Verified by 
Fellow blogger Lee Charles Kelly has raised some great issues is his blog response to my last post. Thanks, Lee!
He emphasizes the reciprocity of the relationship that led to the appearance of domestic dogs more than 30,000 years ago. By the way, you may have seen some writing by anthropologists who question this date. But there have been additional finds of domestic dogs at other sites from that age reported lately in the literature. It is true.
Dogs were domesticated long before any other species. In my last post, I suggested that this long, intimate relationship between animals and humans may explain why the right amygdala of the human brain is hard-wired to pay special attention to visual images of animals.
Lee points out that if we are programmed to recognize and pay special attention to animals, shouldn't dogs be programmed to pay attention to us? They certainly should -- and I'd be willing to bet they are. I'd love to carry out the experiments if it didn't mean implanting electrodes into dogs' brains.
The very essence of domestication is the paying of special attention to the partner in that domestication. Theoretically, domesticating an animal is a not-so-simple matter of establishing enough control over the animal's life and behavior that you can control its breeding and select for traits in the offspring that you want. Practically it involves a great deal of learning about the species' needs, wants, and emotions and working to understand those and provide them. And at the same time, the target species is studying US and figuring out how WE work and what WE want.
Underlying this two-way relationship is the generous assumption that some species make or made that humans are worth paying attention to, worth communicating with, and might even have something interesting to say. Ancestral dogs -- wolves -- apparently were willing to at least entertain that notion. Many species do not.
Communicating with a wild species is not simple and requires quite a bit of observation, training, and usually failure. Even communicating with an already-domesticated species can be a challenge for many humans, witness the popularity of books and television shows on animal training. As a dog trainer himself, Lee certainly knows that the biggest task in training a dog is... training the dog's owner.
Without doubt, the ancestors of the modern dog observed and trained the humans with whom they interacted. Domestication is a relationship and a dialogue, not a condition one species imposes on another.
As a horsewoman, I am amused and perplexed by a phrase many trainers use to urge on a student having difficulty accomplishing a particular task with their horse:"MAKE him do that!" Make him do that? Little old human me, who is completely at the physical mercy of an animal that outweighs me by at least five times if not by 10, is supposed to MAKE the horse do anything? Hogwash.
The intent (I hope) of this phrase is to encourage the student to become clearer in her physical signals (aids) to the horse so that the horse can understand what is going on. Novice riders, particularly, make a lot of random movements because they are not in control of their own bodies and the horse cannot always "hear" the aids (intended movements) through the static.
Personally, I prefer the metaphor of asking a horse to do something and seeing what he answers.
In reality, what humans do with horses, dogs, or any other trained and usually domestic animal is carry on a conversation in a mutual language. That language is certainly physical; it may very well be, as Lee suggests, telepathic as well.
No, I have no scientific evidence that telepathy exists. It would be hard to test the existence of telepathy rigorously when one subject is non-human. However, as a horsewoman and a pet owner (not as a scientist) I am sure that my animals do communicate with me telepathically. I've received such messages too often to doubt them.
The trick is, if you are going to receive the message -- the phone call, metaphorically -- you have to be willing to pick up the phone. You have to be paying attention.
