There has been a lot of talk lately about how some people are very perceptive, with children under five being said to be the most perceptive of all. We have read about how they might be able to know what we are thinking, remember past lives and even talk in languages that we can not understand. It is said that all these abilities disappear in people as they grow up. When I read something like this it makes me think that maybe, if it is true, the reason for this ability is an uncluttered mind. But wait once second, is it only humans that might have this ability or is fido able to do this and we just don't realize it? Have you ever decided that you were going to go away for a few days and have someone watch the dog for you while you were away? Did you notice that even before you made up your mind to go, your dog started acting sad? I know that this has happened with my dog on a few different occasions. Did the dog read your mind, or perhaps does he know enough english to understand that you were going away? As absurd as this sounds, your dog may be able to either sense certain things or even read your mind, who knows? How many times did I get up to go into another room and before I was even out of the chair, the dog was in the room that I was going to go in. Sometimes this uncanny knack of knowing where I am going to go even surprises me.

There are people out there that claim that they can actually read a pet's mind. Most of us laugh at the thought, because we know that it is almost impossible to read a human's mind, much less a dog, cat or bird's mind. Having said that, people pay them a lot of money, when their pet is having a problem and supposedly, they can tell you what the problem is and how the animal feels about its owner. I wonder what kind of messages these people receive, could they be something like, "I didn't mean to poop on the rug" or "he never gives me enough dog biscuits"? I guess when the pet psychic tells the owner something like this, it is a safe bet. One person who had a deaf dog, wondered how the dog could understand the commands he would give it. He stated that the his dog would watch everything he did very closely. The thing is that when he wanted the dog to do something, it would. Here is the question, was the dog reading his mind, his lips or his body language?

Some people have reported that when their favorite tv program is about to come on, their dog paws them for attention. Apparently he knows that their attention will be diverted to that program and away from him and he is not happy about that. But how does he know when the program is about to come on? He goes into this mood even before you sit down. Dogs and other animals can't tell time, at least we don't think that they can. Is he reading your mind and picking up signals that say "hey it is almost time for do you want to be a millionaire"? How many times have we read an article that stated that just before an earthquake, all the animals acted strange? There is no doubt that animals have abilities that we don't quite understand yet. They are turning out to be a lot smarter than we first thought. Did you ever see your dog do something that really surprised you because it was so intelligent? I have and I bet most of you have too. At this point you begin to think that your dog is really smart then he goes out and tries to eat cat poop and your opinion of his intelligence falls to an all time low. The thing is that we have to realize that the animal has a different kind of intelligence than we have and its values are different. While some of your dog's values may be the same as yours, some are not. For example your dog may be very kind and gentle and feel like a mother to your children, but she eats off the floor and drinks out of the toilet, if not watched. It seems that in the interaction with us, most dogs want to please us and actually love us. They even want to take care of us.

Computers are being created to read our minds. I can't help but feel that it will be a lot more interesting when they read the minds of our pets. Who knows what they might come up with. Could our pets have special abilities that are unknown to us at this time? We know that a dogs ability to smell is far greater than our own, does out pet use this ability to predict what we will do next? Could it be that we emit a slight change in odor, when we perform certain tasks and it is not detectable by other humans, but dogs can smell it. Maybe this is one way that they know what we are about to do? As far as earthquake predictions go, maybe their sensitive hearing allows them to pick up distant noises that they associate with trouble? These are guesses of course and without any scientific basis, but sometimes it is fun to try and figure out a mystery like this.

There is no doubt that your dog loves you, unless you are extremely cruel to it. There are many cases on record where dogs have risked their own lives to save their owners from fires and other dangers. What about the seeing eye dog that pushed its master out of the way of a speeding car and got run over, or the dog who used to walk its master down to the train station every day and meet him there when he came home. The owner died at work one day and never returned and the dog spent every day of the rest of his life at the train station waiting for him and this went on for years. He was fed and watered by the kindly station people, who felt sorry for him because they knew what happened. Can there be a greater love for a human by an animal than this?

One site I visited talked about reincarnation. What is so unusual about that you might ask, aren't there thousands of them? Well yes, but this was a little different. It talked about people being reincarnated as animals and about one dog in particular. A dog that was so intelligent, that these people believed that it was a reincarnated human. Hey you better be nice to your pets, one of them might be your deceased uncle Joe. Seriously, some dogs can do amazing things, but does that mean that they are reincarnated humans, I really don't think so. I believe that dogs and other pets are like people, in a way. There are those of below, average, smart, and super intelligence. Not all dogs are created equal. I remember one dog, a female German Shepard that I used to play ball with when I was a kid. I didn't see it for three years, because I was away in the service. When I came home and visited my aunt, she owned the dog, I was standing talking to her and felt something being put into my hand. I looked down and there was the German Shepard forcing a ball into my hand, she remembered all those days when I had played ball with her, even though it had been over three years ago. I know this was not a giant leap in intelligence, but it was smart and touching.

There is a dog, a terrier who is credited with ESP. ESP stands for Extra Sensory Perception. In this case it was said that this particular dog can sense when its owner is coming home, no matter what time she left or where she went. Supposedly the dog is very famous in Australia, but I wouldn't know anything about that. Unfortunately for the dog's owner, she let two scientists observe the dog. They set up a camera to watch the dog and a camera to watch the owner. When they saw that the owner was ready to come home, they would examine the dog to see if it ran to the window. Nope, it was all baloney. The dog never knew what the owner was ready to come home. To bad, if it had, that would have been something.

So does your dog ever know what you are thinking? I look at it this way, your dog spends his or her whole life watching you. It learns what you do before executing an event. For example, you might make a sound before going to take out the garbage. I caught myself saying "oh well" when I do this job and I am sure our dog has picked up on this, because she will run to the door to watch. She sometimes beats me there. Another thing that I do is sometimes go into the room where I keep my computer after I watch tv. When she sees me starting to get up, she runs into that room first to find a comfortable seat on the rug to be with me. She has also learned that if she barks at me and then sits down and stares at me, I will know that she wants dog biscuits. She is very smart. Can she read my mind? I don't think so. I love her and I believe she is smart and loving, but I do not believe that there is anything more than that there. The next time you see your pet, whatever it may be, doing something ahead of you that seems to indicate he, she or it, knows what you are about to do, remember this, some of these pets are great studiers and have learned what you will do from experience.