89: Valentines Special! Lost Loves Reunited with Author, Dr. Richard Sugg

Valentine's Special! Transcript

Dr. Richard Sugg, a connoisseur of animal narratives, joins us to unravel the mystery of dogs' navigational prowess in an exploration of the extraordinary capabilities of our four-legged friends, we delve into historical and modern-day research on animal homing instincts.

Guest: Richard Sugg (PhD) is the author of 16 books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (2011), a collection of 19th century animal stories, A Singing Mouse at Buckingham Palace (2017), Fairies: A Dangerous History (2018), The Real Vampires (2023) and Talking Dirty: A History of Disgust from Jesus Christ to Boris Johnson (2023). I am currently working on, Uncanny Animals: the Epic Homing Adventures of Dogs & Cats and a collection of historic and modern dog stories to commemorate the Feb 2024 centenary of Bobbie the Wonder Dog: Around the World in 180 Dogs. 'Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?'
@DrSugg IG drrichardsugg  https://drrichardsugg.substack.com/

Book Recommendations: The Wilderness World of John Muir ed by Edwin Way Teale and The Door Marked Summer by Michael Bentine

Other Valentine's Episodes:

E17: The Civet Lovers Club with PhD Candidate Jes Hooper

57: Valentines Special!: Furry Fandom with Victoria Gersdorf

Show Credits⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you also to John Lasala for his beautiful music and audio engineering on Series 11!

⁠⁠⁠⁠Read the Blog! (Guest profiles, book recommendations, trailers and more!)

What to start your own podcast in he Animal Advocacy or Animal Welfare Space? Check out my ⁠⁠⁠⁠ Podcast Mentoring Services⁠⁠⁠⁠!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Deal with Animals. I'm Marika Bell, anthrozoologist, cptt, dog trainer and an animal myself. This is a podcast about the connection and interaction between humans and other animals Music. So Valentine's is just two days away and we're kind of known here for our fun and little out-of-the-box look at love for our Valentine's Day specials, and this year is no different. We're talking to Dr Richard Sugg. Dr Sugg is the author of 16 books and is currently working on at least two more, and we're going to talk to him about love, the truest kind of love, the kind of love that lasts a lifetime if that lifetime was on the average of 10 to 15 years the love of a dog. Music. And after this episode, if you'd like to email me or send me a message on social media about your very special companion animal, please do. I would love to hear about it and see pictures as well. We might even post them on social media. So thank you for joining me today on the special Valentine's episode, to ask the question what's the deal with animals?

Speaker 2: 1:45

Music. Thank you, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. I'm Richard Sugg and I've been researching strange subjects for a long time, since my PhD at Southampton University, which concluded in 2001. I was working on the rise of anatomy out of theology and religion in the 16th 17th centuries Pronouns, by the way, are he and him not to forget that. And yeah, I got researching animals in 2017, really was just looking up newspaper stories about vampires and ghosts and poltergeists and would constantly, on a sort of big old newspaper page, find a great animal story. I hadn't started thinking there's a book in this. So a singing mouse at Buckingham Palace is a book about animal stories, wild and tame, in the 19th century. And a few months ago I wrote a book to try and it's difficult to explain this, but try and get something joyful and enjoyable out of Brexit, which has been the strange tragedy of Britain.

Speaker 1: 2:50

Yeah, I don't think that's possible.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Well, wait and see, give it a try. But it's a novel. It's a novel called Carly the Wonder Dog, set in the 1930s, and it features some heroic characters, a couple of real characters who are certainly want to be talking about one of them this year I'll talk about that a little bit later on but a guy called Charlie Hutchison who was a heroic black anti-fascist fighter whose story is only now being recovered. He turns up in there and the Battle of Cable Street, which was a great story of working class heroism against fascism, turns up in there. But the main hero is a dog.

Speaker 2: 3:27

It's a dog, carly, and the story is really I suppose just quickly about the attempt to kind of steal British things for a very small number of narrow minded, misguided people and the dog kind of romps through all these icons and has all these contacts with Britishness and turns out to be not the British icon they want him to be Carly K A L I. So that might give you some clue. But yeah, I have been researching animal stories on and off for a long time and with the centenary of Bobby the Wonder Dog, have just wanted to celebrate one of the most uncanny heroic stories full of love, about a dog coming home. And the centenary, of course, is coming to a close with Bobby's arrival, to everyone's astonishment, back in Silverton on the 15th of February 1924. And I will push quite hard for a while now to try and get that day made an international day, bobby's day to celebrate these uncanny abilities of cats and dogs and other animals.

