’s another typical example:

Seven years after she acquired Carlo, my daughter went to teacher training college and rang us infrequently. However, when the phone did ring and it was Marian ... Carlo would bound up the stairs [where the phone was] before I had picked up the receiver. There was no way that this cat could have known my daughter was to ring us ... He never did this at any other time and was not allowed upstairs anyway. 

Many cat owners – about one-third, according to a survey that Sheldrake conducted – believe their cats are telepathic. The examples above and those to come will make it clear why so many cat lovers are convinced that this is so.

As the title of Sheldrake’s book implies, he is particularly interested in anticipatory behavior in animals, especially dogs, who give evidence that they are aware when their owners will be returning home. These reports do not depend on anecdotal accounts alone; Sheldrake has actually carried out controlled experiments to establish the point. Here is a summary of a typical such experiment.

A dog owner is sent into town to wander about. At a certain time of her own choosing, she forms an intention to return home. Cameras have been placed in her home so that the movements of her dog can be tracked. Let’s say the dog has been lying on a sofa. However, at the very moment the owner has turned around and has started her trek toward home, the dog suddenly jumps off the sofa and pads over to the door to wait for his owner to return.

There are many cases of such astonishing anticipatory behavior in dogs in Sheldrake’s book and many other marvelous stories about the amazing things that dogs are capable of, so I highly recommend this book to any of you who are dog lovers. But, as I remarked in my previous blog about animals, since I fancy cats and am actually a bit averse to dogs, the rest of this essay will concern itself with the wonders of cats.

However, before moving on, I should note that cats, too, can exhibit in the same kind of anticipatory behavior as dogs. Here’s just one such example:

When the son of Dr. Carlos Sarasola was living with him in  Buenas Aires, he often came home late at night, after his father had gone to bed with their cat, Lennon. Dr. Sarasola noticed that Lennon would suddenly jump off the bed and go and wait by the front door ten or fifteen minutes before his son arrived home by taxi. Dr. Sarasola made careful observations of the time the cat responded to see if the cat could be responding to the sound of the taxi door shutting. He found that the cat responded well before the taxi arrived. "One night I paid attention to several taxis that stopped at the front of my building. Three taxis stopped and Lennon remained quiet with me in bed. Some time later, he jumped down and went to the door. Five minutes later I heard the taxi arrive in which my son was traveling."

Cats seem to be very sensitive not only to the emotional state of their owners – there are countless examples of that and this is well known – but are especially telepathically attuned to accidents, illness and death. Here are a couple of illustrative cases that Sheldrake provides.

In May 1994 I sat outside on the veranda, and my three-year-old cat, Klaerchen, lay beside me purring comfortably. My eleven-year-old daughter had gone out with her girlfriend on her bicycle. Everything seemed harmonious, but suddenly Klaerchen jumped up, uttered a cry we had never heard before and in a flash ran into the living room where she sat down in front of the telephone. The phone soon rang and I got the news that my daughter had had a bad accident with the bike and had been taken to the hospital.

We had a beautiful Carthusian tomcat that we all loved, but he loved my husband most of all. In the summer holidays we went camping in Denmark and left the cat at an animal home in Switzerland [where we lived]. In Denmark my husband, who was forty-eight years old and had never been ill, died of a heart attack. When we went to pick up our cat the lady told us she knew exactly when a tragedy had happened to us and then gave us the exact day and hour, which she could not have known! Our tomcat had withdrawn into a corner and whined in a way he had never done before, staring at a certain point in front of him as if he observed something special, his whole body shaking.

Cats seem to sense the onset of death, even when there may have been no discernible sign of it beforehand. Again, there are many examples of this kind of premonition in cats, and we will soon consider in detail a couple of such cases, but for now, here is one last brief such account from Sheldrake’s book.

Dorothy Doherty says that the day before her husband collapsed and died, their cat continually rubbed around his legs. "I remember him saying, 'What’s wrong with her today?' As she had never been so persistent before, I have often wondered if she knew what was to happen."

About the certainty of that kind of presentiment, there was no doubt in the case of Oscar the Cat, whose remarkable story was sent to me by colleague. It was originally written by Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician at Rhode Island Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and published in a journal in 2007. Here’s the story, which was entitled "A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat." You will find it charmingly written, almost like a fable, but it nevertheless is based in fact.

