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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:10
Celestia Ward: Okay, welcome back to Squaring the Strange. Celestia here. I will be soon joined by Ben and Pascual for Episode 68. This week we are looking at animal abilities and boy that’s a big topic we could probably do some more episodes in the future on. Everything from dogs in Colombia paying for their treats with leaves and then monkeys supposedly engaging in prostitution when they learn what money is. There’s a million other things out there we could look into and cover. We picked a few favorites and we’ll be discussing them. This is actually an episode we recorded a while back to use just in case people were busy or gone and so we’ve got you know a situation here where Ben is busy this week and Pascual has been busy for a while so we pulled up a canned episode but it’s still fresh. I opened it and checked it it’s all good and before we move on to the meat of the episode here. I do have a mea culpa from last week. While I was discussing pregnancy woo, I mentioned a friend of mine who has worked as a certified maternal nurse with pregnant moms and their newborns for like 30 years now. She is in the process of getting her PhD slash DNP, a doctorate in nursing practice, and I somewhat cavalierly referred to her as soon to be doctor a couple of times, but that may have caused some confusion for listeners. And more importantly, it brings up a point that we have made on a show in the past and actually have in our topics list as something to cover in a future show, and that is namely that there are doctors and then there are doctors. And it’s important not to confuse any other type of doctorate with an MD, even a nursing doctorate. Karen was not doling out any medical advice. We tried to make that clear, and she was helping me get a feel for what goes on in prenatal care and in the delivery room, and she pointed me to some useful studies, but neither of us was giving out any sort of medical advice. I bring this up because there are many, many, many examples online of people who use the title doctor in a confusing way to insinuate that they have medical authority that they do not. And just to be clear, Karen in no way was doing that. She just kindly helped me via some Facebook chat messages, and I was the one who goofed up and used the term doctor a bit too loosely.

0:03:07
CW: And as I said, she’ll be getting her PhD DN early next year. She’s been working on it for a while, but I thank her for her help. And anyway, as a skeptic, just something you should remember in your skeptical toolkit, you can find PhDs in just about every field online who write about medical issues regardless of what they have studied. Now, nursing is a legitimate medical field, of course, and I trust a nurse far more than I would say a computer science PhD doling out health advice or climate science advice for that matter. But bear in mind that an MD undergoes clinical training and a residency that literally can be the difference between life and death. So just remember that when someone presents you with health information online or a miracle cure espoused by somebody who calls themselves doctor, look at what type of doctor they are. Anyway, apologies for any fuzziness that I may have created last week, and I’m kind of glad it came up because it gave me a good reason to discuss the title of doctor. And one last thing, you will notice in this episode that we mentioned facilitated communication once during the course of the conversation. It comes up, and I would be remiss if I did not mention that Susan Gerbic and the guerrilla skeptics of Wikipedia have been doing some great work updating the webpage for facilitated communication and other forms of that type of supposedly therapeutic communication aid. And anybody wishing to check that out should take a look at that Wikipedia page and some of the other stuff Susan Gerbic has been posting lately. There is some really good information in skeptical publications and online resources about that most unfortunate type of interaction that often does not really have anything behind it and can lead to a lot of harm for both children and their families. Anyway, let’s take a lighter look at some animal abilities first.

(MUSIC)

Pascual Romero: So this week we’re talking about animal abilities, and everything ranging from actual abilities that animals have to purported abilities that are kind of in the mystical realm and psychic.

CW: Or abilities that just make them seem so much more like us.

0:05:40
PR: Right. Which are everyone’s favorite abilities, obviously.

0:05:44
Ben Radford: A lot of times, as you guys know, we’ve talked on the show about ghosts, and there’s a lot of ghost lore about the idea that children and animals are more sensitive to ghosts. I’m perpetually being told a ghost story, and the ghost story will be, so sometimes my cat looks at a far corner of the room when there’s nothing there. And I’ll be waiting for the ghost part to come up and they’re like, well, what else could it be? I’m like, have you had cats? Do you know what cats are? Why in the world would you think that this is? But it’s just like, oh well, they’re sensing something. Well, maybe, maybe not. And even if they are, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean that they’re…

0:06:34
CW: My roommate in college always blames stuff like that, not on ghosts, but on business meetings. Whenever our cat would look up, suddenly jump in the air, and then run to the other room for no apparent reason, she’d say, oh, he was late for a cat business meeting.

0:06:50
BR: Important cat business.

CW: Yes.

0:06:54
PR: So Ben, we’ve scientifically proven that animals can read minds, right?

0:06:58
BR: Depending on who you talk to, yes. Well, you know, it’s a case of where, oftentimes, we project our interpretations of the world onto animals, right? I think of the times when someone will be describing their cat’s behavior and they’ll say, well, my cat thinks she’s a dog. And I’ve always spent, and I’ve heard this, I’ve heard this many times, and I’ve always, I’ve always been fascinated by like, your cat thinks she’s a dog. How would your cat know what it’s like to be a dog? And it’s just this, this bizarre, like double projection of motives. Yeah, that is like…

CW: My cat has species dysphoria.

PR: Yeah, that is conceptually adventurous.

BR: That’s a good way to put it, right? But this happens all the time, and we do this all the time. We project, and we see things, and the cat is looking into the corner, not because there’s a bug or insect there, but because there’s a ghost there. We often project meaning, anthropomorphize human behaviors.

0:08:14
CW: I sometimes say, you know, I’ve got some friends with really nice cats, I just say, wow, your cat acts more like a dog, by which I just mean your cat’s not a little sh**.

BR: Yeah, a lot of it goes back to folklore of animals, and of course there’s a long tradition of that. There’s the famous black cats being bad luck.

0:08:24
CW: Cats have a long folkloric history of being little sh**.

BR: And associated with witches.

CW: Stealing breath from babies.

0:08:29
BR: Right, exactly. And on the plus side, you have animals such as bees and crickets, which are, particularly in many Eastern cultures, considered to be good luck. And so there are places, for example, in Jamaica and the Caribbean, where you shouldn’t harm a spider, you shouldn’t harm an animal, because it’s… Lizards, for example, because they’re good luck. So there’s lots of really interesting, intricate traditions of folklore associated with animals. We could do a whole show on that. And of course, you can also go back to the ancient Romans. One of my favorite types of divination is called Haruspiciation.