Speaker 1: 4:32

You know, we're kind of known on the deal with animals for doing something a little out of the box for Valentine's Day, and one of the reasons I wanted to bring Richard to you all is because I really loved the idea of the love of a dog, right, I mean, what's more Valentine's than that? There are just so many stories of our companion animals going so far, not just within space, but just to show their love for us, that they're willing to surmount so many obstacles, and so I asked Richard to tell us the story about Bobby and some of the other animals he's researched that show their love for their human companions in this remarkable way.

Speaker 2: 5:16

Absolutely. Yeah, it is one of the very best and, as you say, this kind of index of the power of love, you know? I mean, what's the distance? We're not absolutely sure because of his exact route, but this is the broad story anyway is that August 1923, the Brazier family, frank and Elizabeth and two girls, leona and Nova, drove across much of America from Silverton in Oregon to Walcott in Indiana, and it was a kind of road trip where they would stop at what they called rest stations with the place to sleep and petrol, what have you? And then they had relatives, as it happened, in Walcott, Indiana, and it was an old style travel journey, with the car quite small and there's a suitcase on the outside and Bobby's quite often leaping on and off the running board, coming back, chases a rabbit, comes back right on the suitcase, what have you? So quite a charming kind of way to travel across America.

Speaker 2: 6:14

They get to Walcott and Frank is filling up the car when suddenly three dogs come out of nowhere stray dogs and chase Bobby and he flies off. Frank's not too worried because he's used to Bobby running off to see a rabbit and coming back and so forth, but it doesn't come back, sounds the horn quite a bit doesn't come back. They keep looking and then it gets to a serious search. Lots of people involved. Time goes by. They stay a bit longer than meant in Walcott to try and find Bobby. They just can't. And they set off to go a bit further east, which is an interesting point, as we'll see.

Speaker 1: 6:49

Can I just ask what kind of dog is Bobby again?

Speaker 2: 6:51

Oh, sorry. Yeah, very good point. He's a colleague, a colleague cross, so one of the classic dogs for endurance, but also for being spookily uncannily, if you like. Intelligent college feature a lot in these stories. And then also stories of rescue ingenuity. Yeah, good question. So young dog, two, two at the time, and they drive on having left money for a railway passage. If someone can find Bobby, can they just put him in a railway car to go back to Oregon? And the months, the weeks past, the months past, there's no news of Bobby. And Christmas comes in 1923, the new year, january, you have to presume they've given up all hope.

Speaker 2: 7:37

And as a historian you often, you often think about where would I like to be if I had just one time travel journey to see exactly what really happened, what happened at that moment, what was the drama of it, what were the exact details and so on, and I have to say, with a lot of competition for that.

Speaker 2: 7:54

I've studied history from time of Christ to the present. I think this one beats them all is the moment on the 15th of February and it's nice that we've got two days of love, include Valentine's and the 15th here, 15th of February, where Nova is out in the street with a girlfriend and the girls. Her friend suddenly says hey, isn't that Bobby? The sound of his name, the talk turns around. Obviously utterly exhausted, in very bad condition, flies all over Nova and covers her with kisses and has come home 2500, 2800, possibly 3000 miles, exactly six months and, yeah, somehow, across a pouring depths of temperature, rocky mountains, snake river, plain, frozen rivers, frozen deserts, the bitterest cold, the mid American winter. There was a light that never went out and, as you say, it just seems to be most basically of all, love.

Speaker 1: 9:00

I so wish there was a picture of this moment or, you know, video recording, but this is truly astonishing In terms of the distance Bobby had to travel and how he was actually able to find his way back. Okay, I have to hear more stories.

Speaker 2: 9:16

I've found a lot of stories now, yeah, I mean I'll share with you a more recent one which is impressive as well. This is 1973, a guy called Armin Brøy in Germany, solingen, what was then West Germany had an Alsatian called Barry which became too big. He decided for his flat, so he gave it to a friend of his at a bigger place. The friend took the dog on holiday in 73. I think it was in the early part of the year accounts of this ferry, but he took it down to the south of Italy, barry, so pretty much as south of Italy gets, and unfortunately the dog got lost. Probably lots of exciting other dogs and Italian food and so forth down in Bari got lost, couldn't be found. Friend comes home without the dog and on Christmas Eve 1973, barry turns up on Armin Brøy's doorstep. So yeah, had covered around 1200 miles, depending on what route he took, and interestingly, came back to this might have been an accident but perhaps not. Came back to his original owner.