Oscar the Cat awakens from his nap, opening a single eye to survey his kingdom. From atop the desk in the doctor’s charting area, the cat peers down the two wings of the nursing home’s advanced dementia unit. All quiet on the western and eastern fronts. Slowly, he rises and extravagantly stretches his 2-year-old frame, first backward and then forward. He sits up and considers his next move.

In the distance, a resident approaches. It is Mrs. P., who has been living on the dementia unit’s third floor for 3 years now. She has long forgotten her family, even though they visit her almost daily. Moderately disheveled after eating her lunch, half of which she now wears on her shirt, Mrs. P. is taking one of her many aimless strolls to nowhere. She glides toward Oscar, pushing her walker and muttering to herself with complete disregard for her surroundings. Perturbed, Oscar watches her carefully and, as she walks by, lets out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that says "leave me alone." She passes him without a glance and continues down the hallway. Oscar is relieved. It is not yet Mrs. P.’s time, and he wants nothing to do with her.

Oscar jumps down off the desk, relieved to be once more alone and in control of his domain. He takes a few moments to drink from his water bowl and grab a quick bite. Satisfied, he enjoys another stretch and sets out on his rounds. Oscar decides to head down the west wing first, along the way sidestepping Mr. S., who is slumped over on a couch in the hallway. With lips slightly pursed, he snores peacefully -- perhaps blissfully unaware of where he is now living. Oscar continues down the hallway until he reaches its end and Room 310. The door is closed, so Oscar sits and waits. He has important business here.

Twenty-five minutes later, the door finally opens, and out walks a nurse’s aide carrying dirty linens. "Hello, Oscar," she says. "Are you going inside?" Oscar lets her pass, then makes his way into the room, where there are two people. Lying in a corner bed and facing the wall, Mrs. T. is asleep in a fetal position. Her body is thin and wasted from the breast cancer that has been eating away at her organs. She is mildly jaundiced and has not spoken in several days. Sitting next to her is her daughter, who glances up from her novel to warmly greet the visitor. "Hello, Oscar. How are you today?"

Oscar takes no notice of the woman and leaps up onto the bed. He surveys Mrs. T. She is clearly in the terminal phase of illness, and her breathing is labored. Oscar’s examination is interrupted by a nurse, who walks in to ask the daughter whether Mrs. T. is uncomfortable and needs more morphine. The daughter shakes her head, and the nurse retreats. Oscar returns to his work. He sniffs the air, gives Mrs. T. one final look, then jumps off the bed and quickly leaves the room. Not today.

Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.

One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.’s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls. Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K.

A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.

On his way back to the charting area, Oscar passes a plaque mounted on the wall. On it is engraved a commendation from a local hospice agency: "For his compassionate hospice care, this plaque is awarded to Oscar the Cat." Oscar takes a quick drink of water and returns to his desk to curl up for a long rest. His day’s work is done. There will be no more deaths today, not in Room 310 or in any other room for that matter. After all, no one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.

Note: Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.

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Moved by this story when I first read it, I sent it to my daughter Kathryn who, like her father before her and possibly because of him, has always loved cats and lived with them for most of her life. Kathryn was not surprised to read his story in part because she had one to match it.

This is what she wrote to me after reading about Oscar the Cat. In it, she will describe what she witnessed after she brought her mother, Elizabeth, who was ill with cancer, to live with her and her husband, Bill.

When we first brought Elizabeth back to the house, she was extraordinarily sick -- barely functioning, barely talking. We set her up in the little bedroom and she stayed in bed. Little Princess was a cat that lived down the street. She didn’t have a good home life and for a while before Elizabeth came, she would come up to our house and we would pet her on the back patio, but she would never come in and we would never feed her. Then she would go home and come back when she wanted -- sometimes that next day, sometimes a few days later. The day that we brought Elizabeth home, Princess came up came on the back patio, walked in the back door and went right straight to Elizabeth’s room. The cat had never been in the house. She jumped up on the bed and she walked around Elizabeth and then settled right down next to her. 