CW: Hairspousiation?

0:09:06
BR: H-A-R-U-S-spication.

0:09:07
CW: Hairspication.

0:09:08
BR: Haruspication. And basically it’s where they would take an animal, usually a poultry or sheep, and they would bring it into the town square, and everyone’s gathered around, and they would disembowel the creature. Oh, I thought you were going to go there, yeah. Yeah, they would take a live animal, just cut its guts open, and of course the guts and intestines spill out in sort of weird, gross ways. And so then you take a stick, and you poke at the guts as they’re squirming around.

0:09:40
CW: I would just like to apologize to any listeners who thought this was going to be a cute little cuddly show about what puppies and kittens could do.

0:09:47
BR: Well, there you go. It’s not my fault. I’m edu-macating our audience.

0:09:56
CW: But go on, Ben, about disemboweling animals and poking their guts with a stick.

0:10:01
BR: So this, for a long time, this was considered a valid method of divination, right? How do you determine the future? Well, you disembowel a pig and you watch how its guts squirm on the town square. So my point here is not to gross out the listeners, but to give sort of a sense of the breadth of some of the folklore surrounding animals, and of course in this case, their predictive abilities. The predictive ability you also see with the black cat, right? The idea is that a black cat is telling you about the future. You will have bad luck. It is an omen or a purport of something else. And so there’s that whole tradition of animals knowing more than we do and often knowing the future. Anyway, and this course folds into psychic pets. You have, you know, Punxatawney Phil. Quasi-psychic, I should say. There were a whole bunch of animals, and I’ve written about them many times for Live Science and Discovery News, psychic animals. For soccer games and the Brexit vote, pretty much any time that there’s any important national or international referendum, somebody consult a dog or a squid or a duck.

0:11:11
CW: For the Super Bowl, they have two jars in the aquarium. One has like, you know, the Seahawks, the other has the Patriots or whatever logos on them, and they see whether the octopus in the tank goes into the right jar or the left jar, and it’s a big hoopla thing, but to everybody’s credit, I think the general public recognizes it as just a publicity stunt and an advertisement for the aquarium or the zoo or the whatever, and thank goodness there’s no disemboweling.

0:11:40
BR: Yeah. Not these days. The PETA folks would not go with that. But let me just add one other item. I was reading a book called Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.

PR: That’s a great title.

BR: It’s by magician Ricky Jay, actor and magician. He was in The Illusionist. He’s an interesting Interesting guy. Anyway, in his book he references an 1817 advertisement touting Toby the sapient pig. So this was a big thing. This is, you know, so Toby the sapient pig, you’re thinking, now what does sapient mean? Right? Knowledgeable? Well, this is what Toby could do. I mean, let me just give you a sampling. He could spell, he could read, he could play cards. I’m not sure how a pig holds cards.

0:12:30
CW: We need to take this pig to Vegas.

0:12:32
BR: He can tell time and perhaps most astonishingly, he can read an audience member’s thoughts.

0:12:39
PR: Oh wow.

0:12:40
BR: Now if you’re suspecting this is sort of like a magic trick, or an elusive mentalist.

0:12:45
CW: I was suspecting it was exactly like that, yeah.

0:12:47
BR: There’s a reason for that. I will let that go.

CW: I think I’ve read some stuff by James Randi where he talks about the old clever pig tricks. Apparently there was more than one going around at a certain time.

BR: Oh yeah, sapient pigs, man, they’re a thing. We should bring them back.

CW: And there was a Warner Brothers cartoon about a singing frog as well.

BR: Yeah, with the top hat and the cane.

PR: Yeah, that guy was very talented.

BR: Until he went to France.

PR: Yeah, well.

CW: Well, people have made quite a bit of money off of some of these animals. I looked into a story of a horse named Lady Wonder. And this horse, you know, not quite as old as the pig acts. It was not in the 1800s. This horse lived around the time of 1930s through the 1950s. And it was owned and trained by a person named C.D. Fonda. And according to C.D. Fonda, this horse had psychic abilities and would answer questions. So the charge for these questions was three questions for a dollar, and over a hundred and fifty thousand people took the horse up on this, which makes that horse more profitable than most prized race horses of the time. Lady Wander would use a lever system that pulled up alphabet cards to spell out answers. So just like the two-legged swindlers, I mean psychics, Lady Wonder was reported to have helped solve crimes. She found the body of a missing boy. She helped discover oil, and she predicted the winner of a boxing match, which reminds us of all the animals that are used in publicity stunts to predict the winner of some huge sporting event.

0:14:25
PR: Sure.

BR: Well, not to interrupt, but now a boxing match, now I’m not a sports fan, but there’s a 50-50 chance on that one, right? I mean, unless they knock each other out, I mean what…

0:14:36
CW: Indeed, with all sporting events that have two participants, which is most of them, it’s one or the other.

0:14:44
PR: Yeah, there’s a very, very, very slim chance of a draw in a round-based fighting sport, but that is like almost impossible.

0:14:55
CW: I feel the need as a person who knows a little bit about odds making in Vegas, it’s not a 50-50. It’s never a 50-50. The odds are never even.

BR: But does the horse know that?

CW: Well, the person training the horse might know that, might know who’s favored.

0:15:11
PR: Like predicting a Tyson fight in the 80s or something.

0:15:15
CW: Yeah, exactly.

0:15:16
PR: Who knows who’s going to win that one?

0:15:18
CW: Exactly. Technically, all bookies are psychic then, if they know the odds.

PR: Yeah.

CW: They’re pretty good at predicting the winners. So a researcher, and I put that in little air finger scare quotes, J.B. Rine investigated Lady Wonder and found evidence of ESP in the horse, of course.

PR: Of course.

CW: But magician, it seems like we have a precursor to James Randi here, magician Milbourne Christopher looked further into it and saw that Lady Wonder was being cued by her trainer and sure enough the horse was clueless about answering if the trainer did not know the answer to the question.

0:15:53
BR: So there’s reminiscence of facilitated communication. Facilitated communication and you know people would, people with autism and other disabilities would would have someone handling, handling, using their fingers to point to different things, answers on essentially a Ouija board.

