PROVING E.S.P. AMONG HORSES

Extra-sensory perception, as experienced among horses, and between horses and human beings, seems to have four different functions, which may be used separately or together. The first is to convey mood, which may be agi­tated and excited, or peaceful and relaxed. Now part of this message the receiver will perceive consciously, that is to say, he may see the horse's relaxed and peaceful swishing of his tail in the shade; but he will also feel his peace and serenity within himself. If the receiver is another horse he can be observed being made peaceful and serene by the first horse. But if something intrudes to disturb the peace – such as hounds going across the skyline or the sound of horses galloping – the horse becomes excited, and the second horse will become excited too, even if he cannot see the first horse and cannot see or hear what is exciting him. An observer will be able to see the second horse become agitated, looking around to see what is caus­ing the excitement, even if he cannot see what is happening to the first horse.

The second function of e.s.p. is to convey emotions: anger, affection and so on. Anger is probably the strongest of the e.s.p. feelings: it is something you can feel mounting within yourself, knotting your stomach muscles, making you tenser and tenser until you feel you could explode.

I had evidence recently of just how powerful a message of anger can be. A friend had brought me an Arab-cross Welsh six-year-old for gentling, who had been used as a stallion for three years and then castrated in the spring. As soon as his wounds had healed, he was brought over to me, and I was especially interested because we had two of his sons at our place at that time. We named him leuan. I had an immediate affinity with him, which was rather unusual, since I normally have great difficulty in getting through to anything with Arab blood. We worked him for about a fortnight, riding him every day and gentling him, and about Easter he was going so well and quietly we decided to put him into the trekking string. He went very well for three of or four days, until a friend came to stay with us for Easter. He rode him on Easter Friday, and then on Easter Saturday he rode him again. My wife and daughter had taken them out, and they had been gone only about twenty minutes, when I could feel my stomach muscles knotting and getting tighter and tighter and I knew that I was get­ting a message from leuan. How I was so sure of that I do not quite know. So I jumped into my car and rushed after them, and when I caught up with them after a couple of miles I could see straight away that leuan was all over the place, just ready to explode. So I whipped Bill off his back and put my daughter on and they went off quite happily. That afternoon, however, Paddy had a young horse she wanted to ride, so I put Brian, another friend, on leuan and again away they went. And again after about half-an-hour I could feel my stomach muscles knotting, and off in the car I went and again leuan was ready to explode. As I caught up with them he started putting in a buck, but as soon as I got there he settled down and this time I put one of the girls on his back, and after that he settled quite happily.

On this second occasion I had felt the horse's anger mounting over a distance of three or four miles: a very remarkable event, since e.s.p. normally works only over comparatively short distances. This time there was in addition the unusual circumstances of a large number of witnesses to the actual working of e.s.p.

Physical sensations, such as hunger, thirst and pain are also conveyed by the horse through e.s.p., and the capacity to pick up such messages is something that all good vets seem to have. They can sense just where the horse is dis­tressed and uncomfortable, and they use this ability in their diagnosis of illness or injury – a capacity which is clearly very important to a vet. For example, if a horse has a lame hind leg, it may be because he has injured his foot, his pastern, his fetlock or his hock; he may have pulled one of the leg muscles; he may have damaged his stifle or his hip joint; he may have pulled one of his thigh or back muscles or he may have damaged his vertebrae. And there may be no visible sign whatever as to where precisely the injury is. Of course the vet's previous experience will help him to guess where the injury is likely to be; but I have watched Bill Martin our horse vet in the West Country literally sensing out an injury. He would stand for five or ten minutes looking at a horse, maybe talking, maybe say­ing absolutely nothing, just looking and feeling. Then he would go, very nearly invariably, straight to the seat of the injury. I can remember him once saying to me, 'use your eyes and ears Henry, but also use your feelings.' He told me that he had a sixth sense that told him what was the matter, and I always regret that at the time I knew him well we were only in the very early stages of our communication work and I never talked to him about it.

E.s.p. can finally be used to convey very limited ideas, such as 'here is food,' 'let's go away,' and use is quite often made of it among horses. This function is probably really an extension of the capacity to convey mood and feeling, since, for example, the idea 'here is food,' does not come over in e.s.p. as a message, though it would come over as a message if telepathy were being used. What in actual fact the receiving horse feels is a sense that the hunger of his companion is diminished and from this he knows that the other horse is eating. Similarly behind the idea 'Lets' go away' is the simple fact that in flight the feeling of fear is being diminished. For practical purposes, however, I have found it useful to say that a function of e.s.p. is to convey limited ideas. The distinction is particularly useful when some form of reaction to emotion or sensation is involved; for two or three of these e.s.p. functions will often be used together. The phrases 'I am hungry,' 'here is good grass,' used together, come through as hunger and hunger dim­inished. The phrases 'I am frightened,' 'let us run,' come through as fear, and then the automatic reaction of flight, which is fear diminished.