Elizabeth had had surgery and her stomach area was very tender. But this cat knew not to walk on her stomach. Princess would walk across her shoulders, would curl up by her head, by her side, and by her feet, even lying on her legs but never on her stomach. Princess stayed with Elizabeth so long that the neighbor who owned the cat started calling around the neighborhood trying to find the cat. The cat finally decided that she should go home. But the next day she was back and she continued to come back every day and stay with Elizabeth all day.

Elizabeth loved cats. Even in her befuddled state she was absolutely thrilled that the cat was with her and she would smile when the cat walked in the room and was just happy to have her there. This went on for a couple of weeks. But Elizabeth was so bad that I had to put her in a nursing home and while Elizabeth was gone the cat would come in and go to her room and look for her.

Sometime during this period when Elizabeth was in the nursing home, the woman who owned the cat was going to move and she was looking for somebody to take all of her animals -- she had three cats and one dog. Bill and this neighbor did not get along at all, but when we heard that she was going to give the cats away, we contacted her through a different neighbor and they told her that we were interested in taking the one cat. She finally called Bill and said that we had to take two cats because they were sisters but we said that we only wanted the one cat. She told us "Well, you can’t have either one then." A couple of weeks later she called us and said we could have the one cat and she would leave the paperwork in the mailbox and we could have the cat when she moved. So she left the paperwork in the mailbox and was supposed to bring the cat by but instead she called us and said "Well, sorry -- the cat jumped into the moving van with us so we just took her." We had already told Elizabeth that we were getting the cat for when she came home and she was, of course, devastated. 

Two weeks later our neighbor (who had facilitated the deal) called us at the apartment and said "Aren’t you taking care of your cat?" "We said, what cat?" He said the cat you got from the neighbor. We said we didn’t get the cat -- she took her with her. He said "Well, the cat is right here in my yard and she looks terrible -- she’s all messy and matted." We said we would be will be right there! 

We went the home and there’s the cat. We took her to the vet, got her cleaned up, shaved and she became our little Princess. Elizabeth was thrilled -- couldn’t wait to get home to see the cat. The cat immediately recognized her, stayed with her constantly and they were a happy couple for the entire time that Elizabeth was there. Elizabeth was definitely this cat’s charge. 

Elizabeth had gotten well enough during part of the time that she was home to use her computer. She had a printer, and after she died, I noticed there was a printout on the printer that was entitled "When cats grieve." The article from the Internet was all about how to take care of a cat after their master died. So goes the story of Princess and Elizabeth. But it didn’t stop there.

Nita [Bill’s mother who also lived in the house], who did not like cats and put up with the fact that we had adopted little Princess really did like little Princess a little bit. When Nita got sick and started to go downhill, Princess would jump up on her lap and sit with her during the day and comfort her just like she had done with Elizabeth. And when Nita was much closer to death, little Princess would climb up on her bed and stay with her just like she’d done with Elizabeth.

So believe me, we know that cats really do understand when people are sick and they do try to take care of them in a lot of cases. Elizabeth was happier and I believed lived longer because Princess cared for her. 

After Elizabeth died [she had to be moved to a hospice before her death], Princess constantly went into her room looking for her. It was probably the better part of a month before she stopped. She did the same thing when Nita died, but not for as long. 

Princess knew she was supposed to find and take care of Elizabeth and she did. It’s not like we brought her into the house. She marched right in the open back door and ran through the house like a kitty with a purpose to find Elizabeth. Elizabeth suffered a lot while she fought her terminal battle and little Princess softened her struggles. She could bring a smile to Elizabeth’s face when no one else could. She was one of Elizabeth’s last thoughts as she left us that article so we could take care of Princess’s own grief. As we found out, cats grieve too. 

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Our pets grieve for us when we die, and God knows that when one of our beloved pets die, we are broken-hearted and mourn for them. I have seen so many women weep with anguish on such occasions, and we men, too, are not immune from deep grief on suffering the loss of pet. Indeed, the death of a pet with whom we have shared such an intimate life for many years can be more devastating than the death of a person, and often is.  

We form such deep bonds with our pets, and they with us, that to experience a final, wrenching separation is often hard to endure. Never to see our pets again? That is a sorrowful thought indeed.