CW: Yes.

BR: And this was a huge thing, we should do a show on that at some point. But that was one of the ways that facilitated communication was eventually disproven, was that when the subject, when the person was handling the person, didn’t know.

0:16:22
CW: If the nurse did not know who the kid’s uncle’s name was, then suddenly the kid didn’t know who the what the uncle’s name was and and and in facilitated communication, yeah, if we ever do a show on it, there’s some tremendous harm that’s been done people accused of sexual crimes. It never happened children being abused and mishandled and and and and families hopes being brought up and then dashed in this case with the horse. Obviously the horse was not accusing anybody of sexual misconduct But much money was swindled out of people and it was a huge fraud obviously right Joe Nickell our Investigator friend also looked into the case and said lady wonder was a well-trained animal not a psychic one. Now as I’m talking about this horse who has been cued by the trainer to answer things is anybody thinking of another famous horse? Perhaps with an Austrian name? Oh, Clever Hans! He is the most famous animal for skeptics. He is the most famous animal with an ability. And his ability was, he changed the way that research methodology was performed.

BR: That’s pretty impressive.

CW: Clever Hans helped science a lot. Now I did a little deep dive into Clever Hans and learned some things that I didn’t know before. It is a really neat story that demonstrates the importance of double blinding. Hans was a horse, and specifically an Orlov trotter. It’s a very gorgeous Russian horse, the kind you see trotting very elegantly in front of those little carriages. He became a national spectacle in Germany around the turn of the 20th century. Hans appeared to be much like the pig you were mentioning, the many pigs. The horse appeared to be able to do math problems. In addition to understanding a calendar, he could differentiate musical tones, he could read, he could spell, all of this in German, as showcased by the owner, Wilhelm von Osten. And Wilhelm was a math teacher, but he was also into phrenology and mysticism. He was a pretty well-rounded individual. Now, around the early 1900s, there was a huge public interest in animal intelligence, sort of brought on by Darwin’s theories. Like, if all these animals are related to us, they must think like us. So people were very interested in proving or sometimes disproving whether or not animals could think far beyond what we previously imagined. And so he would take the horse around, and apparently he never charged admission. He just created huge, you know, spectacles, and large groups of people would watch Hans answer these questions. He would respond by tapping his hoof. And the news even made it to the States as the New York Times ran a story about this amazing horse. Now, due to all this public interest, the German Board of Education appointed a commission of 13 people to study Hans and find out what they could. The commission seemed like it was pretty well staffed. They had a circus trainer, a veterinarian, a zoo director, a cavalry officer, basically every type of horse handler you could think of. And the rest were made it that the rest of the board was school teachers and a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst. P-F-U-N-G-S-T. Now, the commission itself found that there were no tricks being used to get Hans to answer these questions. It’s not like he would tap the horse on the buttocks or something to get it to tap its hoof. So after a while, they passed off the investigation to just Pfungst, the psychologist I mentioned, who continued to look into the phenomenon by varying the conditions like a good scientist. He put blinders on the horse, he separated the horse from the spectators, he had people besides Wilhelm ask the questions, and he tracked the horse’s rate of success. He found that there was actually no evidence of fraud, but he did discover that Hans only got the right answer if the questioner themselves knew the answer and Hans could see the questioner. Didn’t necessarily have to be Wilhelm. Pfungst started by focusing on the questioner and he noticed that Wilhelm and others would show signs of tension, facially and in their posture, when Hans approached the right answer. And with the final hoof tap that was the correct answer, that tension in the human being would release and they’d kind of like breathe a sigh and their head would move. And horses, when they interact with other horses, if anybody who’s been around horses knows this, horses are very sensitive to slight changes in posture and signs of tension. That’s how they communicate with each other. So it makes a lot of sense that Hans could pick up on this. I guess that just never occurred to the other so-called horse experts on the commission who were likely just looking for intentional fraud. So it turns out Hans was simply taking cues from Wilhelm, clues that were completely unintended. So Wilhelm had no idea himself that he was cuing Hans. Now Pfungst took it one step further, and I admire the guy for this. He trained himself to essentially do the trick. If he wanted to, he could have gone on the road as a psychic after this and made tons of money, but to his credit he didn’t. He got a bunch of people and he had people think of a number or a simple math problem and he would look at the person without, you know, he said, think of it, concentrate on it yourself, but don’t tell me, and then he would tap on a table as he watched the person. And he noticed signs of tension and then the tension would release and he said specifically he noticed a slight upward jerk of the head when he did what should be the last tap. And of course, and he had success with this. He actually was able to do it fairly well. So it’s totally unintentional on the part of the participant, similar to the ideomotor effect how people don’t know they’re moving the Ouija board planchette, but they do.

PR: Right.

0:22:24
CW: And as I said, this story always reinforces to me the importance of double blinding, meaning you blind not just the participant, in this case Hans, but also the person administering the test, in this case Wilhelm, or Funks when he was doing it with humans. You can have the most honest research assistant in the world, but if they give off some unintentional cues, they can totally wait the results without even realizing it. And if a horse can pick up on body language like this, absolutely a human being can. Sure. As Funkst showed. Funkst’s findings actually led to a big change in experiment design, and researchers came to realize that unintentional cueing needed to be acknowledged and eliminated in order to not taint the results of experiments. And even now, the Clever-Hans effect is a big problem with training drug-sniffing dogs, as unintentional cues from dog trainers can result in dogs that produce a lot of false positives. Now we could do a whole show on dogs abilities. Boy they can sense changes and smell like nobody’s business. One of the things I did when I typed in can animals sense in Google, you know how it shows you all the potential results, can animals sense cancer, pregnancy, hypoglycemia, and dogs can. Anyway, that’s for another day. Now, the million-dollar question is, did the owner of Clever Hans, Wilhelm von Osten, thank Mr. Pfungst and say, well, never mind? And did he hitch up Hans to a wagon and just call it a day?

PR: I get the feeling he didn’t.

CW: No, he completely refused to believe the conclusions, and he continued to show Hans all over Germany, attracting the same large crowds of people. And as a final irony, Clever Hans actually takes his name from a fairy tale. Did you know that, Ben?

