Canine Behavior: How Do Lost Dogs Find Their Way Home?
The Power of Emotion
Whenever I pass someone who’s talking on their cell phone, I usually hear one of two things: “Where are you?” or “I’m [at such-and-such a location].” The other day I heard guy on the bus tell whoever he was on the phone with, “I’m on the bus. No, the bus. The bus. B-U-S. Bus. I'm on the bus!” This went on for what seemed like 10 minutes!
True, these conversations may go on to other topics, but that’s how most of them start. That’s why it becomes clearer to me each day that human beings have a deep biological need to feel connected to one another, almost to the point that we feel lost, physically and emotionally, without having some device or ability to help us make contact with others.
I think dogs are the same way. They’re not as neurotic about this deep need as some cell phone users seem to be, but they do have a strong biological need to feel connected to us.
Every so often you’ll hear a story in the news about a dog who gets lost, and then miraculously, against all odds, travels long distances to find his way home. Whether it’s an Airedale named Max who got lost in Connecticut, 45-miles away from his home in Rhode Island, and was found hanging out in his own back yard three weeks later, or Jarvis, a Jack Russell terrier from Devon, England, who got lost on a family outing, and made his way home by hopping a ferry across the Plymouth Sound, it’s hard to know how they got to where they were going. In rare cases dogs have even managed to do this while the family was in the process of moving; yet the dog still shows up at their new front door months later, tired and hungry, and wagging its tail.
The most recent case happened last month when a sheepdog named Pero , living in Wales, managed to find his way home from 240 miles away, traveling for two weeks.
How does this happen? What kind of GPS system do these dogs use?
I did some research on the mechanisms that homing pigeons and monarch butterflies use when finding their way home (or navigating), and discovered that, so far, science only has some educated guesses as to how those things happen. For pigeons one theory is that they operate by magnetoreception , the ability to “tune-in” to changes in the earth’s magnetic field. For monarch butterfiles, who travel every year from Canada and the northern United States to Mexico (and then back), their flight patterns are reportedly, “inherited.” This makes sense because the individual butterflies that leave for Mexico are three generations removed from the ones that actually arrive. This means that those that eventually return north each year are at least six generations removed from the ones that started the journey. And since their flight patterns are very exact, those patterns would almost have to be encoded into each butterfly’s DNA. But how do group memories get stored in an individual’s DNA? Or do they?
As I thought about this, I realized that dogs might find their way home in similar fashion to an experience I had when I was in college. I didn’t get lost, but somehow, against all odds, I found my way from Point A to an unknown, yet very desirable Point B, with only my emotions to guide me.
What happened involved a girl I’d met on campus. We’d bumped into each other a few times and I’d felt an instant attraction for her though I was too shy and love struck to be of any use to her or myself the first time we met. The second time, I was a bit more relaxed. After she laughed at a couple of my jokes, I got up the nerve to ask for her phone number, and she gave it to me. Then I asked her where she lived, meaning on or off campus. She told me the name of the street she lived on, but couldn’t remember the address; she told me she was “bad with numbers.”
I called her later that evening and found out she’d given me the wrong phone number. (She really was bad with numbers.)
I couldn’t stop thinking about her, though. I had to see her again. But how? I could let the days drag by, and hope that I might run into her again somewhere, somehow. But that seemed much too slippery and intangible, not to mention totally contingent on happenstance.
I told my roommate, Mark, about her, hoping he might have a solution or talk me down from the romantic ledge I was on.
Finally, one evening, I decided to take action. My car was in the shop, so I asked Mark if he’d mind driving me over to this girl’s house.
“You found out where she lives?”
“Not exactly, I just know it’s a house on Seventh North.”
“That’s a long street with a lot of houses.”
“I know. I just have this feeling that I’ll know which one is hers.”
Mark, who’d had his own romantic obsessions, shrugged. “Okay, but keep it short. I want to get to the record store before it closes.”
So we drove, Mark shaking his head, me staring intently at all the houses we passed by. After several blocks I said, “Pull over here.”
He pulled over. I got out. He looked at his watch.
“I know,” I said. “But this is her house. I can feel it.”
He shook his head. “I’ll keep the motor running.”
I made my way up to the front door, feeling foolish and stupid and vulnerable, yet driven to find out if this was the house with the potentially wonderful girl living in it. I knocked.
A moment later the door opened. It was a college-age girl, but not the one I was hoping to see. Mark had been right; this could end up taking all night.
“Uh, hi. Sorry. I’m looking for Pat Smith? Does she live here?”
The girl gave me a funny look, then said, “Yes. But she’s not home.”
Wow. I’d nailed it.
After a brief conversation—in which Pat’s roommate gave me the correct phone number (two of the digits had been reversed), and promised to tell her I’d dropped by—I went back out to the car and Mark and I went to the record store, shaking our heads in wonder at how I had managed to find her house on the first try.
Now, you might be thinking so what? What does that tell us about how dogs are able to find their way home when they get lost?
I think we all do things like this—or at least similar to this—every day. We become filled with a strong desire to connect to something—a potential mate, a job, a promotion, a new place to live, a hard-to-find article of clothing, a concert ticket—and that desire creates a kind of “magical” connection between us and the thing we want.
However, I don’t believe this connection is magical at all. We now know, for instance, that the rhythm of our hearts and our dog’s hearts often beat in synch. It’s also been discovered that DNA can communicate at a distance. However, I believe that in order for that connection between the lost dog and his owners to take place, there has to be some kind of natural energy field—call it emotional, bioenergetic, or morphogenetic—that enables us and our dogs to plug our internal GPS systems in and follow where it leads us. This may sound “new-agey,” and perhaps it is. But the mere fact that this blog article started with an observation about cell phones kind of indicates that we’re actually living in a new age, at least where science and technology are concerned.
So it seems to me that when a dog is lost, and wants to find his way home, he’s not remembering his route, or navigating by certain signposts, or thinking about what he’s doing. If he did, he wouldn’t get anywhere, just as I wasn’t getting any closer to the girl I wanted to see by constantly thinking about her. No, a dog has to go by feeling his way. And if his drive to connect is strong enough, he’ll find his way home simply by going where the bioenergetic (or emotional or magnetic or morphogenetic) field resonates most intensely with his desire.
For most of us, home is a place of strong emotional resonance. If we were to chart our daily movements, home would be the center, with all other locations—work, the supermarket, the movies, a friend’s house, the kids’ schools—acting as satellites. It’s as if “home” has its own emotional gravity, and so we find ourselves orbiting around and then being pulled back to it day in and day out. The more positive experiences we have with being there—comfort, rest, the satisfaction of eating and drinking, feelings of love and affection, feeling connected—the more those things would displace our own energy fields, creating a kind of emotional tide that constantly, yet subtly, pulls us homeward.
If home and family have any kind of emotional resonance for dogs—and I’m pretty sure they do—then it’s those properties that displace the lost dog and pull him in one direction not another, just as I felt myself being pulled directly toward one house, and one house only, because that’s where the person I most wanted to see and talk to lived. And if I was able to do it just because of a passing crush, imagine how much simpler it would be for a dog who’s lost the people who mean the most to him. After all, there’s a great deal of truth to the homily that “home is where the heart is,” and of all God’s creatures, dogs may be the ones with the most “heart.”
So it’s no wonder that a lost dog could find his way home. He’s just doing what dogs do when hunting for a favorite toy. Only in this case the stakes higher: he’s trying to find a missing piece of his heart.
LCK
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
