Last night I caught a portion of an interesting TV documentary on animal communication (both among animals in the wild and between animals and human beings). The program may have been American-made, but I watched it on the BBC's Learning Zone.
The show contained some interesting interviews with professional animal trainers, etc., but one segment featured a "pet psychic" - a woman who claimed, among other things, to possess the ability to diagnose ailments in dogs merely by looking at a photograph of the sick animal.
Photographs of six pet canines, each previously diagnosed by a panel of veterinarians as suffering from a particular doggy ailment, were shown to the psychic. She proceeded to offer moderately specific diagnoses (such as "I'm definitely feeling something wrong with the right eye of this one") for each dog.
The psychic went 0 for 6. There weren't even any close calls (a typical example: she misdiagnosed an inflamed intestine as a sinus ailment). The veterinary experts were fairly gracious when the results were disclosed; one simply remarked "We'll stick to our own diagnostic methods." Another noted that in several instances a misdiagnosis, if relied upon, could have led to paralysis or death of the pet.
Unfortunately, the program did not cut back to the psychic, so the audience never got to see her react to the news that she had botched every single diagnosis.
The show contained some interesting interviews with professional animal trainers, etc., but one segment featured a "pet psychic" - a woman who claimed, among other things, to possess the ability to diagnose ailments in dogs merely by looking at a photograph of the sick animal.
Photographs of six pet canines, each previously diagnosed by a panel of veterinarians as suffering from a particular doggy ailment, were shown to the psychic. She proceeded to offer moderately specific diagnoses (such as "I'm definitely feeling something wrong with the right eye of this one") for each dog.
The psychic went 0 for 6. There weren't even any close calls (a typical example: she misdiagnosed an inflamed intestine as a sinus ailment). The veterinary experts were fairly gracious when the results were disclosed; one simply remarked "We'll stick to our own diagnostic methods." Another noted that in several instances a misdiagnosis, if relied upon, could have led to paralysis or death of the pet.
Unfortunately, the program did not cut back to the psychic, so the audience never got to see her react to the news that she had botched every single diagnosis.