Speaker 2: 10:23

And there are cases where it's very clear that a dog loves one person much more deeply, I'm afraid to say. You know, amongst husband and wife or friends or whoever it might be, they have a passion for a one owner usually goes back to early days, puppyhood. Yeah, that's not bad, 1200 miles, but in terms of sheer distance there are dogs that rival Bobby. There is one, in fact, pretty much this is a new one to me, I have to say. The stories are coming in all the time. They just stream in really as I'm doing the research. So, yeah, the record distance until Bobby. It looks like so far. I mean, who knows what else you're going to find day to day.

Speaker 2: 11:04

But this is 1898, in America again, and a dog called King was the dog of a bank cashier called Waldy in Carnegie. Waldy fell ill and went to Los Angeles, right across the country, for his health, but he died there in December 1895. His family then returned to Carnegie but they left King behind, not really clear why. Perhaps you've got happy there, they thought you liked the people there, or what I was presumably gave them to another family. Anyway, the dog presently wandered into the railroad station at Carnegie.

Speaker 2: 11:42

This is the account as I have it and I don't exactly know yet how they managed to be this precise, but they claim to have someone seen him in the railway station at Carnegie. He was looking pretty rough and he wandered about the station sniffing, got out of the station, wandered into the residential area of the town Spider-Man up the street, who recognized him and then presently came to a house where the children the Waldy children were playing, and out hurtled one of the youngsters with the dog, howling in mad joy and recognition and romping and jumping all over the children. And this is calculated, then, as a distance of 2,300 miles. So that's pretty close to Bobby already, and perhaps was the record until Bobby cracked it in 2324.

Speaker 1: 12:33

I don't know about the rest of you, but this just keeps bringing me back to that Disney movie, homeward Bound the Incredible Journey. Do you guys remember that? I think my little brother ended up watching that movie like three dozen times in a two-year period, so of course I had to look it up and see whether that was based on a true story or not. Apparently it is not. It is actually a 1961 book by Scottish author Sheila Bernford based on her own pets, but they did not actually get lost. However, it's a great movie and you should definitely watch it or read the book.

Speaker 2: 13:08

Yeah, I mean I I don't see. No, I must watch, I must get it for the nesis, I think would love it. Dog, dog, girls. But yeah, it's some. It was a novel, was it? I think six days, and I suppose she's. She's done what you do with fiction you take some basics and you, you polish them up in the way that you want to. So I don't know of any stories of dogs and cats making a journey together. Many stories in problems, stories of Dogs rescuing cats, dogs risking their lives to rescue cats and certainly cause. There are many, many stories of cats making pretty incredible Turn.

Speaker 1: 13:44

Is okay, I know there was even a song about this. My dad used to sing it to me when I was little. The cat came back the very next day, so of course I had to look it up and I found this new version of it from lori burkner, who my kids love to listen to, and she's done a cat came back remix. I'm gonna share a little bit of it with you right now.

Speaker 2: 14:10

Yeah, I didn't. I didn't know the song, but there's a new dog film coming out this year with mark warburg warburg, and they never, they never ends. You know, I think it's a recent one, based from, was telling me yesterday recent film, I think might be twenty twenty three. My earlier Family had a dog which was deeply attached to young son in the family and they got lost on a dog, lost in a hiking trip, and they all go out frantically looking for the dog party because it has an illness as an injection once a month, and so I'm very keen to find the dog and I seen so many cases as with merlin, the spaniel that was talking about a few days ago. The dog just comes back on its own. All the technology, all the kind of tracking helicopters, drones, thermal imaging cameras you can use, and nothing to what dog will do on its own.

Speaker 1: 15:02

Over and over again we have so many of these stories now I'm wondering could this even happen with sort of traffic that's around these days?

Speaker 2: 15:10

This is right. Yeah, I mean. I think one thing that fascinates me about doing historic dog stories is that dogs were all over the place. Dogs were roaming about on their own dogs what children to school and then what home again. So you've got to routine homing Going on there. It might have been a mile, it might have been five children did proper sort of school walks of their own in those days. You had dogs doing work, pulling carts. Dogs roamed about trains. I mean, they love trains. Awful of dogs all over the world spent their lives just writing about on trains, became the mascot in love it mascot to the train, men only being the most famous example in america. And yeah, it was safer. My mother had a dog that used to run with the children, brothers and her about four miles down to a common to play cricket. You just run alongside the bikes. That was the 1950s and it's harder now, but you do still see the stories. It was in 2012, I think.