0:24:10
BR: I did not know that.

0:24:11
CW: Oh my God, I found a fairy tale thing Ben didn’t know. It’s a brother’s grim fairy tale. And in that tale, the adjective of clever is completely sarcastic. It’s about a guy named Hans who bungles several tasks and ends up doing so many stupid things that his fiance just dumps him.

0:24:31
PR: Yeah, that’s funny you mention that because I have heard in older writing or I’ve witnessed the word clever being used sarcastically like that in a sort of like, you know, he’s a very clever man or, you know, not meaning that at all.

0:24:47
CW: Well, as skeptics, I’m pretty sure all of us have been called clever and it’s not really meant what we think. Aren’t you clever?

0:24:54
BR: You know, when you were talking about the fact that Clever Hans’ owner didn’t recognize that he was unconsciously killing Hans, I mean, as you pointed out, that’s an incredibly important aspect of this. And you’re right, I mean, it goes back to the idiom motor effect with the Ouija boards. It also applies more broadly to the interaction between psychic mediums and sitters.

0:25:19
CW: Absolutely.

0:25:20
I’ve seen this over and over again. It’s fascinating where you’ll have a client go into a psychic or a person who claims to be a psychic.

CW: A swindler.

BR: A swindler. They’re not all swindlers. Many of them genuinely believe they actually have the ability. I wouldn’t call them all swindlers necessarily, but you have this dynamic in which somebody goes in there and they’re unconsciously cuing and giving the answers to the psychic. But they swear they don’t. There’s been interesting research. My friend Richard Wiseman has done some interesting stuff on this about six or seven years ago. It’s exactly the same case where when you’re trying to design research to determine whether or not a person is psychic, one of the things you look at is, is there new information? You have a person comes in talking to a person and says, you know, my grandmother died, there’s a whole history of things, and they will just be fascinated, oh, the psychic told me this, the psychic told me that, and you can record the conversation and say, you told the psychic that, or you essentially gave them all the information to piece it together. This is not rocket science. They’re just astonished. They’re like, I don’t remember. No, in the same way that he was cuing Clever Hans, the sitters cue the psychics. One of the key ways that you can actually determine whether or not there’s novel new information that neither the psychic nor the sitter has. So for example, if I know that my great-grandfather died in prison because he was a notorious serial killer, and even if I don’t tell you that and you’re a psychic, if you give that back to me, one of us knows that. And on the other hand, if a psychic tells you something that no one in the room knows, for example, that your mother was adopted, and you go to your mother, I have found that you know…

0:27:24
CW: Well, it’s the difference between a cold reading and a hot reading. A hot reading indicates the psychic appears to be presenting new information, but it’s because they got it by some other means, by searching the Facebook profile, or some other, which animals can’t do. Animals do not search Facebook profiles.

0:27:43
BR: Maybe Toby the sapient pig can.

0:27:45
CW: But a good reader of human, a good psychic reader of minds will also be able to pick up on little body language cues. If you start talking about romantic relationships and the person appears to get all uncomfortable, I sense you’re having trouble in that area. Oh, she knew I was having romantic troubles. Well, yeah, when you bring up dating and the person tenses up and they start twitching. It doesn’t take a clever Hans to figure that out. But horses are just fascinating. You’ve had some experience with horses, haven’t you?

0:28:22
PR: Yeah, I spent some time kind of working at a horse barn.

0:28:27
CW: You’ve got a very colorful past. You know that?

0:28:30
PR: Yeah.

0:28:31
BR: There’s a tale from the road coming up.

0:28:33
PR:  This is almost a tale from the road. So for about three years, I spent a good five days a week at a horse barn part-time. I would go over there and feed horses, walk them, do just basic general what they call groom work.

0:28:50
CW: They’ve got personalities.

0:28:52
PR: They do. Different breeds of horses have very different things that are common within the breed and things like that. One thing you will notice right away with horses, especially some of the smarter horses, they pick up on human behavior very quickly. It’s very important, a person who handles horses needs to be very aware of how horses read you because they can get very apprehensive if you’re not carrying yourself confidently and calmly. Certain horses, especially thoroughbreds, which tend to be a little more aggressive, they can be perfectly nice horses, but they have a lot of energy. Because of that, they can be real spooky and they jump at things a lot.

CW: If the ears go back, move away.

PR: Yeah, if they pin their ears. And so, you have to, it takes more time for you to learn the horse than it does for the horse to learn you. Horses will figure you out faster than you can even realize. And they’re so, as Hans’s name denotes, they’re very clever animals. They’re able to use this to their advantage sometimes. If you have food, they’ll do things, they’ll make movements that catch your attention or they’ll be kind of silly because they know that people will come pay attention to them if they start nodding their head or something.

0:30:13
CW: So you’re saying the horse thinks it’s a dog.

0:30:15
PR: Yeah, the horse thinks it’s a dog. In sort of a manner of speaking, horses, when you properly train them, think the human is a horse. They think you’re just part of the herd and they will behave towards you as they do to other horses in their kind of language, their physical language. One of the more remarkable things though is that they will teach themselves the tricks. That’s a thing that you don’t hear a lot. For instance, a horse will, in the same way that it can read you pretty well, if it realizes that you react to something a certain way, and it likes that reaction, it will continue to keep doing it. I mean, all animals do this. But then horses can also do this thing where they can kind of create a relative, they can create a little system of behaviors off of that on their own. So they’ll like nod at you and you’ll give them a treat or something, you know, and just like, and this is, at these barns, I have a lot of people, it’s always, you just always have these people who know the horses and they’re walking by and the horse will start nodding, and if they have a treat in their pocket, they’ll give it to them. So the horse always nods at people. And then like, say they have a treat the horse doesn’t like and it kind of reels from it or something. And then what’ll happen is sometimes they’ll develop their own behavior of like shaking their head or something. And all of a sudden the horse has a way to say yes and no. And then the horse will use that in other applications. And this is, it seems really remarkable, but it’s really just the thing that animals do. They learn that, okay, well, if I do this, people get away from me. If I do this, they come to me.

0:31:59
CW: So it’s a way to sort of watch a system of communication develop live time.

