Paranormal: Dogs don't commit suicide. People do.

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GPatten

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reph

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I'm guessing that there's something odd about the place, maybe an ultra-high-frequency sound that dogs hear as eerie and people don't hear at all.
 

Cabinscribe

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Just an odd coincidence ...

When I was about five years old, we moved to a different house.

The first day we were there, our Collie bolted out the door and was hit by a snowplow. He was bruised and sore, but his injuries weren't life-threatening.

A few days later when he had regained his strength, he got up and jumped right through the glass of the kitchen window. He didn't recover from the injuries from the impact and the cuts from the broken glass.

The house, we discovered, was haunted. (I'll spare the details right now.)

Maybe these dogs were trying to flee (wow, that could be a bad pun!) from whatever they were sensing, rather than deliberately attempting suicide.
 

Selene LuPaine

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holy crap that is terrible. That so bites. My sister had a dog and it managed to flee from the house. It was a small dog they rescued from the streets. It ran across the street and got hit by a truck. It didn't die right away but it was badly injured. It continued to run and my sister has never seen her dog since.

Thats why I've always worried that If my cats were to get out they would get hit by a car or something. Its quite scary. I've even witnessed several loose dogs run across the street completely oblivious to the fact there are moving vehicles on the road.
 

Richard

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"Paranormal" indeed. As far as 'ghostly manifestations' go, a spooky spectre whose deaths' work is to make a species that routinely sniffs bottoms and chases is own tale act a bit nutty is right down there on the lowest rung of the ectoplasm ladder, just behind Timothy Claypole and Willo the Wisp's slow cousin Wally.
 

Nivvie

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Timothy Claypole may not have scared you but I thought he was majorly creepy.

I also think these dogs are jumping off the bridge becuase they live in Glasgow.
Having lived there, I can see their point.
 

GPatten

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Here are a couple of tear jerkers:

I had a dog, a pug, that was older, and feeble... going blind and deaf... bad arthritis.. in pain every day. I took great care of him, but age caught up with him and he decided to end it.

He went out in the scorching heat and sun and tried to kill himself through heat exhaustion. He knew it; he did it on purpose. My neighbor called to let me know what he was doing.
I rushed home from the office to try to save him. I found him in the yard, barely hanging on. I put him in the bathtub and tried to cool him down, but the damage was already done. He died in my hands four hours later.

I am convinced he intended to end his life, and dogs do understand when their end is coming. R.I.P. Marty....


It’s common in the animal kingdom to see animals do that. They will leave a heard or a pack when they get really old or get injured an they leave to find a place to lie down an die. We humans have wonderful things such as morphine which dogs unfortunately don’t have access to, maybe feeling as bad as they do they would rather die.
 

reph

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Jerry, I've heard of cats doing the same thing when they're old and ill. They might leave home and go lie down somewhere. I don't see anything paranormal about that. But the dogs that jumped off the bridge – was it time for them to "go," or were they young and healthy?
 

GPatten

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reph said:
Jerry, I've heard of cats doing the same thing when they're old and ill. They might leave home and go lie down somewhere. I don't see anything paranormal about that. But the dogs that jumped off the bridge – was it time for them to "go," or were they young and healthy?

I don't know reph. I only cought the story on FOX news, and found it on Yahoo news. I wish they had written more to the story. :Shrug:
 

Elincoln

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Dogs jumping off a bridge is not normal behavior, even if they're sick or old. They either was trying to get at something (maybe they saw something in the water) or away from something. I agree with reph. High frequency sound might have been hurting their ears and jumping away from it was the choice they made to get away from it.
 

reph

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Richard

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That last article reads like pure guff. Much as I love cats, here's the lines you're looking for:

Elizabeth says that from a scientific standpoint she would have to say she doesn't know since there is no evidence. She goes on to say that for something to be scientifically therapeutic, it has to be exactly the right strength, loudness, and amplitude. However, she did say that as a “healer,” she says “yes, it absolutely” can be helpful to sleep with you cat.

No evidence, actively avoiding science, giving cats psychic powers? Beep. Pseudoscience alert! Woo-woo! Woo-woo!

People have the tendency to believe that if you can't hear it and see it then no one else can, either. There is a lot of skepticism to this day in the bio-acoustic field. But scientists are becoming a little more open-minded than they used to be.