Speaker 2: 16:09

A guy called mark vessels moved house his dog had been in Virginia with his father Because he wasn't allowed to have a dog in the community moved into dogs, went out and, interestingly, this place in South Carolina called my little beach and this the account is frustratingly unclear. It's not clear if Vessels moved from Virginia to Carolina or if you move from one part of South Carolina to another, and this is important because presently the dog Escape from the father in Virginia and turned up in my tool beach. What I'm interested in here is was the dog tracking its old home or was it tracking vessels? Because that does happen. A dog or a cat can track purely a person to a place that the dog or cat has never been before. These are, in some ways, I think, the most astonishing stories that's interesting this isn't.

Speaker 2: 17:03

I mean there's a big one we can talk about from world war one in a moment. The thing now, of course, was interesting. The value of modern stories is you get microchips, so where people would brush it off and say all these people are sentimental, they want to believe it's their lost dog or cat, they're killing themselves. Now you've got a microchips. There is no question about it. This was definitely vessels dog and it seemed to have walked 500 miles. A dog called Cleo Labrador cross vessels dog was a was a Labrador Labrador cross call clear in 2020.

Speaker 2: 17:35

The family moved from Kansas to Missouri and the dog went back to its old house. This doesn't happen so much, mainly with cats. They almost always go back to their old house is very clear split on the whole between dogs and cats. But now this dog, clear, went back to the old house, did it successfully and safely. There was about 57 miles, so not bad going in American modern traffic and again with my microchip.

Speaker 2: 18:02

What's interesting here is that the owner saw his dog one where it's come from. They got it checked at the vet. They got the microchip check, so they found out. The owners Realized and restored the dog to the to the original owners. But how many times, I wonder, in the past would a dog turned up like that? If it did, it's not so common for it to go back to its old house, but no one would know where it came from, how far it had come, you know. So it's a nice dog, will will keep it, will put some ads up. Keep it if nobody wants it. So there's that. But yeah, the dogs and the cats tracking their owner is one that has an extra twist to this puzzle, really.

Speaker 1: 18:39

Of course, there's so much we still don't know about the capacity for animals and how they perceive the world. We're just learning new stuff, for instance, about how birds migrate and how they can potentially actually see weak magnetic fields in order to migrate. I wonder if there's just something going on with dogs. I mean, they do have that amazing sense of smell, but what can they smell? That is so beyond our capacity to be able to track down a human in a place they've never been before. Dr John L.

Speaker 2: 19:10

That's it. I mean, it's very difficult sometimes to separate the sense of smell, which is incredible to us, from something more spooky, if you like, which I think must be going on with Bobby. There's nothing too smell in subzero temperatures and I'll come to the experiments in a moment which suggests that the ones that are best at this, these dogs that just find their way back by smelling a short distance, but the ones that are best at this do not smell at all and they've been watched very carefully and experiments since the 1930s at least. But yeah, the sense of smell, like you know, brought it, brought home to me.

Speaker 2: 19:40

I had a friend, a couple of friends, in Durham where I worked previously, with a lovely retriever dog, Isabel. They had her from America originally, brought her over and she was a faithful companion all around Durham, and between Dan and Marina, who are a couple, they walk her home different times, one or the other finished work at different times and so on. Anyway, one evening Marina was walking the dog home and she got through Durham, which is very nice or pedestrian walk, got outside marks and expenses around the middle of the town and the dog just stopped, bolt riveted to the pavement, couldn't move her Quite a big dog. He doesn't want to move. Quite hard to move her. Finally Marina got her to go on and she said this was quite weird. She told Dan about it when she saw him later at supper. And what time was this? She remembered the time pretty much, said to him yeah, it was about five to six, and Dan said I was in marks and expenses. I guess the trail stopped right there. It stopped at the doors. I don't know.

Speaker 2: 20:41

But what they can do with smelling is formidable. But the experiments, so the experiments have been going since the 1930s. A lot of them in Germany, a guy called Bastion Schmidt in the 1930s, a guy called Bernhardt Muller in the 1950s and 60s, and these older ones are summed up. Think Sheldrake covers them. And an excellent article by a guy called Robert Charman in a book, telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition covers an awful lot of strange animal homings. And these Muller ones, he says when they watched the dogs very carefully and they, some of them, just couldn't do it, about a third of them could do it.

