How do we explain "dog treks?"

BenBurch

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BenBurch
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How does one explain the anomalous and sometimes quite long cross-country treks dogs make to re-unite with their owners?

See this video; http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4633822

And in my past is a similar story.

We owned an old rural tavern when I was a child. We had a dachshund named Willie that we gave away because we could not house break him - we had him for 4 months total. The couple who took him lived 35 miles away to the north with a lot of woods and fields and streams and roads and railroads in between where we were and where they were.

Well, about 3 years later, my Mom was closing the tavern one night when there was a blizzard going on, and as she was taking the trash out, she heard a dog whimpering in the darkness next to the steps. She turned on the light and there was a small dachshund caked in ice and snow at the foot of the steps. She brought him in and got towels and dried him off and called us all out of bed and we all were in the kitchen looking at this dog. My Mom said "there is something familiar about this dog!" Then my grandmother said "Willie?" and he went nuts. It was Willie. And somehow he had gotten to us in the dead of winter in the teeth of a blizzard.

Of course we couldn't send him away again. We took him to a specialist who removed his prostate and his housebreaking problem ended, and he lived with us for the rest of a fairly long life.

So;

How do they do this? Smell? Infrasound? Magnetic sense analogous to birds? How?

Is there some rational explanation?

Thanks?

-Ben
 
- The new owners didn't want him anymore and dumped him in front of the tavern.

- Coincidence(think of how many dogs that run away and don't reunite with their prior owners).

- The new owners sold him to someone in your town, and he was checking out the town.
 
TobiasTheCommie said:
- The new owners didn't want him anymore and dumped him in front of the tavern.
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We though of that; But we saw them a month later and they were amazed that he had found us. He had been gone about a month from their place when he showed up.

- Coincidence(think of how many dogs that run away and don't reunite with their prior owners).
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Always possible.
 
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I think Randi has a similar, personal, story and explanation but someone with a better memory than me will have to recount it.
 
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Wow, interesting story.
And 35 miles is much further for a dachshund than a border collie.
I'm wondering whether he could smell something on the wind, miles away, that was distinctive about where you lived. A particular farm, or a brewery, or something.

(there was a story a while back, in the news, about a dog whose owner lost him while at a regular train journey away from home.. the dog caught the train home and got off at the right stop :) )
 
Back in the days when hogs were allowed to run loose like dogs, there were hog stories.

In the spring of 1806 or 1807, David Brownlee settled in Coitsville [Ohio]; he hailed from Washington county, Pa. In emigrating he brought with him a sow and a half a dozen pigs, five or six months old... These swine were in their stye every evening, and regularly at their troughs at feeding times, and things for a time went on very pleasantly with the porker family...

Now one evening in early summer the pigsty was empty; none of its occupants put in an appearance. Not much solicitude was felt about their absence for a few days, then a dilligent search was made for their whereabouts, but they could not be found and were given up for lost.

After a time, Mr. Brownlee went back to Washington County to harvest his wheat that he had left growing. To his great surprise he found all his swine, with an addition of eight or ten pigs to the family, not one missing. (From Historical Collections of Ohio by Henry Howe, 1896)
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Seems like either a certain small proportion of domestic animals who can range freely will do "treks." Or telling the classic animal trek story is satisfying enough that it's become part of human mythology.
 
My parents had a cat that was lost about a hundred miles from home and found his way back. It took him nine months though, so he might have wandered around for thousands of miles before he came upon familiar territory. When he was lost he weighed about 22 pounds. When he got back, he was a rather sickly 8 pounds and had a broken tail. He was a lot friendlier after that though.
 
Sea turtles do some fairly amazing navigation; not sure if science knows how they manage such journeys to the nesting grounds, but isn't it possible that (some) mammals would have the same navigational tools?
 
Wolves have territories ranging from 50 to one thousand square miles, and wild small felines can have terrotories up to 30 miles. Whatever pets are using to do treks, it's probably an ability they inherited from their wild ancestors.
 