But.

For many people, whether they have heard of near-death experiences or not, the thought that we may after death be reunited with our own loved ones is a powerful source of hope and often a deep-seated belief. And the many accounts of NDEs we now have where such encounters have been reported only bolster those beliefs. I know that, for my part, I cherish the hope that when I die, assuming I can ever get around to it, I will see members of my family again, particularly my father whom I lost, seemingly for good, when I was a child.

But then we love our pets, too. Is it too much to hope that we will never see them again as well? Or is it possible ....

Be sure to check out my next blog to find out the answer to the question whether when a pet dies, does he or she really disappear for good?

Confessions of a Retarded Animal Lover

 By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Nature and I are two. - Woody Allen

I’ve always loved that quip of Woody’s, probably because I identify with it. For much of my life, and even to some extent today, I have felt not only removed from nature but alien to it. Some years ago, I wrote a memoir about my father from whom I was separated at an early age and who died when he was scarcely forty years old. I called it My Father, Once Removed. If I were to write about my life in nature, I could give it a similar title.  

Didn’t Thomas Carlyle, who was not a fan of things mechanical, somewhere assert that "machines are inherently aggressive?" Well, I could say something akin to that sentiment about nature – that it is inherently frightening, at least to me. But I know I’m not the only one who thinks this way about nature. I remember when I was young reading the books of a man named Eric Hoffer – he was a self-educated longshoreman whose books were very popular when I was a kid – where he said much the same thing about nature in trying to counter the typical romantic blather about it. Nature is fine on a sunny day in the park, but if you get caught in a sudden thunderstorm in the woods, it is not your friend; it could kill you. 

I don’t know how I got to feel this way, but unlike many kids, I did not grow up with animals. In neither my mother’s home nor that of my aunt’s where I also spent a lot of time when I was growing up were there any pets. Not having a father, no one took me camping, fishing or hunting either. I even flunked out of cub scouts because I couldn’t figure out how to tie a knot properly. I knew that I was descended from a long line of Lithuanian rabbis; what I was good at was reading books and studying. That was the world where I felt at home. Jews are urban people anyway. We didn’t farm; we made money (although I was never much good at that either, come to think of it).

I also had another problem growing up that helped to make me a misfit in nature. I was born with a congenital nystagmus that left me with very poor vision and a wayward sense of balance. No one even discovered my visual problems until I was six years old. Before that, I guess I was walking around like a child version of Mr. Magoo.  

You can’t become much of a naturalist if you can’t see. I can’t tell you how many times I would be walking with a friend who would suddenly stop to point out a beautiful bird in a tree. I could see the tree. Or I remember a time when I was walking by the Pacific Ocean in Monterey with a good friend when she stopped to look at how the sea lions were cavorting. I could see the water. I could never see well enough to make out anything. In order to learn to appreciate nature, of course I had to read books about it, such as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I could be in nature, but I could never experience it the way most people could. Where nature was concerned, I was a hopeless retard!  

But that was to change when I was in my mid-thirties. It was then that I had my first LSD experience, which took place mainly when I was ambling around in the woods not far from the University of Connecticut where I was teaching.

That experience was a revelation to me at many levels, and it totally changed my feelings about nature. I remember looking at a certain tree and realizing as if for the first time that it was alive – and holy. For a long time after that experience, I could no longer look at trees in the same way I had been used to. And after that, I spent a lot of time tramping through the nearby woods. I would go there as often as possible, both for pleasure and as a place of refuge. I would drag my kids there, too, who were not keen to go and would complain. But I was at home in nature now, and when I could travel to places, such as Colorado, where there were mountains, I learned to love to hike up them. Of course, I was never much of a hiker, given my physical limitations, but hiking became one of the supreme recreational pleasures of my life. It’s only been in the last few years that I was no longer able to hike. I miss it terribly.  

My views about animals have changed, too, and I will get to that since that is what I really want to focus on in this essay but first I need to say a little about my feelings about the two types of pets we are most familiar with – cats and dogs.