Speaker 2: 21:23

It's worth stressing this you don't expect your dog to find its way home automatically. It seems about a third can do it and some just got lost, wondered about. Some dogs will just find somebody kind to look after them. Make a phone call, what have you? But a third of them that could do it wondered about for a little while, seeming a bit lost. And presently the head of the dog would go up in a very kind of sharp, unnatural way, almost like a compass needle going up, and I do wonder about the electromagnetic side of this. There seems a lot of clues in that.

Speaker 2: 21:53

Anyway, the dog would then, in a kind of trance like state, make its way home, and it was not sniffing, it wasn't hardly even seeing was a fascinating thing, because it seemed to bump into low fences. It seemed to do better at night or in a fog than in clear daylight. And over time these experiments be repeated. And what's fascinating was these, the scouting dogs you want to call them that rather than the sniffing dogs would get faster, and sometimes they would. They would actually take a route completely in the opposite direction from the previous one, but would get home faster. And so this has been repeated in the teens this century by a Czech study University there, and they've had, oh Lord, 60 breeds of dogs.

Speaker 2: 22:39

But anyway, study went on for three years, filling with GPS trackers and so forth forest, we can kind of let the dogs off safely. So they find sniffing dogs doing sniffing, back to handlers about kilometer, not really very far, but they can find the dogs that scout are best at it. They can do it best, fastest. They don't sniff and they seem to get faster on a second try. So yeah, abundant evidence that dogs are not sniffing if you watch what they're doing and that there's something. Really a sixth sense at the moment is about the best term for it. But I do think something's going on with electromagnet magnetism probably when you you think what dogs can do that we can't do. They can detect the epileptic fit of an owner hours in advance of it. They can detect a storm hours before humans are aware of it. So yeah, they seem to have these kind of skills we don't yet understand True story.

Speaker 1: 23:38

This morning I was walking my dog and my husband was coming the other way down the road, about 50 meters ahead of us, and I could easily tell it was him. She could not. You know, dogs don't have great eyesight, so I let her off leash. She ran towards him furiously barking and when she got to a distance of 20 feet her whole body language changed and she suddenly realized it was one of her favorite people in the world. But before that moment she had no idea. I don't know if she just doesn't know how to use her nose or what's going on, but no sixth sense there. So maybe the reason we all like to hear these stories is because it's just so very romantic that our dog could love us so much. This idea that the bond is so strong between you and your dog that it's this kind of amazing experience. It really makes us feel good about ourselves. Unless you have a dog like mine.

Speaker 2: 24:33

I think so. I mean the case that I was just hinting at earlier gives us that in spades, and it was World War One. A lovely story to come out of a tragic time. A guy called Private James Brown he was in the army in Ireland before the war and he would march about with his regiment on routine kind of training maneuvers what have you across the countryside and his young dog it was an Irish terrier called Prince would romp about crazily.

Speaker 1: 25:02

I love the regiment, I love James Brown and did you all just hear that noise in the background? Yeah, that was Richard's roof flying off his house and hitting the neighbor's house because he was in the middle of a big storm so we had to take a little bit of a break. But he was a real trooper and came right back and we finished the interview.

Speaker 2: 25:25

Sorry, we've got quite a storm going here. Sorry, I will just have to. Sorry, do you mind, marika, if we just take a break for five minutes, because I think there's been some storm damage? We've had crazy storms. Oh, somebody's actually knocking on the door. Hi, marika, yes, sorry, I just sent you an email. I'm sorry, I just Jesus Christ, not for the recording this one, but quite a bit of my roof just fell into my neighbor's garden. Oh no, oh my gosh. Yeah, we're getting these storms now that I've never known before which just one storm blows into another.

Speaker 1: 25:56

How are you?

Speaker 2: 25:57

I'm in Cardiff but it's happening all over the country. I mean, a friend of mine, you've got tornadoes. A friend of mine in Oxfordshire, you know, a whole stable got lifted into a road the other day and it'll this normal start. This one started on Sunday. It'll seem to stop by that Monday afternoon. That will just start again, like he did this afternoon. And I've just it's been giving me the fear because you're listening to howling over the roof like I've never heard before and you're just thinking I could do that, having a bloody roof fell now and it's just happened. I mean I heard the noise and thought, jesus Christ, what was that?