This message-carrying aspect of e.s.p. has been vital for the survival of the species, since in the wild a herd of horses may often be scattered, with some members out of sight and sound of each other. But if one part of the herd should be frightened by the appearance of man, wolf or some other predator, the rest of the herd, maybe amongst the trees, can be alerted by e.s.p. even though they can neither see nor hear their fellows. Horses thus alerted will become first disturbed, then prick up their ears and snort, and start to move away from the area.

The horse will also feel the aggressive intention of another species, and this too has been vital for the survival of the horse. When for instance a wolf, man or other car­nivore tries to stalk a horse to make an attack, even though he cannot see, hear or smell the enemy, the horse will become restless and disturbed. And funnily enough this is one of the abilities that has survived in man. If you try to shadow a man, you will often find that after you have been following him for a very short time he will start looking around, even though he doesn't know you are there, be­cause he can feel you with a sixth sense. This is easy to prove for yourself. All you have to do is to pick on some unsuspecting individual in the street and follow him for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. This sensitivity is one of the few elements that man still retains of his primitive self.

Over the last five years we have carried out a number of experiments into e.s.p. among horses. To do this we have used horses which were empathic, that is to say, pairs of horses which were at one with each other, who were close companions and who thought on the same wavelength and acted as one horse. They would graze together, walk together, and stand together and if you were trying to catch them, either both would come or neither would come. We used only horses which we knew came from the same source and had been together for two or three years at least, and, though this was not always possible, we tried for pref­erence to select brothers or sisters, since we found that two brothers or two sisters brought up together tend to think on exactly the same wavelength. Before starting work with them we would observe them over a period of a month to six weeks to make sure that they always grazed together, and never palled up with another horse, even for a short period. This being established, and my own experience confirming that they were on the same wavelength, we were ready to select them for experiment. I sometimes found it rather difficult to be absolutely certain, from the e.s.p. messages that I was getting, that the horses Were thinking on the same wavelength, since I tend to switch my wavelength of e.s.p. to the horse I am handling; but from among the forty or fifty horses we have through our hands each year, we tried to select two pairs of horses each year. After five years, we had selected eleven pairs: that is, we found the proportion of suitable horses to be about ten per cent. Of these, two pairs were eliminated because we dis­covered that the attraction between them was physical rather than mental – each of these pairs was a mare and a gelding, and they were sexually attracted to each other. (We deduced this from the fact that when the mare was horseing they were much closer to each other, and also much closer together in the ten days to a fortnight between her horseing periods.) The third pair we had to eliminate was an eight-year-old mare and a rather immature three-year-old gelding who came from the same farm, and had been together since the gelding was a six-month-old foal. They appeared to be an ideal pair, until we actually started the experiments. I ran the five experiments on the gelding to begin with, and had a positive result in every case; but when I started handling the mare and not the gelding, we had a fifty-fifty result. Actually the pair of them came out higher than the average – 75 per cent positive, or 7-8 per cent above average– but after considerable thought I came to the conclusion that the mare was in mental contact with myself and not with the gelding – her affinity with the gelding was maternal rather than mental.

We were extremely fortunate from the outset in that the layout of the farm lent itself to the experiments. We had a loose-box next to the house, and fifty yards away, the other side of a range of buildings, we had a railway hut by the front gate; that is, we had two boxes out of sight and out of hearing of each other. Since when we were working on one horse, the other could not see or hear what we were doing, any response recorded had to be the result of e.s.p. and not of sight or sound. It was also possible from two points in the intervening building to observe the second horse with- out being observed; and provided we worked from the loose-box in the yard, the horse in the railway hut did not even know that we were in the yard, let alone handling or feeding the other horse. In the second experiment we had to leave the yard for a period of time, so we used the railway hut by the front gate to saddle and bridle the horse and take him out of the yard, and the first horse could not even see us leaving, though' it was possible for him to hear our footsteps as we went down the road.

There were five experiments involved, and over a period of three days we carried out each experiment three times, varying the horses we were working on and the horse we were expecting a response from. On the first day we would use horse A, on the second horse B, and on the third horse A in experiment one. For experiment two the first day we would use horse B, the second day A, the third day B. On experiment three we would use A, B, A. On Experiment four we would use B, A, B, and on experiment five A, B, A. In this way we made absolutely certain that there was a fair spread of the primary and secondary response of both horses.