It’s often said, simplistically, that there are two kinds of people in the world: dog people and cat people. Well, I am definitely a cat person. And I always have been. Even though I didn’t grow up with them, once I got married and had kids of my own, cats became a part of my life. I feel about them the way the ancient Egyptians did. They are divine creatures, and truly one of the jewels of evolution’s experiments. There’s an old song from South Pacific, "There is Nothing Like a Dame." For me, there is nothing like a cat. Nietzsche said "Without music life would be a mistake." I would say the same for cats. A catless world would be an abomination. I trust I have made myself clear. 

As for dogs, I would be happy to live in a world without them. They may be "man’s best friend," but they are not mine. Oh, I know there are touching stories about men and their dogs, one by Thomas Mann called in fact "A Man and His Dog," or the famous story by J. R. Ackerley, about his dog Tulip (though it was actually named Queenie), and many others. Fine, to each his own. But, frankly, some dogs look like unmade beds to me, and I really can’t abide their slobbering tongues, their panting, their fearsome teeth, their annoying barks, and their slavish loyalty. When my second wife suddenly arrived one day with a large matted four-legged thing, who proceeded to jump on me, seeking out my gonads, I immediately named him Albatross, and his name, shortened to Alby, stuck. I’m sure he was responsible for our fighting like cats and dogs ourselves (you will know who was who) and in part for our later divorce. I’m sorry if I have offended you, if you are a dog lover, but I hope to redeem myself in my next blog when I will have some wonderful things to say about dogs who don’t live with me.  

In fact, I will soon have some wonderful things to say about animals, period, because in recent years I have become fascinated with books about animal intelligence (or "animal cognition," as it is now usually called) as well as the emotional life of animals. Indeed, I now have a slew of books in my library – well over a dozen – dealing with various facets of the lives of animals and am currently reading a new one on animal languages. For somebody who didn’t grow up with animals, I am now growing old with them, and what I have learned about them has been a source of endless wonderment and enchantment. Of course, I admit I am really not spending my time with actual animals; I am limited merely to doing my usual thing – reading about them. But that’s been enough to thrill me with what I’m learning about them and why I’m keen to share some of that knowledge with you in the remainder of this essay.   

The thing that’s new in animal studies, and what has particularly excited me, has been the focus on the inner lives of animals. Perhaps surprisingly, in recent years animal researchers have learned a great deal about how animals think, what they feel, what kind of emotional lives they have, and most intriguingly, about the structure of the languages they use to communicate with one another and to us. Consider, for example, the titles or sub-titles of the following books, which are representative of these new directions in the exploration of the lives of animals.

Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal. (De Waal is world famous for his forty years of research on chimpanzees.) In this illuminating book, de Waal shows us how similar the emotional lives of chimps are to our own. After beginning with the very moving story of the death of the chimp, Mama, de Waal shows us that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust and empathy. There is no sharp dividing line between us and them; we all animals after all and we share a continuum with all life.   

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.(Safina, a MacArthur Fellow and a marvelous writer – I even wrote him a fan letter and he responded most graciously – in this book writes about the inner lives of elephants, wolves and killer whales.)  I can’t resist quoting just a short passage from the book jacket, which echoes de Waal’s sentiments: 

Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to reevaluate how we interact with animals.

The Soul of An Octopus: A surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery. (Montgomery is another accomplished writer and naturalist. She lives with a flock of chickens and a border collie – and did you know that one border collie learned the names of a thousand toys and understands grammar? Yes!) Of course, when it comes to octopuses (yes, that’s the plural – not octopi!), we encounter a creature vastly different from ourselves. For one thing, their brain is distributed through their arms, but Montgomery, too, wants to explore their emotional lives and how they come to experience and navigate the world. I defy anyone not to be amazed and utterly captivated with the story that Montgomery tells of these extraordinary beings whose evolutionary history is so different from ours. And yet…. 

Modern research into the lives of animals has taken us a long way from Descartes (or Des-car-tees, as my best friend, Stan, in junior high was wont to call him until I gave him some French lessons) who thought that animals, because they could not speak and therefore could not think, were soulless creatures, mere machines (in fact, he called animals bêtes-machines), incapable of experiencing pain. 

Did that man ever look into the eyes of a dog?  