Speaker 1: 26:36

Okay, let me remind you of the story so far, because Richard wants to continue. James Brown was called up for the war in August 1914. And Prince stays with his wife in Hammersmith in London.

Speaker 2: 26:47

Presently she writes letters to Brown, who's in Montiere in France, and she says to him I'm sorry to say that Prince has disappeared. Brown writes back after a few weeks the letter's taking a while in wartime and says I'm sorry to hear that Prince has disappeared, but you won't find him there because he's here with me. This is a true story. Somehow Prince had got from London to the coast across on a troop ship and found his way to Brown in Montiere in France, somewhere he had never been before. He became the regimental mascot. He had his own khaki jacket. He rode about on horseback, did all sorts of tricks, killed tremendous number of rats the record was perhaps 137 in one day and happily enough both of them survived the war. So this is a landmark case really, of an animal going somewhere it had never been before just because of the love of its owner.

Speaker 1: 27:50

That really truly is remarkable, and finding someone instead of a place you've been before it just goes beyond our comprehension of what abilities we think animals can have.

Speaker 2: 28:02

And the animal side is already fascinating, because if you allow for some kind of electromagnetic navigation, which might be the case, you've still got to allow here for the fact that there's a kind of a beacon, if you want to call it that, on the person. They're not going back home, they're going only to their owner, and we know that quite a lot of animals, it seems, can do this. Cats can certainly do it, although cats typically like to go back to their old home, and this is so common that almost everybody knows of a cat that's done it from friends or their own animal. But this cat in 1951, a Persian cat, cream-colored cat called Sugar.

Speaker 2: 28:41

Its family moved from California to Oklahoma and different accounts are given, but for one reason or another they left the cat behind, perhaps because it didn't like car journeys or it tried to escape from the car, but they left it behind with a family, gave it to a local family, friends in California, moved off to Oklahoma and presently they're in phone contact with the family and find that the cat has disappeared, can't be found, and I cannot now remember if I've told you in my head I think it's perhaps a year later.

Speaker 2: 29:15

It's a long time, obviously, but the cat turns up in the backyard in Oklahoma, the woman is thinking well, this looks like our cat. It looks in a very bad way, which is what you'd expect, but surely it can't be my cat. And she puts her hands down to stroke the cat and sure enough, it has got the same hip defect on the exact hip that they know their cat to have. So, before the age of the microchip, we're pretty certain that this was their cat and it had again gone to find just its owners in a completely unknown part of America and possibly a thousand, possibly 1500 miles journey.

Speaker 1: 29:59

Okay, so this has all been just a little bit mind-blowing, but if you want to hear more about some really uncanny things, you can head over to our Patreon page, where we keep our bonus content, and listen in to the next part of the conversation, where we talk more about Richard's books that cover things like mummies, cannibals and vampires. It's some very cool stuff, so go check that out on our Patreon. That and other bonus content is going to be available rolling out over the next few weeks, so become a member there now and you'll have access to all of the snippets and background stuff that goes on and bonus content from all of our guests. So let's find out next what book Richard would give to every one of you if he could.

Speaker 2: 30:42

Yeah, I think actually it's a difficult choice to choose one. I like Sheldrake's work a lot. I think he goes places where almost no one else has ever been and his son, merlin Sheldrake, is pursuing that tremendously well now as well. But actually I think really one that's so hard to be in his just joyous exhilaration at the natural world is John Muir. And yeah, there's a great collected. I'll send you the link for it. There's a great collected, great, fat edition of Muir's writings which has a wonderful story about a dog which I'll be including in a collection that I'm doing.

Speaker 2: 31:20

I'm doing a couple of dog books. One's going to be called Around the Worlds in 180 Dogs and Muir has a lovely, lovely, heroic story about a strange dog called Stikine. But he just has, overall, an ability to drop you right there in the Sierra Mountains amidst natural wonders, storms I mean. You all have heard that we're suffering from appalling storms in Britain at the moment. I've been suffering quite sharply, just yards behind me as we speak. I would like just briefly to thank my kind neighbors who I've just met in terms of adversity, when quite a bit of my roof has fallen into their yard. They'll be listening to the podcast by the sound of it. So thank you to them for being pretty kind and patient in the circumstances.