In the first experiment one of each pair was fed in the plastic container. For us to record a positive reaction his empathic pair had to indicate that he wanted food at the same time; and to make quite sure that there was no ques­tion of habit coming into this experiment, the horses were not fed at the same time each day, nor were they fed at their regular feeding times, so that any response had to be from e.s.p. On twenty-one of the twenty-four tests we had a positive response, which was better than we dared hope for: that is to say, on twenty-one out of the twenty-four occasions, when we were feeding one horse, the second horse, even though he could not see or hear us in any way, knew that we were feeding the first horse and demanded food. (Of course, before we carried out this experiment, we had to find out how each horse said 'where is my bloody breakfast.' Some of them bang their feeding bins, others whicker, two of them would walk from the door to the feeding bin and back to the door. One par­ticular horse would stand with his head out of the doorway and shake his head up and down, up and down, until he was fed, and if you were a long time feeding him he would pull horrible faces.) This was the easiest experiment to do and to set up, since in the first place it is quite simple to eliminate signs, sounds and habit, and in the second place there is no question of personal opinion coming into it whatever. Your responding horse either says 'where is rny bloody breakfast,' or he does not. There are no two ways about it. So to my mind this experiment is absolutely con­clusive proof of the existence of e.s.p.

In the second experiment one of each pair was taken out of the yard and into a field, then excited by cantering and jumping and generally getting him hotted up. Positive results were recorded if, when the excited horse returned to the yard, the second one of the pair – who had remained in his box – became excited. This again is an experiment where it is comparatively easy to tell whether you have a positive result or not: if a horse is standing still, half asleep, and he suddenly pricks his ears and starts walking or danc­ing round his box, you may be absolutely certain that something has disturbed and excited him. Two of the horses became agitated and started whickering: in two' cases the horse in the box became excited when the ex­ercised horse was well over a quarter of a mile away. But with another two – that is to say in three tests, since one of the horses was used twice – we got no conclusive results since the horse in question was a restless horse anyway and tended on occasion to become excited for no obvious reason. Nevertheless in this experiment nineteen out of the twenty-four results were positive, with three further results in which the second horse did become excited, but we could not be sure that he was excited purely because his empathic pair was excited.

Experiment three was a more or less complete failure, because the positiv^ results left too much room for human error. This experiment followed on from the second ex­periment. After the excited horse had been brought back to the yard and we had observed the effect on his companion, we took his saddle and bridle off and went to his companion and started gentling him and relaxing him. A positive result was recorded, if the exercised horse relaxed con­siderably sooner than normal. The difficulty here was in deciding how long it would normally have taken the horse to relax. We had also to shorten the series of experiments because one of the horses we were exciting over-reached and cut himself, so instead of gentling his companion we had to spend the next twenty minutes cleaning up the wound and stopping the bleeding. So we only had twenty-three experiments instead of twenty-four. Out of the twenty-three cases we had eight positive and seven mar­ginal results, that is to say, in eight cases we thought it probable that the horse had relaxed more quickly than usual, and in seven cases we thought it was possible that he had done so. I have included this rather unconvincing experiment in the series because I feel that with a certain amount of scientific equipment, and considerable time to set it up, it could prove one of the most definite and im­portant experiments of the series.

The fourth experiment was quite simple. I would talk and make a fuss of one of the pair, usually the one that I liked least, and a positive result was recorded if the other showed signs of jealousy. Jealousy is shown in various ways: the horse might become disturbed and start walking around the box: she might (as happened with one of them) start banging at the door; or, like another lean upon the door, shaking her head up and down; and a third, as soon as I talked to her companion, started banging her dish. We took all these to be positive results, though they were not quite the results I expected. The curious thing about this -experiment was that nearly half the horses showed a posi­tive result by saying 'where is my bloody breakfast,' which possibly indicates that the e.s.p. message sent out was one of pleasure, which nearly half the horses took to mean that the first horse was being fed. Again we could get no definite result from the three horses which were naturally restless and excitable, because it was impossible to say their re­sponse was from e.s.p. and not from natural restlessness. But one of these was a mare who showed impatience by shaking her head up and down in the doorway, which was not the normal way that she showed her restlessness (which was walking around her box and then looking out of the door), but was the way she normally said 'where is my bloody breakfast.' We included this as a probable, not as a positive result. So in this experiment we had seventeen positive results out of the twenty-four.

The fifth experiment was a most unpleasant one, and I do not think I want to repeat it, because it involved really frightening one of the horses, and this is not a thing I like to do. I also think that it is possible to prove e.s.p. without fear. But since fear is a primary emotion, we thought it important to prove that it can be transmitted from one animal to another. I frightened the horse by rushing towards him, clenching my fists and chasing him round and round the box until he was frantic. A positive result was recorded if his companion became disturbed too. This happened in sixteen out of the twenty-four cases, plus of course the three excitable horses who could give us no positive result.

Out of one hundred and nineteen experiments we car­ried out in all, we thus had positive results in eighty-one cases; a marginal result in twelve more; and a possible result in eleven cases, wl^ich gave us an overall success rate of 67.5 per cent. When you consider that the only alterna­tive to e.s.p. in explanation of these results is pure chance, it seems more than scientifically probable that there is a sense of communication between horses other than sight and sound.

