Melissa Larivierre asked me on Facebook this morning if I believed animals possessed powers of intuition and can anticipate us. I am grateful for the question, it is one of the things I have been the most interested in during my life with animals. I believe animals do have intuition, do read intentions, and do anticipate human behavior, especially those who have lived with people for many years – donkeys, dogs, cats, sheep.
Donkeys are extraordinarily intuitive. If I go out to the pasture with medicine or a syringe in my pocket, they will run off. If I have a cookie in my pocket, they will come towards me. If I go out to the barn to get them inside for a vet visit, they often take off. I have to avoid eye contact, carry food, go quickly inside to rouse their curiousity. They seem to read my intentions. If I have business or am anxious they seem to read it, or smell it, or sense it in my eyes, posture, demeanor The donkeys seem to also sense when we are ready to get up and feed them, as they are always waiting for us at the pasture gate. I believe they hear sounds from inside the house. If I am calm and visiting them, they approach me. If I am anxious or angry, they stay away.
The barn cats are intuitive. They sense when we are about to feed them, are always present at that time. A dog like Frieda lives on her intuition. She sizes people up, watches them, anticipates them. A half hour before Maria goes to bed, Frieda goes upstairs and goes to sleep in her dog bed on the floor by our bed. She always knows when Maria is getting tired, often before Maria does.
Dogs are smart about what they need to be smart about and they need to be smart about humans in order to get fed and sheltered. Red is an astonishingly intuitive dog. This morning, Maria was sleeping late and I got up to feed the animals and I let Red out ahead of me, as I usually do. When I got into the barn to get some hay, he was waiting for me, just in front of the bales. When I head out to the sheep pasture, he is always – always – waiting at the gate ahead of me. If I am going to go to town for errands, he goes straight to the car and waits for me. He seems to know what I am intending to do. This also crops up when we are working with the sheep. He watches my eyes, listens to my voice, seems to grasp what I am intending to do.
Dogs are, I believe, astute readers of human emotion, it is why they do so much better than raccoons and get to sleep in bed and eat high-class foods. These feelings are, I believe, instinctive rather than cognitive, that is they don’t plot or plan or analyze in our words. Their instincts are, I believe, beyond our imagination and we diminish them by putting our inferior ideas into their heads.