Lady Wonder Part 2

Astonishing Legends vor 6 Jahren

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It seems Lady Wonder was much more than a "One-trick Pony."
But even if you consider her one trick to be an abnormal aptitude
for intuitiveness and the ability to express it, that's quite a
trick for an animal. Her impressive skills were at least
intriguing enough to garner a scientific study of her phenomenon
by a couple of leading researchers of the day. Joseph Banks
Rhine or "J.B." as he was known, and his wife Louisa E. Rhine
were the founders of the branch of psychology known as
parapsychology, with J.B. credited with coining the term
Extrasensory Perception, or E.S.P. In a week, they
conducted around 500 experiments on Lady Wonder's powers.
While there was no conclusive proof that the horse had an
individual and infallible psychic perception, the data collected
was enough to astound the Rhines since no human trickery was
detected. In the following years, J.B. Rhine would come to
doubt his initial conclusions, although he never expounded on his
later thinking. Still, he wondered if there wasn't instead
a form of telepathy between Lady and her handler Claudia Fonda,
which would be nearly as remarkable. Skeptics have claimed
that this mere parlor trick was performed by having Lady move
over each letter on her "typewriter," at which point Claudia
would somehow signal Lady to tap the correct key. However,
this would necessitate Lady having to step several feet in either
direction to cover every possible letter and number, and the
Rhines observed that when she was most effective, the horse was
near motionless while in an almost trance-like state. It
would also not explain how Claudia then could have answers to
questions she would not logically know. If J.B. Rhine's
rethinking of his conclusions was correct, it might be just as
extraordinary if there was psychical cooperation between Lady and
Claudia, one that perhaps Claudia was not even aware of
herself. Whether you believe psychic ability with any
living creature is real or not, at the very least, the story of
Lady Wonder illustrates the profound and special bond humans have
with the animals they love.

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