We also ran a control experiment for our own interest. For this we used a mare and a gelding who were very hostile to each other, and among fifteen experiments we had a positive result in only one case. For this series of experiments we made absolutely certain there was no means of communication between myself and either of the horses – I did not like them and they did not like each other, and we were a very hostile trio! Thus, since in the control we had a positive result in 16.66 per cent of cases and in the experiment we had a positive result of 67.5 per cent, we again conclude that it is probable that e.s.p. be­tween horses does exist.

It should be noted that the five experiments were de­signed to show the transfer by e.s.p. of the messages: 'hunger diminished', 'excitement', 'excitement dim­inished', 'jealousy', and 'fear'. What we have satisfied our­selves in the series of experiments is that it can be proved scientifically that e.s.p. exists. In fact if in our results you eliminate the excitable horses, and the failed third experi­ment, we have an overall success of nearly 80 per cent and not 67.5 per cent.

' What interested us most in this series of experiments was not the results, which were slightly better than we expected, but the fact that they indicated the ability of horses to switch to other wavelengths. Some of the horses we used were horses of different breeds, who normally think on different thought patterns and on different wave­lengths; and three pairs among the eight, what is more, were mares and geldings, whose thought patterns, because they are of different sexes, would again tend to be different. To prove that wavelengths vary between breeds and types, and that individual horses could communicate on varying wavelengths and in different thought patterns, we ran another series of experiments with four horses: a Welsh Cob, a thoroughbred mare, a half-thoroughbred thirteen-two pony and a Welsh Section B-cross stallion. The Welsh Cob was in communication with the thoroughbred mare and they were very close companions. The thoroughbred mare was in communication with both the Welsh Cob and the half-bred pony; and the Section B was on the same wavelength as the pony, but not in communication with either the Welsh Cob or the thoroughbred mare. After a very long series of experiments, we discovered that if we fed the Welsh Cob the other three all asked for food. If we fed the Welsh Cob and the thoroughbred mare was not there, neither the half-thoroughbred pony nor the Section B stallion would ask for food. When we put the thorough­bred mare back and removed the half-thoroughbred pony, the Section B did not ask for food. If we fed the Section B and they were all there, the other three horses would all ask for food. If we removed the half-thoroughbred pony at feeding time, neither the thoroughbred mare nor the Welsh Cob would ask for food. Again in this series of experiments we always fed at odd times so that there was no question of habit entering into the experiment, and we proved absolutely conclusively that the Welsh Cob, when he had food, was sending out an e.s.p. message which was received by the thoroughbred mare; who passed it on to the half-thoroughbred pony; who passed it on to the Section B. If we remove the thoroughbred mare there was no one to receive the message from the Welsh Cob, and so the other two did not know there was food about. If we remove the pony when the mare was there, she would know because the Welsh Cob would haye told her he had received food, but there was no one to receive her message and tell the Section B. Conversely if, when the pony was not there, we fed the Section B, neither the mare nor the Welsh Cob knew anything about it. Put the pony back, the pony would be told by the Section B; but without the thoroughbred the Welsh Cob was completely in ignorance.

These horses were Rostellan, lantella, Marie and Star­light. And Starlight's relationship with Marie made an interesting story. We had bought him in a horse sale as an eight-year-old stallion. We had him home and gelded him, then turned him out with the other horses three or four days later, and he immediately chummed up with Marie and proceeded to pulverise any other gelding in sight. Ros­tellan was petrified by him after he had been clobbered by him the first time they met. But apart from noting this affection for Marie, we did not think any more about it. However eleven months later Marie produced a lovely chestnut foal, which to us was rather confounding since he must have fathered the foal when he had already been gelded!

This experiment is a difficult one to set up, since you need a number of horses which are not all in close com­munication with each other. In our case Rostellan could get through to lantella and lantella could get through to Marie and Marie could get through to lantella and Star­light, but it is very rare in a group of four horses for one to have no communication whatever with two of the others. It is much easier to find straight-forward empathic pairs. All these experiments however have been designed so that they can be reproduced anywhere by other people who have horses, and with very careful selection of the subjects anyone should be able to get a high proportion of definite results. Given a sufficient number of horses to select from, and adequate time to make your selection, these results can be reproduced time and time again, and we hope and be­lieve that these six experiments will in time be standard experiments for people who are interested in proving e.s.p. amongst horses. We know that we are pioneers in the field of equine communication, and being pioneers we have to be very careful that all the work we do can be reproduced by other people in other places at a later date. We also know that the work we do now will be pulled to pieces, and fully expect that in ten, twenty or thirty years' time people will be saying 'Oh, Blake was all right, he started early, but he was wrong here or he was wrong there.' It is quite possible that in parts of this very extensive subject, we are wrong. But in the field of equine research in general and in e.s.p. in particular, we know that our work has been on the right lines because we know that we can, and do, communicate all the time vocally, orally and mentally with our horses. We can understand what they are saying at all times and they can understand what we are saying. We are in fact in the position of an Englishman who can speak French and can understand French. But at times he will be wrong in the elements of French grammar, and so it is quite possible that at times we are going to be wrong in the elements of equine grammar.