Speaker 2: 32:04

And Muir would embrace a storm by climbing up to the top of a pine tree to see what it was like being up a fir tree during a storm. Absolutely a destructible character. Formidable, hardy, and with the greatest, endless sparkling zest in every little creature around him squirrels, birds, the dogs to Keen, just the whole rushing, colourful, ever changing world of glaciers, rivers, snowstorms and shepherding. As a lovely job accompanying sheep flocks up to the high Sierra at one point in the summer. Terrific collection of anecdotes about his growing up, his time in Scotland, his time as a child when the parents emigrated to America and, of course, he created the National Parks I mean, never forgotten because of that. So, yeah, I can't recommend that too hardy. I go back to that book and reread.

Speaker 1: 32:57

As always, we will put the book recommendations in the show notes and on the blog, and you know all the places. So now let's find out what Richard wants to share with us about his earliest memory connecting with an animal, or even if he's had any animals that showed any uncanny abilities.

Speaker 2: 33:15

I would like to talk about our dog, who didn't do anything like that that. I know we had a lovely dog called Sally. It was a collie, our station crossbar. I'd actually like, for reasons that become apparent, to go back back back back to the late 1940s. And this was the home of my mother, her two brothers she's settled in along with us. One brother, les, is still around at 90 and has been a wonderful, wonderful thing in our family as long as I can remember, and we celebrated his 19th birthday a few weeks ago in a garden where I think five generations had roped about down to my nieces, who love his garden and the trees they climb.

Speaker 2: 33:56

And it was to this house in the late 1940s in St Albans that my grandfather came home. He worked on business trips with the post office traveling around the country and he'd gone away to stay and he had a landlady who put him up and she said while you're here, would you like one of these? Took him out to the garage litter of puppies. So it was that my grandfather came home with a puppy in his pocket which came to be known as Pat. It was a kind of, I think, some Irish terrier in him. I'll send you photographs. Legendary dog really. And he was the dog that would romp alongside the bicycles for miles down to the common to play cricket with them. And yeah, at one point during, I think, the early fifties my mother remember this vividly he was stolen. He seemed to actually be stolen me for the days of free ranging dogs and dogs and roaming about anyway. So he must have been outside the house and he was missing for some days and was very, very anxious. And, yeah, he suddenly turned up with a rope around his neck which is obviously some kind of rudimentary lead. Was was evidence that someone had taken in, perhaps the circus or something. He found his way home. The fact that he'd been away for days suggest that he'd he'd home several miles.

Speaker 2: 35:14

But I was left to remember pat anyway, regardless, because, as I'm older, she had an endless gift for happiness and joy and friendship making new friends In the unlikely circumstances, made terrific friends with a carers who came into the house look after. But you know, sometimes you have low days and if she had one of those days you're talking to on the phone, you get her talking about pat. What I thought about this was that suddenly she was fourteen years old, not eighty five, and she was there back in the house and she would say I think that was the happiest day of my life and somehow you were back there with her. And yeah, the realization which keeps coming to me over and over again and I think we'll never end with all these stories the animals bring people together in a way that we don't always consciously realize is a wonderful thing.

Speaker 2: 36:08

What was fascinating about my mother and pat memories was that with this, you had an animal bringing two sides of a person back together somebody age fourteen, somebody aged eighty five, and yet that that dog reglute them to their past, as it were. So yeah, pat, I will send you photographs. Wonderful dog.

Speaker 1: 36:30

I really love that story. So now we've come to the last question, which is, of course, what's the deal with animals?

Speaker 2: 36:38

Yes, there's so many ways to answer. I do love the way they they connect people routinely all the time, so it's particularly dogs. But I think perhaps the biggest deal for me at the moment as I track my way through this strange labyrinth of stories for these two books and particularly uncanny animals, which is about the uncanny abilities of dogs and cats, I think it's that ability of them to reconnect ourselves to our distant past is it is you suggested this and it's been argued by Sheldrake convincingly that we all had these abilities In in our tribal past when we didn't have maps. We have compasses with road signs. Perhaps we couldn't, probably couldn't read. We had to find a way home and Lawrence found a post out with the Calahari.