Of course, Descartes was famous for his dictum, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. But why doesn’t someone ever pose this question: If Descartes had said instead, "I do not think," would he then conclude that he didn’t exist?

I think Descartes, as great a philosopher as he may have been, is over-rated. He may have been a smart cookie, but at least where animals were concerned, he was an arrogant anthropocentric nincompoop.  

But he got his comeuppance. The fabled Queen Christina of Sweden, who was fascinated by Descartes’ ideas, invited him to come to Sweden so she could learn from him. Against his better judgment, Descartes allowed himself to be lured there in the fall of 1649. As a brutally cold winter set in, he was obliged meet with the queen in her unheated library very early in the morning, and because she was the queen, Descartes had to appear bare-headed. Naturally, he developed influenza, which turned into pneumonia, which turned into death. So ended the life of a great philosopher who knew everything about how to think but would die without knowing that animals could think, too, and would never be stupid enough voluntarily to venture into territory which could be expected to be a mortal threat. 

Well, so much for our Cartesian diversion. Let’s return to more intelligent creatures. Take bats, for instance.

Free-tailed bats use echolocation to navigate and to catch prey. They emit sounds that are too high-pitched for human ears to detect. And they sing, too. In recent years, digital technology has revealed that bats are now believed to be the mammals with the most complex form of vocal communication after humans.

These bats not only sing, but each male bat creates his own distinctive song to court females. And these songs are extremely complex and varied, and are constructed like human sentences. The language of bats, therefore, has its own syntax.  

I learned all this from reading a fascinating book I alluded to earlier on the language of animals by a Dutch researcher and philosopher named Eva Meijer. She also revealed to me the secret lives of the lowly prairie dog.   

Prairie dogs live in underground tunnels with different areas for sleeping, giving birth, and getting rid of bodily wastes. Because they have to be vigilant for predators when they surface, they have developed various complex alarm calls that sound a bit like the twittering of birds. Did you ever wonder why these animals are called prairie dogs? It’s because when they are out in force vocalizing their alarm calls, it sounds like the barking of dogs.

But these calls also contain information about the predator, and it is so highly specific as to be almost unbelievable. According to Meijer, in the case of a human predator, for example, they can communicate that it is a human, what color clothes he is wearing, and if he is carrying something like an umbrella or a gun. Different parts of the call change meaning depending on the order of its elements, so that the language of prairie dogs has a simple grammar. Meijer says that research into the language of prairie dogs shows that they use verbs, nouns and adverbs in meaningful ways.

Take that, Descartes!

I wish I had the space to talk about the wonders of larger animals that are more familiar to us, such as chimps and elephants (I have read a number of books about each of them, which have been fascinating to me), but for now, let me mention another creature that is familiar to us all on a daily basis: the crow.  

Crows are among the most intelligent of birds. A number of studies have shown that they can solve complicated puzzles and devise and use tools. They are extraordinarily clever and tales of their prodigious memories are legion. If you threaten or actually injure a crow, that crow will never forget you and will attack you on sight. I have read a number of accounts of this sort of thing, but one of the most fascinating comes from one of the best books on birds you could ever read, Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds.

I just can’t resist quoting this story, which I will lightly edit and slightly abridge here:

A brilliant string of studies over the past five years ... at the University of Washington has revealed the extraordinary abilities of American crows not just to recognize individual humans by their faces but to pass along to other crows information about those whom they deem dangerous. In one experiment, teams of people wandered through several Seattle neighborhoods wearing different sorts of masks. One type of mask in each group represented the "dangerous" mask. The people wearing the dangerous mask captured several wild crows. Other people, wearing "neutral" masks or no mask at all just meandered along harmlessly.

Nine years later, the masked scientists returned to the scene of the crime. The crows in these neighborhoods – including those who weren’t even hatched at the time of the capture -- reacted to the people with the dangerous masks as if they were a threat, dive-bombing, scolding, and mobbing them. 

Moral: Never mistreat a crow or you will pay for it. And also don’t volunteer to carry out any such experiments wearing a threatening mask. You may decide that some scientific experiments are just not worth having to fend off savage crow attacks!

