[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

I suspect that most cases of "psychic" pets are explained by a).

If your cat only began to signal that it wanted to go out when you were a few minutes away I would think that the most likely explanation is that it heard the car. You really need to give a good reason why this explanation is less likely than "psi"

Well, old ladies take a bit of time to let out a cat, and he was usually already waiting when we arrived. The only reasonable conventional get-out seems to me to be the idea of car noise (i.e. how far away can an animal detect a specific car) - and Alex seems determined to tackle that.

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

I don't think that this explanation played a role in the specific case of the Jaytee trials where the "signalling" began before the owner even got to her car. I do suspect that it explains a great number of cases for the general phenomena. I don't think you can expect a single explanation to cover all cases. In the Kane trials the dog only began "signalling" after the owener began the journey home. The owner always travelled in the same car. There was only one trial where the owner was a significant distance from home and the "signalling" in this case only started right at the end of the journey home.

Multiple ad hoc explanations for a phenomenon are always less convincing

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

This is exactly the problem. You haven't described a scientific theory even a tentative one. All you have done is describe what "psi" isn't - physical.

My 'theory' does not contain a mechanism, but it is enough to get round the notion that Ψ experiments are just about searching for anomalies - as is sometimes said. Arbitrary correlations - such as dog gets excited whenever a cabbage is dug up in an arbitrary allotment - would definitely not count!

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

It is true that you can't directly control distant stars but you can look at different regions of space where one factor differs and see what difference that makes. You can't do the same for "psi".

You have to take earthquakes and volcanoes as they come, though you can make interesting seismic readings, and I don't doubt that various brain scanning techniques may be useful in exploring Ψ. Every area of science has its own limitations regarding experimentation.

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

His statement on one of his podcasts that "dogs that know are real and we're gonna prove it" suggests that he ahs already made his mind up. In the youtube video he explicitly states that the dog is telepathically communicating with it's owner.

A lot of scientists are enthusiastic about their experiments - imagine you had just put together and debugged a gravity wave detector, wouldn't you be enthusiastic to see your first gravity wave? This would not mean that you would be any less rigorous at looking for possible stray vibrations. There is a real danger that parapsychologists are criticised for behaving exactly like most other scientists!

David