0:32:03
PR: Yeah, and horses and dogs, all these animals that are very trainable have the ability to kind of teach themselves and apply it to other things. Horses are really good at that, and so it makes them seem remarkable. To their credit, they are very smart for herd animals especially. It’s really fun to see these horses kind of develop over time, especially younger horses that aren’t trained. And you see all the things that they start picking up, like following targets and learning their movements sideways, back, forth. And then horses learn words really well. And the interesting thing is it’s like dogs, where the word matters to an extent, but it’s how you’re saying the word that’s the most important. So if a horse is really used to an owner that says their name in a very specific way, you have to mimic it, otherwise the horse won’t know you’re talking to it. Which is really tough, because a lot of horses are owned by very young women with high-pitched voices.

0:33:08
CW: I was about to say, did you have to go like, come here, horsey!

0:33:12
PR: Yeah, sometimes you’d have to really try to get your voice up and pitch to just get the horse to recognize you. Interesting.

0:33:19
PR: Yeah.

0:33:20
BR: I had no idea.

PR: And so it’s very, very interesting. They respond to clicks, and they respond to all kinds of different motions. But they are so clever and so intelligent that you always have to be outsmarting them, too. Riding them is almost just a test of outsmarting the animal to not kill you. Especially when they’re a little young and still kind of hot, it’s like you’re always trying to kind of preempt the things that are going to cause them to get out of control. Like if you see a bag blowing across the road or something while you’re trotting, it’s like you just stop and wait.

0:33:54
BR: You know that’s going to be a problem.

PR: There’s all sorts of little things like that.

0:33:58
CW: It’s a wonder we ever domesticated those animals.

PR: Yeah, I frankly I’m very surprised that they didn’t just kill us so often that we stopped messing with them.

CW: I was once sneezed on by a horse. As a young kid I had riding lessons occasionally and I also, just picture Hermione, that was my hair. I had hair like that when I was a kid and this horse just like a booger cannon just sneezed right on me and I was picking horse boogers out of my hair for like an hour. It was a very vivid memory.

0:34:29
PR: Yeah, their sinuses are huge.

BR: She’s tearing up in the studio.

0:34:33
CW: And now you’re telling me about all the stuff you learned about horse cognition. I’m like, that horse probably did that on purpose.

0:34:40
PR: I wouldn’t be too surprised sometimes.

0:34:42
CW: Not in the mood for a riding lesson today.

0:34:44
PR: That’s probably that horse’s defense.

0:34:46
BR: Well, I don’t spend too much time around horses. I’ve gone for a couple horse rides. The last one I did was, I thought it was going to be, I was on a tour, and I thought it was going to be a short horse ride. Oh, yo, a 30 minute horse ride. Well, it turns into like a two hour horse ride. If you’re used to horses and riding horses, it’s not a big deal.

0:35:07
PR: Yeah.

0:35:08
CW: You were walking 20 for days, weren’t you?

0:35:09
BR: If you’re not, no, my tailbone, like nine months later, my tailbone still hurt. It was in South America. Anyway, so I don’t avoid horses. I just don’t ride them. But I do have a cat and that’s one thing where I found is that with my cat, she reads body language very well. And sometimes I have to… I’ll see what she’s just like, okay, the pace, how I’m carrying myself, there’s so much just in simple movements from point A to point B that we convey that we don’t, we do this all the time, we do this in everyday lives, we don’t notice it. If we’re at the bank, we’re at the post office, we’re in errands, there’s all sorts of innumerable facial cues, body posture cues.

0:36:05
CW: Idio-motor.

0:36:06
BR: Yeah. It factors into what we think about the world, but we don’t consciously process it. So it’s just interesting to sort of remember that we’re giving off cues about our state of mind, our intentions, who we are the pets career and hobby.

CW: When you’ve got a dog or a cat, that dog or cat relies on you for food, relies on you for affection and pets and warmth at night, and so it’s going to make you the focus of its attention. It’s going to notice if you’ve changed. It’s going to notice if you are its sun, its moon, and its stars.

0:36:52
PR: Yeah.

0:36:53
BR: Well, with a cat, it’s more like you’re just its roommate. You don’t have a cat, but I can tell you this.

0:37:00
CW: I have had cats. I have had cats in the past. Yeah, sometimes the cats are… It’s not so much you’re the sun, the moon, and the stars. You’re the butler, the maid, and the cook.

0:37:12
PR: I kind of wonder if a lot of it is simply that humans, because we’re a verbal species, we use verbal communication mostly to convey things. So we’ve kind of evolved to not, I mean we still can subconsciously and train ourselves consciously to read each other really well, but I think maybe we tend to ignore the small things like that because we depend on each other to communicate what we need or what we’re thinking. I think with animals being nonverbal, I wonder if just the fact that we can’t tell them how we feel and they can’t tell us what they’re thinking, and therefore 100% of the communication has to be through nonverbal cues and watching how you’re behaving.

0:37:55
CW: Yeah, which we’ve come to take for granted.

0:37:57
PR: Yeah, and I think… because I mean, you can tell if someone’s upset and they’re not being straight about it, but at the same time if you know someone comes in is like boy, I’m tired like you don’t need to like read that on them You just you take their word for it, you know And so and I think over a long enough timeline we probably have learned to just kind of not consciously pick these up.

(MUSIC)

0:38:18
BR: So, Pascual, word around the campfire is there’s something called a skeptic crate. Do you know anything about that?

0:38:38
PR: I do, as a matter of fact. We are going to be putting out a monthly crate.

BR: A monthly crate?

PR: A monthly crate.

BR: I’m intrigued.

0:38:54
PR: Called the Skepti-Crate. And it will be a crate with a few goodies relating to our show, relating to science, skepticism, show topics, maybe some little bonus items that have to do with us as individuals relating to our own work or things that Celestia has done.

0:39:14
BR: Tell me more.

0:39:15
PR: So any patron above $5 an episode. Five bucks? Seriously? Five bucks. Five measly bucks? That’s like that’s like 500 pennies or something. Yeah, exactly. Who can’t afford that? Precisely 500 pennies. And you will get a Skeptic Crate once every month. We ship them on the 15th of every month. So once you are within a month of good standing at the $5 or more per episode level, you’ll be receiving a Skepticrate every month as a regular thank you for your continued support.