Well, there are so many remarkable stories about animals I would love to regale you with, but this blog can’t go on forever, anymore than I can, so let me conclude with one more topic, which many of you will know has long played a special role in my life: death. In this case, the death of animals.

Can animals actually die?  Of course, they can, you would say. That’s obvious!  But not to some philosophers. Martin Heidegger, who along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, is generally regarded as the most important philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century, famously held that animals, because they presumably have no concept of death, cannot die; they simply disappear.

Honestly, these philosophers! Some of them deserve to be attacked by a swarm of vengeful, screaming crows.

I have already referred to the fact that animals are capable of empathy, so it won’t surprise you to learn many animals mourn those who have died. Chimps, for example, and the mourning rituals of elephants are well known. (I could easily write pages about elephants in this connection; the stories I have collected about them are deeply moving.) What isn’t well known is that giraffes and foxes also mourn their dead. There is even a remarkable story about a gorilla who used sign language to describe the death of his parents by poachers.   

And there are our crows again whose mourning of their dead comrades is especially affecting. I have read several very touching stories, especially in Ackerman’s book, about the way crows gather around the body of a dead crow, and often return to drop twigs or a piece of grass over its body.  

In fact, when I was talking about such rituals to my girlfriend Lauren a few days ago, she volunteered that she already knew all this from her own experience and proceeded to tell me about something she had witnessed herself a few years ago. After listening to her account, I asked her if she would be good enough to write it out for me so that I could use it in this essay. Lauren indeed was "good enough," so here it is in her own words:

There is a set of wires that intersect in front of my house. One goes to my home, and another is attached to a pole across the street that crosses in front of my view, which would otherwise be exposed to a panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. One day I heard a terrific uproar at the front of my residence and wondered at the commotion. As the cacophony continued, I investigated only to find crows sitting on the wires abutting one another bawling, rocking back and forth, and in utter distress. There must have been forty of them in lamentation. Why were they crying so piteously?

In a moment of bravery, I walked out my front door, down my steps, and peered into the street at the object of anguish. There to my surprise was a huge crow without a mark on his body, but dead. I looked up at the mourners and said to them, "I am so sorry that your friend has gone." With those words, the crows inexplicably and suddenly became quiet. I picked up the body, which was surprisingly heavy, and said, "I will take care of his body. You may lament him, but I will take guardianship over him." The crows reciprocated with a soothing cooing sound. I was stupefied that my words and actions had such an impact on these beautiful highly intelligent avians. 

I walked with their friend to my backyard noticing that five of them followed me up the driveway and settled in a tree under which I placed his body. They bobbed and swayed and cooed quietly while I went about my preparations. Inside I found a length of fabric with which to wrap his body and returning I picked up a shovel with which to dig his grave. I dug as deep a hole as I could, perhaps a foot and a half deep all the while the mourners remained unchanged, quietly grieving. When I had completed my regrettable task, I covered the grave with an old doormat knowing that one of the night creatures might dig him up. I then placed an antique fireplace grate over the mat to make sure the gravesite would remain untouched.

This is the biggest surprise of all: five of the crows returned each day for five days and remained all day to mourn their friend. Then I noticed that there were only three who came to lament his passing, and they too remained all day for three days. While I can never be sure, I suspect that one still comes each day to pay her respects, and I welcome her.

I need to bring this blog to an end soon, but not quite yet.

Obviously, I could offer you here only a few tidbits, as it were, about the lives of animals based on my reading of books about them. But I hope I have said enough to intrigue some of you to read some of these books yourself. (If you would like a complete list of such books in my own library, please write me.) Of course, books are no substitute for actual physical encounters with animals, but most of us can’t easily arrange to have an elephant in our backyard or to burrow underground looking for prairie dogs. Anyway, in my case and at my advanced age, I am pretty much forced to follow my usual practice – to spend time learning about animals, once removed, in my belated efforts to become an animal lover after all these years malgré moi. It is never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks. 

And speaking of dogs, I haven’t forgotten my promise to say some good things about them in my next blog, which will be about the psychic life of dogs and especially cats, wherein more wondrous stories will be told about the amazing sensitivities of those we call our pets, including what happens to them after they die.