Beep! Blame shifting alert! Rather than trying to prove the theory, accuse scientists of being closed-minded. Pseudoscience alert! Woo-woo! Woo-woo!

She has also received support from a professor emeritus in England who is known as the "Grandfather of Bones." He is the foremost authority on bone density. She declined giving his name since she didn’t have his permission.

Beep! Anecdotal evidence! Pseudoscience alert! Woo-woo!

As an avid animal lover, I know full well that animals are intelligent beings even if they don't speak a human language — although, my own cats have tried to talk like a human. Elizabeth has a recording of a cat in a veterinarian's office who kept saying its owner's name

Er... I don't think this one needs any words.
 

reph

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Richard, the article did give factual information about infrasound. I suggest reading it as you would eat lobster: discard whatever you find indigestible and enjoy the rest.

Did you notice that infrasound effects explain "haunted" houses? Good news for debunkers, huh?
 

Richard

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Richard, the article did give factual information about infrasound. I suggest reading it as you would eat lobster: discard whatever you find indigestible and enjoy the rest.

No, because it's a useless article. It shows absolutely no understanding of cause and effect. Read it more carefully: the sole scientific bit - ignoring what ultrasound is, because that's functionally irrelevant on its own, just as it would be if it were lasers or genetically modified cress - involves a supposedly famous expert who refuses to be named! What? That's the best she can come up with?

Simply mentioning scientific words and terms doesn't make what you're saying in anyway scientific, and this is miles away from it. Hell, she flat-out states that the whole thing is based on an old vets' adage that hasn't been tested, but has still been assumed to be accurate - a whole ton of gibberish on how much effort has been spent trying to find out if cats' purrs hit the necessary level and not one single word on whether she's tried to prove that buzzing that sound has any impact at all.

Instead, we get reams of rubbish willingly trying to link her theory to both established cat knowledge (they purr in labour as well, not just in run-of-the-mill physical pain) and wishy-washy wishing about magical animal senses.

Hell, the whole basis for her thesis isn't the healing properties of ultrasound - it's a quick chat about a guy who vibrated chickens, followed up by a test on whether or not the cats could fit evidence to the phenomena. There's not one word in there about any form of scientific trial - even when it would be doing pretty much the one thing you can guarantee being able to get a cat to do willingly: sitting on a comfy bed, being made a fuss of for extended periods of time. Until there's evidence that that's been done, and with proper controls and research, the whole thing's no more worthwhile than me saying that flashing lights into your eyes while you sleep will make you more adapt at windsurfing.

There is nothing to like about this article - it's a piece of junk. Whatever the merits of her theory, which may very well have been tested to actual scientific standards that weren't mentioned in the article (in which case, fair enough), this whole story's just the whole cracked shell of the lobster that you throw away afterwards, with absolutely no meat in it.
 

Richard

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Did you notice that infrasound effects explain "haunted" houses? Good news for debunkers, huh?

Er...very old news, actually. And just like the words 'ideomotor effect', of staggeringly little use when talking to people who've just had a paranormal experience out of the blue, oh, except for watching that late night X-Files marathon.
 

veinglory

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Walking around Scotland my dog had a habit of bounding off small fences even though he should have been able to see a cliff on the other side. There were some places he just had to be leashed. Certain problem bridges were just perceptually not clearly cliffs to dogs (from dog height). Dogs going of cliffs is routine especially with tourists whose dogs arent as cliff and bridge savvy.

Infrasound seems a dumb theory to me as dogs would be most inclined to flee back the way they came andwell, rather than speculate you could take a microphone, record, and play back at 10x speed just like the do with infrasound vocalisations (e.g. elephants).
 
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reph

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Richard said:
Read it more carefully: the sole scientific bit - ignoring what [infrasound] is, because that's functionally irrelevant on its own, just as it would be if it were lasers or genetically modified cress - involves a supposedly famous expert who refuses to be named! What? That's the best she can come up with?
I read it carefully enough to see that it didn't say he refused to be named. Maybe he wasn't asked.

veinglory said:
Infrasound seems a dumb theory to me as dogs would be most inclined to flee back the way they came andwell, rather than speculate you could take a microphone, record, and play back at 10x speed...
I proposed infrasound as one possible physical explanation. The point is, there's nothing paranormal about the dogs' behavior. Speculating is all I can do from here. I wish somebody there would do the microphone test.
 
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