BR: It’s a bargain at twice the price.

PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:39:47
BR: Awesome, awesome. And where do we find out more about that? What you want to do is go over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and you can see all the bonuses, you can see how to sign up, and you can see all the different perks because not only do you get the Skepticrate, but $5 and up have their own bonus VIP level content and episodes that we put out every month.

(MUSIC)

0:40:10
CW: Well, human emotions are one thing, but let’s talk about animals sensing something that you don’t really have warning about most of the time. Something that we’ve always kind of wanted a predictor for, and I’m talking about earthquakes.

BR: Flatulence.

CW: No, not flatulence.

BR: Earthquakes, yeah, sorry.

CW: I’m sure your cat reacts the same as an earthquake whenever you are flatulent. Earthquakes have puzzled people for generations, and there’s even stories going back to like 373 BC, there was a story about an earthquake in a Greek town of Helice, or Helik, I’ve seen it spelled a couple different ways, where they said quite a bit before an earthquake, all of the snakes and rodents and creeping animals. It sounded very folkloric, like they just left the town. Like you see, you imagine this-

0:41:20
BR: It’s a biblical thing, right?

0:41:21
CW: Just this raft of little critters just scurrying away. And so they kind of evacuated the town and then there was a huge earthquake and a tsunami and the whole place was destroyed. And that’s one of the earliest stories about earthquakes being predicted by animals large and small. Did you notice anything with the horses? Any of the other trainers told you they acted skittish or something?

0:41:45
PR: Yeah. In fact, any time… In my years, and then I was in Southern California at the time, and this place was in Shadow Hills, which is the north side of the valley in Los Angeles, which is an area that… Maybe it’s just my own experience, but I think it seems that earthquakes tend to be more out in that, that’s like where the big earthquake in Northridge was, was on that side of LA. Most of the big earthquakes seem to happen kind of more in that direction. So they tend to be felt more over there, at least, again, anecdotally. In my experience, it seems that most of the time I’d hear from my friends up there before anyone else. And yeah, if there was an earthquake, just a minor one, there was never a huge one while I was there, but you know some that were like fives and anytime one happened, first off, the barn would be in disarray because all the animals would freak out and cause, you know, damage to the doors and the gates, they get themselves caught up on stuff. And they would usually sense something before it happened. Now, I’m not talking like an hour before it happened, but usually if you’re standing there and a tremor happens about maybe three or four seconds before you feel anything, the horses start getting agitated. On one hand, people say, well, that seems very mystical and weird.

0:42:57
BR: Very mysterious.

PR: But the thing is that having been through as many earthquakes as I have and just minor tremors and things like that, I didn’t feel them, you know, sometimes when even my neighbor was like, did you feel that? I’m like, no. And if you’re in a car, you’re not, you will not feel an earthquake that’s below probably five and a half. I mean, cars, the suspension just makes it impossible to feel it. And, and it just, generally speaking, if you’re not like expecting one and you’re used to like cars driving by your house, I mean, you’re just not going to pick up. So animals do sense the earthquake, but I, you know, it seems that it’s mostly because they’re feeling it before we do. They’re feeling the waves that are reaching us faster, and it stands to reason that the less intense waves would probably reach us before the big ones.

0:43:49
CW: Well, there’s two types of waves in an earthquake. I did a comic about earthquakes and how they can teach us things about the earth. There’s two types of waves. There’s the P wave, which is the pressure wave, a type of compression wave. And that can go through many different types of materials, liquid and everything. And then there’s the S wave, or secondary shaking wave, which is what we know of as an earthquake. So the pressure wave happens, and the pressure waves travel at speeds between 1 and 14 kilometers per second, while the S waves travel significantly slower, between one and eight kilometers per second. So depending on where the epicenter of the earthquake is, the P wave is going to get there before any serious shaking action by seconds or sometimes by minutes. And so a lot of the reports you see about animals getting really weird right before an earthquake, they’re not like, oh, like a week before this happened. It’s like the animals started getting really weird and then we had an earthquake like five minutes later or like two minutes later. Then there’s even some noise there, like as a skeptic, you look at all different reasons as well as all different claims. There are some kooky claims I’m going to get into in a little while. From an article in 2003 by Marianne Mott in National Geographic, she sums up the seismologists’ opinion of pets predicting earthquakes. American seismologists, on the other hand, are skeptical. Even though there have been documented cases of strange animal behavior prior to earthquakes, the United States Geological Survey, a government agency that provides scientific information about the Earth, says a reproducible connection between a specific behavior and the occurrence of a quake has never been made. What we’re faced with is a lot of anecdotes, says Andy Michael, a geophysicist at USGS. Animals react to so many things, being hungry, defending their territories, mating predators, it’s hard to have a controlled study to get that advanced warning signal. And later in the article, talking about people’s reports about their pets getting weird, it says, geologists, however, dismiss these kinds of reports, saying it’s just the psychological focusing effect, where people remember strange behaviors only after an earthquake or other catastrophe has taken place. If nothing had happened, they contend, people would not have remembered the strange behavior at all. It reminds me of that old Sherlock Holmes quote. Do you remember the strange occurrence, the strange matter of the dog’s behavior in the night? No, the dog didn’t do anything in the night. That’s what was strange. I’m paraphrasing, I’m paraphrasing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But that’s about it. Dogs do weird things all the time. Cats have cat business meetings.

PR: Yeah.

0:46:42
CW: If your cat has a business meeting right before an earthquake, you’re gonna tie those two together and say there must be a connection.

0:46:47
BR: Or if you happen to, for whatever reason, think that there’s a ghost or something unusual in the house, then that’s what you’ll pay attention to. You won’t pay attention to all the times the animals act weird in any number of other entirely mundane and ordinary situations.

PR: Yeah. Something they don’t really mention in the article also is that earthquakes feel different. Every earthquake’s a little different. You know, some of them kind of rock back and forth. Some of them make the ground feel like it’s dropping out from under you. Some of them, and this is one that I think really could be a plausible explanation for some of it, is where the ground starts to kind of sway slowly. And before you even realize anything’s moving, you just feel like you’re getting kind of woozy and off balance.