CHAPTER TEN

TELEPATHY IN HORSE LANGUAGE

Most people treat telepathy simply as one of the forms of e.s.p. But in this we feel that they are wrong, because telepathy is different from e.s.p. in that it deals with the transfer of mental pictures., and uses the intellectual process, while e.s.p. deals with the transfer of moods, emotions, feelings and only limited ideas. It is a purely emotional thing and its response is automatic. For tele­pathy to function it is usual, but not necessary, for the animals to be of the same species. And for human beings it is usual for transmitter and receiver to be in mental and emotional, preferably also physical, contact with each other. But telepathy in everyday life, while it is comparatively common, is extremely hard to prove. It is a spontaneous reaction. For example two people may think of the same thing at the same time; but there is no method of proving whether this is telepathy or coincidence. You may find that you start visualising a place you know quite well, only to find at a later date that a relative or friend was at that place at the very same time; but unless you actually recorded the time, and exactly what happened at that time –what you visualised, what you were thinking about –it is almost impossible to prove it. And even if you can prove the synchronicity, it is extremely difficult to prove that it was not a coincidence. Indeed, if you were to keep such records, you would probably find the sheet number of coincidences – anything up to two hundred or three hundred in the course of your life –put the problem beyond the realm of coincidence. But hard proof of tele­pathic communication remains extremely hard to come by.

It is quite a common thing for someone to say 'I must prepare food for the dog,' and the dog to appear almost simultaneously by their side. With people who are very close to their animals, this will happen almost every day. An acquaintance of mine came to live with her mother, and after she had been there for three or four months she began to wonder why the tea was always ready when she got home. The kettle had either boiled or it was about to boil. There was no question of a regular time, because my ac­quaintance was a nurse and the time she returned home from the hospital depended entirely on which shift she was on. Mystified, she asked her mother how she did it. Her mother said, 'Oh it is quite simple. I know that ten minutes before you get home Jojo will get up and start getting excited. She will go from her basket to the window and she will stand at the window until you get home. When Jojo goes to the window I always get the tea.' She worked out eventually that Jojo knew when she was going down a par­ticular tree-lined avenue, about ten minutes from home. Of course sight and sound could be eliminated completely in this case, since she was still well over a mile away from home, so the dog could have known only by telepathy. This sort of occurrence is much more common than we are aware.

The Russians, who have carried out a great deal of serious research on telepathy, have conducted a very large number of experiments, one of the standard ones involving a pair of people in two different rooms, each with two tables in it. On the first table is a number of different-shaped and coloured objects. The 'transmitter' picks up the objects and puts them on the second table one after another. Then his companion, the 'receiver', in the second room will try to pick up the objects in exactly the same order and place them on his second table. In this experi­ment, with trained pairs, the Russians achieve about sixty per cent success.

Telepathy has fallen into disrepute in the West largely because it was the purported basis of thought-reading acts in music halls, and though no doubt some of these were genuine, most of them were fakfs. But there has been in­creasing scientific interest in the field. The best-known people to conduct a telepathy experiment in recent years were an Australian couple, the Piddingtons. Piddington discovered he had this facility when he was a prisoner of war held by the Japanese, and to entertain his fellow pris­oners in the evening he used to demonstrate his ability with Russell Braddon, the author. After the war he and his wife travelled the world demonstrating their ability to transmit mentally over varying distances the shapes and colours of objects. On one occasion they apparently transmitted mental pictures of various shapes from a B.B.C. studio to an aeroplane.

Modern man appears almost completely to have lost the ability to transmit mental pictures, probably because this was the first skill he ceased to use when he gained the ability to speak. If you could describe with your voice what you were seeing, you did not need to transfer a mental picture. But some primitive tribes still retain the skill and we have seen that Laurens van der Post in his travels among the South African bushmen observed a witch doctor gaze at the cave drawing of an antelope, throw himself into a trance, and then so accurately describe the location where the antelope was grazing that the hunters could go out and kill it

The ability does however seem sometimes to survive in civilised man at times of stress. I know of five cases where telepathy apparently occurred at the time of a motor acci­dent, though in three of these it is not clear whether it was telepathy or e.s.p. that was involved. It is very hard to be absolutely certain, when asking someone about it after­wards, whether he actually visualised the motor accident at the time, or whether he was simply subject to unusual emotional stress. But there were two cases where the acci­dent was described to me before the person knew that it had happened: in one case my wife knew that her parents had had a motor accident at least eight hours before she heard about it; in the other a friend of mine was told by an acquaintance that the acquaintance's parents had had a motor accident at the very time that the accident took place, some twenty miles away.

