Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: Fully Updated and Revised
At a glance
LuvemBooks Verdict
Best for
Pet owners and philosophy-of-science readers who have witnessed seemingly inexplicable animal behaviour and want a rigorously framed, evidence-marshalled case for taking those observations seriously.
Worth it if
You are genuinely curious about the limits of conventional biology, animal consciousness, or human-animal bonds, and are comfortable engaging with a sustained argument rather than a closed scientific verdict.
Skip if
You are a committed mechanistic biologist or require peer-consensus resolution of the debate — the morphic field hypothesis at the book's core remains outside mainstream scientific acceptance and the book does not claim to settle the controversy.
What readers & critics say
Kirkus Reviews praised the book as "thoroughly investigative, conducted in the belief that science can be fun and rigorous, inquisitive as well as skeptical," highlighting Sheldrake's vast collection of case histories and commending his authorial voice as a genuine pleasure. Spirituality & Practice noted that the phenomena Sheldrake documents — from direction-finding to telepathy and precognition — "cannot be explained in terms of routine sounds or smells," situating the book as a serious challenge to conventional animal-behaviour science.
“Thoroughly investigative, conducted in the belief that science can be fun and rigorous, inquisitive as well as skeptical.”
— kirkusreviews.com“Sheldrake is a pleasure not just because he roams way beyond the mechanistic theory of nature, but because he appreciates worthy new questions as well as answers.”
— kirkusreviews.comLook inside the book
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- Is it worth reading?
- For readers curious about animal consciousness, the philosophy of science, or the frontier where unexplained behavior meets unconventional theory, the book is a distinctive and thought-provoking contribution. Kirkus Reviews praised Sheldrake's voice as a genuine pleasure — 'rigorous, inquisitive' and generative of worthy new questions rather than premature answers — and his credentials as a former Royal Society research fellow and Cambridge research director lend the inquiry unusual scientific standing for its subject area. The key caveat is that readers seeking peer-consensus resolution to questions of animal telepathy and precognition will find the book advances a sustained argument rather than closes the debate.
- Similar books
- Readers drawn to Sheldrake's investigation into hidden animal capacities will find natural companions in Ed Yong's An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which explores how radically different sensory worlds shape animal experience, and Jonathan Balcombe's What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, another serious reconsideration of animal cognition. Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate extends the same spirit of inquiry — that living beings communicate and connect in ways science is only beginning to take seriously — into the plant kingdom. For readers who prefer a skeptical counterpoint, Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark offers a rigorous defense of scientific method that productively challenges the book's more speculative claims.
- Who should read this?
- The book is best suited to three overlapping audiences: pet owners who have observed seemingly inexplicable behavior in their animals and want a serious framework for understanding it; readers interested in the philosophy of science and the limits of conventional explanatory models in biology; and those curious about animal consciousness and cognition more broadly. It is not the right fit for readers seeking a peer-consensus scientific account of animal behavior, nor for those unwilling to engage with a theoretical framework — morphic fields — that remains outside mainstream biology.
- About Rupert Sheldrake
- Alfred Rupert Sheldrake is an English author and parapsychology researcher.
- What are the main themes?
- The book's central themes are the nature and limits of conventional biological explanation, the possibility of non-sensory communication between animals and between animals and humans, and the scope of animal consciousness. Sheldrake's morphic field hypothesis threads all of these together, proposing that invisible, self-organizing structures bind living beings across space and time in ways that mechanistic biology has not accounted for. A secondary theme is the philosophy of science itself — the book explicitly challenges the posture of dismissing unexplained phenomena without serious investigation, arguing that genuine scientific inquiry requires sitting with open questions rather than foreclosing them.
- How contested is the science?
- The morphic field hypothesis at the book's core remains outside mainstream biological consensus — a tension the review addresses directly and that Sheldrake himself does not claim to resolve. The book's standing reflects this: Kirkus Reviews described it as 'thoroughly investigative' and praised its intellectual seriousness, but the scientific community has not adopted morphic resonance as an explanatory framework. Sheldrake's position is that dismissing the documented phenomena as wishful thinking is itself unscientific, and he situates his hypothesis alongside ideas currently entertained in physics and cosmology to argue it deserves serious consideration rather than reflexive rejection.
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Age & Reading Level
Recommended age
Adult
Reading level
Adult
Skip if you want a peer-consensus, mainstream-biology account of animal behavior rather than a sustained argument for an unconventional theoretical framework.
Editorial Review
Rupert Sheldrake's Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, first published in 1999 and reissued in an updated and revised edition in 2011, is a serious and wide-ranging scientific investigation into the seemingly inexplicable bonds between humans and animals — from dogs that anticipate their owners' return at unpredictable times to cats that appear to know who is calling on the phone, to horses that navigate completely unfamiliar terrain back to their stables. Drawing on five years of research involving thousands of pet owners and animal workers, Sheldrake advances his hypothesis of "morphic fields" — self-organizing regions of invisible influence — to account for phenomena that conventional biology has largely sidestepped. Kirkus Reviews praised it as "an open-minded inquiry... attentive to the evidence and thoroughly investigative." It is essential reading for anyone curious about the frontier where animal behavior, consciousness, and unconventional science meet.
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