I saw a cat drag his sorry butt back home after being forcibly removed at least 30 miles across some very inhospitable country.
Took it several weeks, but he came back in one (skinnier) piece.
 
monoman said:
I think Randi has a similar, personal, story and explanation but someone with a better memory than me will have to recount it.
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It was a cat that they had to abandon at a rented vacation cabin. It reappeared on their kitchen table two weeks later.

The explanation is that their neighbours rented the same cabin immediately after, adopted the cat, took it home, and the cat walked back to Randi's house.


One of the other explanations for some pet trek stories is that an abandoned animal was replaced with a similar one and the storyteller was just too young and too emotional to notice.
 
One thing I've noticed with my dog, and this is obviously subjective, but she always wakes up from a dead sleep when we are close to home. It doesn't matter if we've been away for hours or weeks. It could be the smell, the combination of turns after leaving the highway, who knows, but she always seems to know that we are close to home. It never ceases to amaze me.
 
portlandatheist said:
One thing I've noticed with my dog, and this is obviously subjective, but she always wakes up from a dead sleep when we are close to home. It doesn't matter if we've been away for hours or weeks. It could be the smell, the combination of turns after leaving the highway, who knows, but she always seems to know that we are close to home. It never ceases to amaze me.
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My dog Cookie used to do the same. She would appear to be dead to world while we were driving but would always wake up as we entered my parent's neighborhood (she liked to play with their dogs), the neighborhood where the dog park was or the shopping center with Petsmart.

I thought perhaps she was timing the distance, but no, she did it even if we were held up by an accident or a stop at the gas station. Then I thought perhaps she was figuring out where we were by scent (I assumed she could detect scent even with the windows rolled up).

You know what it turned out to be? She was waking up and getting excited when I started to make a lot of turns.

I figured it out one day on the way to my parent's house and had to take a different route because an accident blocked the road. The detour involved driving through a residential area, and even though were way out in the middle of nowhere in a town we'd never been before, Cookie started looking out the window and making excited noises, clearly thinking it was playtime with mom's dogs. I tested the idea a few times by driving to different places where I normally didn't take her, like the bank, and sure enough it was the same performance every time. It wasn't simply that we were in a new area - if I had to pull off to the side of the road and take a leak along a stretch of country highway, she wouldn't stir.
 
I think the majority are either coincidence or mistaken identity. That particular one would just be a coincidence.
 
I think it's a combination of things. Stuff like Randi's story, where for some reason the animal was transported back into its familiar territory. And mistaken (or deliberately deceived) identity. And also some genuinely impressive long-distance returns, which I suspect are to do with the animal covering a lot of distance more or less at random, and fortuitously straying back into familiar territory. The spectacularly good sense of smell probably helps with this part.

What I don't think exists is a "homing instinct" which allows these animals to set off in the right direction and deliberately navigate home from a long distance outside their familiar territory. Otherwise there would be a lot more such examples, and a lot fewer lost dog (or cat) posters.

[OT]
I thought my pony had quite a good sense of direction. Once or twice when I was lost, he pulled deliberately to turn in the direction I later discovered was the way we should have gone. But then one day I took him on quite a long round trip from his then base. We returned to base along a ride we often took as a short out-and-back trip. However, it was blindingly obvious he didn't know where he was. He clearly thought we'd been out too long, was reluctant to go forward (even though he was facing home!), and kept trying to turn round. When I dropped my OS map and had to turn back to retrieve it, he set off back up the track (away from home) with great goodwill, and made an unholy fuss when I insisted on going "on" (as he clearly perceived it) after I'd remounted. All this on a section of track I'd have sworn he knew well. I didn't really notice the exact moment when the penny finally dropped in his little equine brain, but at least he didn't try to flee the stable yard when we reached it a few minutes later.

So much for the good sense of direction!
[/OT]

Rolfe.
 
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