This then is what telepathy is all about: the transfer of mental pictures. I have already told the story of how I discovered that I could direct Weeping Roger where I wanted to go just by thinking it. I would steer him to the left or right or straight ahead simply by visualising the road. This was the first time I had consciously experienced telepathy with a horse. Since I used to exercise him for an hour-and-a-half to two two hours a day, feed him, clean his box out, and groom him twice a day, I was in his company for three or four hours daily, to say nothing of passing his loose-box thirty or forty times as I went to and from the cow-yard. All this proximity strengthened the great affinity I already sensed with him. After this experience I dis­covered that with other horses too I could stop them from shying by telepathy: if I thought the horse was going to shy at something I would gaze intently at it and the horse would see it for what it was – a stone as a stone and not as a tiger about to spring, a piece of paper as a piece of paper and not as an eagle about to swoop. This is quite a simple trick, for a horse does not always see an object properly, especially if he sees it only out of the corner of his eye, and his natural instinct is to avoid anything that looks unusual or dangerous. But if the person on his back or leading him is extremely close to him mentally, the person can see the object for him, and the horse will also see it for what it is and take on the rider's confidence about it.

About the time I was working with Roger I was sent a grey gelding that was more of less unridable because he shied very badly and hisi owner could not do anything about it. After picking him up off the train at Axminster, where he had been sent from Ascot, I rode him home and to my surprise he did not shy at all. I kept him for about two months, during which time he always went absolutely perfectly quietly and never shied. I sent him back to his owner, who was delighted with him; but after about two months he was on the telephone to me again, to say that while the horse still did not shy and was absolutely perfect to ride, his blacksmith found it impossible to pick his feet up and shoe him. The point is that he was a very strong-willed horse, owned by a rather weak and nervous person, so the horse was working one trick after another to get on top of him. Once he found that if he shied he frightened the daylights out of his owner, he started shying as a habit. But since when I collected him from Axminster station I knew he was a shyer, and took very great care that he saw every­thing, he did not worry me at all, and by the time I got him home he had forgotten about shying at anything. When he went back to his owner he was completely cured; but he started the difficulty about having his feet picked up when he found that if he waved his leg in the air he frightened his owner. He was rather like a naughty schoolboy who jumps out behiiid a rather nervous person and says 'boo'. He just had a rather juvenile sense of humour. Cork Beg provides further evidence of the horse's fa- ; cility for thinking in pictures, for he could be kept in his stable simply by putting a thin piece of string across the ^: door, and since he looked upon it as a barrier and could see ; the barrier, he would not come out, and very often we did not bother to put the piece of string up at all. On one famous occasion Cork Beg, who like all our horses was intensely curious, was in the railway hut with the door open. My wife was talking to someone on the road and Cork Beg could not see them. He wanted to see them, so he stuck his head out. But he still could not see them. He leant out further. Still he could not see them, so he leant out further still. Now if he had not thought there was a barrier there, he could have walked right out, because the door was wide open. But he thought there was a barrier, so he leant further and further out until he overbalanced and fell on his nose and I had to put him back in! He could not come past the barrier in his imagination until my wife went and put a halter on, thus removing his mental barrier, and led him out through the stable door.

Horses in the wild use the telepathic facility to direct their companions to food and water, or to direct one horse to another from quite considerable distances. It may also be used to split a herd of horses in times of danger; you will find this easily demonstrated if you corner two ponies that are difficult to catch, in the corner of the field. You will find that one will invariably go to the left and the other to the I right of you, and they will try to go the same way only if you leave them no room to go either side of you.

On a number of occasions we have had this ability to transfer pictures rather dramatically demonstrated to us. Cork Beg, who was in the field nearest the house, could see us when we went to the feeding house and he would whi­cker and say 'where is my bloody breakfast.' We would then feed him. If about five or ten minutes later we went down to where we could see the other horses, a quarter of a mile or so away, we would be almost certain to find them all standing by the gate shouting for their breakfast, even though they could not have seen us or Cork Beg. We cannot be absolutely certain that this was a demonstration of telepathy, though we think it probably was, because it could have been a case of e.s.p., so we did not use it as a demonstration experiment. But one of the earliest experi­ments we carried out with e.s.p. was with two small ponies who were particularly difficult to catch. We used to corner them in a field and record which went right and which went left, because we thought it quite possible that one always went right and the other always went left from habit, but there was absolutely no set pattern as to which pony went in which direction. The one thing we did find of interest in this experiment was that if we managed to stop the ponies, when they tried again to shoot past us they would change sides: the horse that went left would try to go right and the horse that went right would try to go left. We did not at the time attach any particular significance to this, but it is quite possible that there is a telepathic element here and a subject for future research.

Up to 1964 in any case we thought of telepathy as more or less the same thing as e.s.p. Then the difference was demonstrated to us by Charles Thurlow Craig, who told us how he woke up one night feeling uneasy and apprehen­sive, got dressed and went downstairs, picked up his wire cutters and a torch, put on his Wellingtons and went out into a very black, dark and stormy night directly to the very spot, about half a mile from the house, where his favourite mare was caught up in barbed wire in a bog. He told me next day that as he went downstairs he 'knew exactly where the mare was and exactly what had happened' because he 'could see it in his mind's eye.' I made a note of the precise words he used.