Speaker 2: 37:28

Bushman would be astonished at the journeys they made in a day hunting and yet their ability to find their way home without even trying. And I think that must still go on in parts of the world. I think we probably had it and I think some of the kind of trance like abilities of animals, some of the apparently telepathic abilities on animals which perhaps we could touch on another time Big, big subject and I keep finding new stories about it cats and dogs. I think some of these abilities we have. There's big questions around this which have been exploring since, stumbling on ghosts and poltergeists how far are Women more psychic than men? More routinely, psychic tape for granted don't really talk about it that much, but but certainly cases where human beings seem to be joined somehow across hundreds or thousands of miles, sometimes by a crisis, a death, an accident, sometimes for other reasons, twins have demonstrated uncanny ability to share each other's pain and sensations across the Atlantic, for example.

Speaker 2: 38:33

Yeah, I think that wildness, reconnection to a wilder past inside of us and that pushing us beyond what we think we know because I'm a great believer in science I think it's a wonderful thing, but it's clear that it's getting to a kind of stagnation point in some areas and with some questions, and that it needs to grasp the fact that if enough people keep saying the same thing, you need to listen to them. That is your database, that is your evidence, that is where you start your research and you don't just wave your hand and say it's anecdotal or dismiss it because it makes your head, it makes my head, but, but you've got to keep going with it. So deal with animals. For me is, is that, I think, pushing us beyond. Pushing us back in one sense and pushing us forward To new discoveries in in another sense that's a fantastic way of looking at it.

Speaker 1: 39:24

Now, richard wanted to end with a passage reading, so we're going to end with that now. I hope you enjoy.

Speaker 2: 39:32

This would be great to finish with and it's a remarkable book called the door marked summer, by a character called Michael Bentin, who was best known as an actor but but had a remarkable kind of psychic side to him and contacts in his family. And this was quite a difficult time in the world generally. The whole decade in lots of ways Takes us back to a difficult time in Britain and Europe and the world just before the start of first world, second World War, when it was evident that this was going to happen. It was the late summer thirty nine and as a young teenager, ben teen was getting increasingly depressed and anxious and he knew he was father, knew a guy called Eddie who was a very ordinary guy and very extraordinary, just a gross around a shop in Kent, but he was also clearly psychic and he suggested to Michael and his father that they Take a trip out into the world of Kent, and I'll read the passage exactly as it is.

Speaker 2: 40:31

We truly drove, drove out a few miles into the world of Kent, those peaceful, sheltered values that are one of the most attractive features of the garden of England. Eddie asked pop, my father, to draw into the side of the country road. Then we got out and followed him down a short, narrow track that led to some woods at the foot of the valley. The night was calm and quite warm, with a few lazy clouds drifting across the moonlit sky. We walked silently in single file through the lush ferns that now rustled around us. The dense underbrush continued as we passed into the thick clumps of trees which made up the small wood. Here the light was considerably reduced to. Eddie continues to lead the way, effortlessly, quite.

Speaker 2: 41:15

Unexpectedly we came out of the clusters of saplings and mature trees into a small clearing which must have been centrally placed in the wood, and there Eddie stopped.

Speaker 2: 41:25

The moon had come out from behind a large billowing cloud and now lit the whole scene almost as brightly as daylight, but with a soft silvery light. You could almost hear the silence. Eddie turned to me and as I stood a few feet behind him, just in front of my father, he smiled and gestured to me to listen. Then he turned and in a low voice, halfway between a whistle and a word, gave one strange, short, gentle call. Immediately, from every corner of the wood, the birds, the beasts, even the insects, and I felt every tree and plant answered him. It was a great joyous chorus of greeting to a much loved friend. There was no alarm in that spontaneous answer, just a massive response of nature to nature, like attracting, like Tears streamed down my face and I could see my father crying too. Marvelous natural tears of joy that seemed to wash away the fears and doubts that have sailed me, reaffirming that nature is far stronger than man alone. I shall never forget that moment.

Speaker 1: 42:37

Thank you so much for sharing that and for joining us today. I think we'll leave it there.

Speaker 2: 42:42

Many, many thanks, thank you. Wonderful, wonderful talk, thank you.

Speaker 1: 42:54

That was Dr Richard Sugg. You can find out more about his work at Dr Richard Sugg at substackcom. I'm your host, marie Cabelle. The theme music for the deal with animals was composed by Kai Stranckoff. You can see links to the guest book recommendations, as well as their websites and affiliated organizations, in the show notes and at the deal with animalscom. This podcast was produced on both historical tribal land of the Snoqualmie and Quenal Indian nations. For more information, go to the Snoqualmie Tribes Ancestral Lands Movement. Now, what do you think is the deal with animals? The deal with animals is part of the Irore Animal Podcast Network.