0:47:37
CW: I’ve experienced those. There was an earthquake in LA and the aftershocks reached Las Vegas and I happened to be working on the third, no it was a pretty high floor of a building. I have a condition where sometimes I get migraines that mess with my balance, my vertigo. I get a little touch of vertigo occasionally if I get a migraine. I’m sitting there working, drawing people, and suddenly I felt, I was like, whoa, oh crap I’m getting a migraine. Then I looked up and in the room the giant chandelier is swaying back and forth. That wasn’t vertigo. Something moved this building.

0:48:17
PR: Yeah, the building’s just moving somewhere.

0:48:19
CW: Then they had CNN on a giant screen in the room as well. They immediately had reports of the earthquake in LA and the fact that aftershocks had just reached us. It was a weird sort of like don’t trust your senses sort of thing.

0:48:30
PR: Yeah, it can get very, very odd. You suddenly feel, I mean, because your brain, any time you kind of go a little bit off balance and you don’t know why, your brain immediately just goes into dizzy mode, you know, and you just immediately feel completely woozy and out of it, you know, and so it’s to think that just that subtle little motion, I mean, you know, probably takes a lot less than that for an animal.

0:48:57
CW: Yeah, it’s, in more than one way, it’s unsettling. And there was actually a, bringing it back to pets, there was actually a San Francisco geologist named Jim Berkland who managed to successfully predict an earthquake in 1989. Again, we’re talking San Francisco, they have a lot of quakes.

PR: Yeah.

CW: But he did that by assessing the notices about lost pets in the classified ads. But this method was debunked later by researchers and it was absolutely not reproducible. It was a situation of the stopped clock is right twice a day.

0:49:32
PR: Right.

CW: Then we have, but expanding that to a lot of other animals, we have, I looked up a Weather Channel article from October 2016, identifies five animals it claims can predict the coming of an earthquake. Ants are said to rush out of their ant holes even at night when they’re not normally active. This is according to a German study involving 15,000 ant mounds. So that caught my eye. Snakes are said to leave their burrows. This has been seen in China before a 1975 earthquake and they mention the folkloric tale I told you about all the small critters running away from Helike in 373 BC before it was hit by a tsunami. And then there’s oarfish. You know what these are, Ben, these creepy giant sea monsters. They’re pretty rare to see because they live in the deep, deep sea. They’re 15 to 20 feet long most of the time and as I said, they’re pretty rare. The Weather Channel actually quotes live science about an incident where 20 oarfish were found washed up on Japan’s shore right before a huge earthquake in 2011. I looked up the article and it didn’t solve the mystery. It didn’t have any specific causes or absolute understandings of the phenomenon, but it did report that the grouping of oarfish showed up. And then we have toads, a bunch of toads that scientists were studying in Italy in a specific pond, they disappeared about three days before a big earthquake there. And then there’s also some Chinese reports of toads flooding the streets before a big quake there. And then they had, then they mentioned birds and zoos reporting that things happening like flamingos flocked all together or ducks suddenly took to the water before a quake. To their credit, the writers of the article do mention that the science of whether or not animals can predict quakes is still a long ways from being anything beyond anecdotes and legend.

0:51:28
BR: One of the problems, of course, is that as we touched on, predicting an earthquake a minute before, not really useful. We need a couple hours, a couple weeks, it might be useful. So it’s one of those cases where it’s clearly true that many animals have senses above humans. Dogs smell, animals that navigate with celestial cues, animals respond to different pressure. So, for example, if there’s an earthquake or a tsunami coming, they may sense that pressure and flee from it, which makes total sense. They might be fleeing away from, for example, an earthquake or a tsunami. But again, it’s a case of where, even within that context, it’s interesting. It’s not useful.

0:52:20
CW: How can we use this?

Yeah. In fact, I remember I wrote a piece about a Chinese zoo that was set up. They actually set up platforms for encouraging people to watch the animals. Like, okay, well, here’s a zoo, here’s a platform, everybody watch the animals to see if there’s earthquakes.

0:52:38
CW: Oh, so it wasn’t, I was about to say, all zoos do that. All zoos set up platforms and tell you to watch the animals, but you mean specifically for earthquakes.

BR: For earthquakes, right.

0:52:45
CW: Wow.

0:52:46
BR: It was set up for earthquake prediction. It goes back and folds into what we were talking about before, about the idea of psychic animals or this sort of mysterious phenomena. But of course, part of the problem was that, number one, people aren’t watching minute aspects of animal behavior all the time. An animal might sense an earthquake, and it might poop. Or it might… I mean, there’s no… You can’t really train animals like, if you sense an earthquake, hit this tab twice. I mean, it’s not that specific.

0:53:18
CW: I was in a really big earthquake. I was actually in the Northridge earthquake and I almost pooped.

0:53:23
PR: Oh, I would imagine.

0:53:24
CW: Well, there’s a bunch of theories. They’re not even, okay, I’m not gonna call them theories. They’re like loose hypotheses about what might tip animals off, like the mechanism that might tip animals off, and that’s a big if. They are responding to some earthquake cues and predicting earthquakes. We’re looking for some inadvertent cue from Earth, you know, like an ideomotor effect from Earth, the way that Hans was cued. People who are writing about this say it might be a result of ozone gas, which is produced when rocks are pulverized at fault sites. So a spike in ozone gas might be an irritant and might make some animals move away from the area. Or the magnetic field might have weird things going on. I’m not a geologist, we should ask Sharon some questions about what exactly happens with earthquakes. But all of these things might be more applicable to animals that get weird right before the quake. Not days, not weeks before the earthquake like some of these anecdotes today. But animals being able to sense the small tremors that precede a bigger quake is also another thing. We talked about the… I’m not talking about, in this case, the P wave versus the S wave. I mean a lot of really big earthquakes are preceded by smaller earthquakes that you don’t notice. And animals can notice those more than we can. And so when they go undetected by humans, humans who don’t have a seismometer on them, they see the animals and they’re like, oh, they were getting really weird the whole day and then suddenly, you know. So it makes sense on a number of levels. And you don’t want to completely dismiss the fact that some animals might have an ability to sense something before an earthquake. But reading through that list from the Weather Channel, I mean, there were so many ways I could just write most of that off. The toads all disappeared from a pond? Well, that happens. Toads are weird. They just, look up all the Fortean stories about toads showing up en masse in some place or leaving some other place. Toads are known to just do weird things. Flamingos flocking together. Every photograph I’ve ever seen of flamingos, they are flocking together.