I had a similar sort of experience myself the year before last. I had a thoroughbred two-year-old gelding called Royal Boy. Unfortunately he was extremely musical, and would stand all day by the window listening to the wireless and if the wireless was not loud enough, he would walk up to a pig netting fence and hit it with one of his front feet and listen to the tinkling it made. He would do this for anything up to an hour at a time, completely fascinated. We used to say he was playing the piano, and of course every now and then he would put his foot through the pig netting by mistake and not be able to get it back out again. After his first try he would stand still and wait for me, and each time I could see his foot stuck in the pig netting in my mind's eye and would get the wire cutters to get him out of his predicament. He always waited for me, and I am quite sure he could see me coming in his mind's eye. (Normally of course if a thoroughbred gets caught in this way he will thrash about trying to get himself free and probably cut himself badly.)

Once we started work on telepathy, we found we had to prove not only that it exists, but that it is different from other forms of extra-sensory perception. Thus we could, for instance, show one animal an object, usually a feed of corn, and record the response from a second horse outside of sight and hearing. If there was a positive response, we concluded that some form of e.s.p. was operating. But we could not conclude that it was telepathy. The mental pic­ture of food in a bucket may be being transmitted from one animal to another, and if such a mental picture were being transmitted, there would be a response from the second animal, which would ask for food. But there is no proof that the communication is telepathic. As you may remember. we used this experiment to prove the existence of e.s.p., where no more than the communication of the feeling of hunger was involved. So we devised what we called the kit-e-kat experiment, inspired by one of the cat food advertisements on television. This was the first telepathy experiment we ever carried out and we used old Cork Beg as the subject.

Basically it was quite simple: he was offered two con­tainers, each containing equal quantities of food, and I was to direct him to whichever bucket I wanted, merely by using telepathy. But the experiment itself took con­siderable preparation, because there were so many factors to be eliminated. Sight and smell were easily eliminated by using two exactly similar containers, with the same food in each of them. What was more difficult to deal with was the fact that most horses when free are left- or right-handed, usually left-handed: that is over a straight line they will veer to the left when walking freely. Cork Beg's deviation over ten yards was approximately eighteen inches to the left. So we took a line at right angles to the middle of his doorway, ten yards long, and the end of this line we took as the centre point. We placed one bucket six yards to the left of the centre point, and the other four yards to the right of it, so that when Cork Beg came out of his stable there was no bias to go over to either bucket, and without inter­ference he did go to them on a roughly fifty-fifty basis. Now we were ready to train him to answer my telepathic commands, and this proved comparatively easy to do, if somewhat time-consuming. Each morning when I fed him, I would fill one or the other of the buckets, then I would wait until I was absolutely sure I was in telepathic com­munication with him, and mentally visualise the bucket that contained the food. Having done this I would let him out. Within a few days he was going straight to the bucket I directed him to, and I persevered with this for a fortnight. Cork Beg, being a very intelligent animal, quickly learnt that the bucket I was telling him to go to was the one that contained his breakfast.

Of course this experiment also involved a certain amount of training for me, since I had to train myself to use my will to focus my whole mind on the mental picture of the bucket, allowing nothing to distract me. And I also had to make quite sure that when he came out in the morning I was entirely in tune with him. But having made these prep­arations the experiment itself was extremely simple. For the first five mornings I directed him alternately to the left and the right. On the sixth morning, to make absolutely certain that he was not taking them turn and turn about by habit, I directed him again to the container on the left. On the seventh morning I directed him to the container on the left, and on the eighth morning I directed him to the con­tainer on the left. That is for four mornings I directed him to the container to which he had a natural bias. The ninth morning brought the most difficult experiment of all. For four mornings running he had taken his breakfast from the container on the left, and on the ninth I wanted to change him to the container on the right. Much to my relief he went straight to it. Having come out of that successfully, he had to take it again from the right-hand container on the tenth morning, from the left on the eleventh and on the twelfth morning from the right. Each morning he went directly to the correct container.

The whole of this preparation and training took approxi­mately one month, and the experiment itself lasted twelve days. To operate this experiment correctly complete con­centration is needed, the picture of the feed lying at the bottom of the particular container must be very vivid in your mind's eye, and above all you must feel the mental communication between you and the horse. The least little thing can distract you. A bird flying across your vision for just one second can break your concentration for another five minutes. But provided you get the conditions entirely correct, and provided you are in complete telepathic com­munication with your subject, the experiment itself is ex­tremely easy to do. We had a hundred per cent success, • when normally we would accept sixty or seventy per cent success as a positive result.

All the experiments we have carried out are in them­selves extremely simple things to do. They have been de­signed to be simple, and inexpensive. Any research we have carried out has had to be paid for from our own pockets, so we have chose experiments for which we can use the animals we already have about the place, and the buildings and existing layout of the farm. We have not been able to afford to put up special buildings, nor to buy the expensive electronic equipment which might have made our work easier. But this very simplicity has meant that we have had to be extremely thorough in our prep­arations, and extremely careful in our selection of the horses.

The research into communication by signs and sounds hds been done through the very elementary means of making use of our powers of observation. We would see a certain signal and try to interpret the message; then when we saw the same message used again, it has either verified our interpretation or led to a new interpretation of the message. And so over a period of time, our observations have made us completely conversant with the signs and sounds used by that horse. And in our own communication with the horse we have tried to simulate the sign and sounds that the horse has used. In our work on e.s.p. The experiments themselves are simple, the important and difficult thing has been selecting the empathic pair. With telepathy, however, the difficulty lies in devising the experiments. For though spontaneous telepathy is comparatively common, the difficulty is in get­ting any proof of it. Since telepathic communication is spontaneous, it is not repeatable under controlled con­ditions, and accurate records are extremely difficult to as­semble.

We have been able to overcome the problem in the following manner. We verify telepathic communication by recording the time of the occurrence to within a quarter of an hour: a mental picture received must be recorded at the time it is received, and the horse you receive it from must be identified by the person who is receiving it. I usually keep most of my records on the back of cigarette packets, since I have always got a cigarette packet in my pocket, and I have not very often got a notebook. To give one example of a recorded incident, at one forty-five on the nineteenth of January 1972,1 was sitting in my car in the car park in Llandeilo. It was a very cold but clear day, if somewhat overcast, and suddenly in my mind's eye I could see my wife and the two labradors walking down the road to a field in a snow-storm. I could also see my grey hunter lantella, and my wife's second hunter Rostellan standing in the field. I could not see old Cork Beg, therefore I knew that I was receiving telepathic communication from Cork Beg, and I made a record of it. On returning home an hour and a half later, I established from my wife that the weather had looked bad, and she had decided to get the horses in. On her way down to the field it had started to snow, and she confirmed that she had had both dogs with her. She had also noted the time as one-forty when she left the house, since she had to get to the library by two o'clock. Since I had recorded this incident on paper, I knew I was receiving telepathic communication from Cork Beg. But the prob­lem, as you can see, is first to record the incident your­self as soon as you receive the communication, and second – which is far more difficult – to make sure that you have someone else involved who has noted the time that the incident happened. Probably no more than ten per cent of telepathic communications \\ill really be verifiable in this way, even when you are master of your subject.

We have recorded three occurrences over distances varyingfrom fifteen to eighteenmiles – the longest distance over which we have had any telepathic communication is approximately two hundred and forty miles, but we could not list this one as verified since the person with the horse at the other end knew only that the incident hap­pened 'late in the afternoon' so we had no accurate time check. (It involved the serving of a mare. The owner of the mare 'saw' the stallion some time between four forty-five and five o'clock. When she rang up that evening to find out if the mare had been served, she was told only that it had happened 'after tea'.) We also know of three incidents, for instance, of people knowing that their horses were dying. In the first, a friend of mine owned an old horse, and while he was away on holiday liis wife decided to have the old horse put down. lie was having an afternoon snooze when he was woken by his whole head exploding in a flash of light. When he returned home the next day he learned that the horse had died at about that time. He told me after­wards that it had been a very weird and odd experience. The second example was last October, when Cork Beg was very ill. We knew that he was dying, and at half past two in the morning my wife woke me and said 'The old man is going.' She had been woken from her sleep by seeing him in a very green field, completely at peace and grazing. We put on our dressing gowns and went down, and the old horse was just breathing his last when we got there. On the third occasion a woman I know fainted at the precise time that her horse was being put down five miles away.

We are still not certain of the extent of telepathy be­tween horses, since it is extremely difficult to differentiate, in communication between horses, between telepathy and e.s.p. We are not ourselves complete masters of the sub­ject. But even so, we can say with almost complete cer­tainty that we can interpret what our horses are saying to us and to each other, and we can make our horses under­stand what we are saying to them. Since I am a practical horseman, any knowledge I get is put to use in my handling and training of horses, so I use e.s.p. and telepathy when I am point-to-pointing, or hunter trialing, or taking part in a one-day event. And because I use these things and I understand them, I can get my horses to do more in com­petitions than anyone would think possible. For example, last summer I took, for a bet, an untouched and unhaltered sixteen-hand five-year-old, and in thirty-two days, be­tween August sixteenth and September seventeenth, I had him competing in a show class. I hunted him, I competed on him in hunter trials and on the thirtieth day I won a riding club novice one-day event. In this event he was within eight points of the highest points in the dressage, and he had a clear round in the cross-country and a clear round in the show-jumping. He was of course an extremely good horse, very receptive and an easy horse to handle, and I got through to him straight away – it was because I was aware of this that I took the bet in the first place!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 646