BR: That’s kind of what they do.

CW: Ducks entering the water. Who has ever heard of that? Wow, strange. All the stories from China, I’m never really convinced by Chinese stories because there’s so many strange things that appear to happen there if you listen to what all the villagers say. And as far as ants and oarfish, I was a little bit, those were harder for me to dismiss, especially because as it was described, the German study on ants seemed pretty reasonably done and pretty large. It involved 15,000 mounds. Some of the ant mounds were watched 24 hours a day, and they recorded everything. Orfish, I’m shrugging there. I don’t know much about orfish. Although the fact that they would beach themselves and die right before an earthquake, that doesn’t sound very evolutionarily sound.

0:56:27
PR: It’s not intuitive at all.

0:56:28
BR: Was that one incident or was that repeated incidents?

0:56:31
CW: That was two incidents. They mentioned one in California where like three… No, no, no. They had the 20 oarfish that washed up in Japan, and that later caused people to freak out when like three oarfish washed up on a California shore. But indeed there was no earthquake.

0:56:47
BR: Okay, so you would need to look at the regions of the world that have populations of oarfish. And then, so, I mean, for example, it’s, if an earthquake happens where there are no oarfish, then no oarfish will beach themselves. Right?

0:57:04
CW: You need to do a controlled meta-analysis of all the earthquakes and all the oarfish in the world. And good luck on that.

0:57:10
PR: The oarfish habitat or their distribution is basically everywhere, pretty much everywhere. Any ocean that’s not too cold, pretty much. It’s like the North and Arctic and Antarctic areas are about the only place you might not ever find them. And therefore, if the distribution is that broad, then if there was a correlation between that you would expect, it would be more than 10 incidents, you would expect hundreds or thousands. I mean, I’m sure, I don’t know everything about oarfish, but as far as their distribution goes, it’s pretty much the entire, every major ocean in the world.

0:57:47
CW: I don’t know how spread out they are within those oceans. They live in the deep, deep part of the sea. Yeah, and they’re in the deep part of the sea. I guess, again, I’m playing the role of the, I’m being very anti-skeptical here, I’m just looking for reasons. If there were some seismic activity that resulted in, say, some volcanic stuff or caused by some volcanic activity on the deep sea floor and suddenly it got warmer down there, well, if I were an oarfish, I’d try and get out of that area.

0:58:13
PR: Yeah.

0:58:14
CW: So anyway, but there’s been some other interesting things. Speaking of volcanic activity, you guys know that Yellowstone National Park is over a gigantic mega volcano, right?

0:58:24
PR: Yeah.

0:58:25
CW: And people are always wondering when is that big one going to blow? Well another big rise in the buzz about animals producing earthquakes happened in 2014 When this fellow named Leo Leckie who lives and works in Yellowstone Park Uploaded a video of a couple dozen bison running down the road. He says he just thought it was cool. They were all kind of on the right hand side of the road in a in a single file And it was kind of cute. These bison just running down the road for no reason. And somebody hijacked it and put captions on it and re-released it on YouTube and stated it was the bison were fleeing Yellowstone because they sensed tremors, and this meant the super volcano under Yellowstone was about to erupt. So of course that went viral. Park officials had to come out and try to quash the rumor and reassure people that bison do move around. Sometimes they run just for fun. They roam, you know, Buffalo roam. It’s in the song. They do that. And these bison were actually running the other way. They were running into the interior of the park. They were not running out of it. And yes, there was an earthquake around the time of the filming, but an earthquake is not a sure sign that the volcano is about to blow. And Yellowstone in fact has a couple thousand earthquakes any given year. Most of them, as we mentioned, the tiny tremors, most of them are so small that nobody feels them. Al Nash, a spokesman for Yellowstone, said that the geological activity happens all the time and every once in a while people notice and quote, the chicken little crowd comes out of hiding.

1:00:00
PR: Yeah. We actually have a really huge caldera here in New Mexico too, just up north of here, the Valles Caldera.

1:00:12
CW: You said you have like a volcano national park or something?

1:00:14
PR: Yeah, well this state is covered in volcanoes.

BR: There’s a volcano about three miles from here.

PR: Yeah, these little hills right behind us are actually volcanoes. But you don’t ever hear people talking about that, which is kind of funny, though, because it’s like, that one, I think, erupted about 50,000 years ago, not very long ago on a geologic scale. So it’s funny, everyone picks the Yellowstone. Now, granted, that one’s about, I think, four times as big as the Valles Caldera, and the Valles Caldera is huge. I think it’s about 15 miles across. But I think the thing that everyone gets freaked out about with Yellowstone is that it’s a 1 in 730,000 chance of erupting on any given year.

1:00:55
CW: Oh, it’s better than the lottery.

1:00:56
PR: Which is a lot better than the lottery. If you feel good about the lottery, you should feel scared of this. That’s the thing. We’ve got tons of earthquakes all the time. They do react to actual earthquakes happening. I mean, the information is just so, it’s just a mess of observational and anecdotal data that we can’t use yet. And so, now we’re worried about things like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions for no reason because animals are kind of having animal reactions to normal things that constantly happen.

CW: Well, animals, again, when it comes to animals, they are often used as a sign for some impending disaster. Whether you are ripping out their entrails in ancient times and reading them, or thinking that them running in a direction means you better get out of the way, or it’s like a canary in a coal mine, literally.

1:01:52
PR: Yeah.

1:01:53
BR: Yeah, I mean, there’s probably some correlation in there, but as a practical matter, it’s not worth investing hundreds or even tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to tease out whether a groundhog might be able to detect an earthquake 20 seconds before everyone else. As a practical matter, it’s interesting just sort of philosophically and from a Fortean point of view, but in terms of being something that we can use, I don’t see this being resolved anytime soon.

1:02:39
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1:03:10
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Transcribed with Cockatoo