Long Distance Homing by Dogs: How They Might Do It and Why

I'm always interested in "all things dog," and a month ago, I received a fascinating email from history of science writer Richard Sugg, author of Dogsygen: Celebrating the Secret Lives of Dogs, in which he celebrates the secret lives, loves, adventures, heroisms, and genius of dogs, along with homing across vast distances.

Source: Stanley Coren, SC Psychological Enterprises, Ltd./with permission.

Richard's email got me thinking once again about homing and the cognitive capacities on which it likely is based and what we know and don't know about this fascinating and well-documented behavior. Dogs display amazing homing abilities, and there are some very interesting stories of long-distance homing, but it’s not clear what cues they use. Some suggest that dogs use scent or the earth’s electromagnetic field. Among the classic stories is one about a dog named Bobbie who disappeared during a car trip in 1923 and six months later found his way home, traveling on foot from Indiana to Oregon, a trip of around 2,500 miles. Richard also wonders about the strong emotional connection that might drive homing, a topic that has received little attention.

Marc Bekoff: How and why did you become interested in dogs who find their way home and travel long distances to do so?

Richard Sugg: In 2016, when compiling my collection of animal stories, I found a number of dog homing journeys in Victorian newspapers. When I told my mother about these, she recalled how their dog Pat had done the same in her childhood. I then started to wonder how common this was.

MB: How do your interests in animals relate to your background and general areas of interest?

RS: I've always loved animals, since the hamsters and pet cat and dog we had as children. And since studying at the University of Leeds as an undergraduate, I've loved strange and challenging subjects. To my surprise, animal homing journeys (of cats, dogs, ponies, cows, pigs, and more) are turning out to be the most incredible research adventure of my life.

MB: What are some of the major topics you have to consider in your analysis of homing behavior?

RS: With dogs, one obviously has to consider the use of scent, and how remarkably intelligent many dogs can be. I learned a lot about canine ingenuity when writing Dogsygen. I've also burrowed into decades of homing science, from Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, J.F. Fabre, Clifton Hodge, and Francis Herrick, down to European experiments from the 1930s to 2017. Time and again, the experiments imply that the best homing dogs (about one-third of a given sample) do not use scent, but seem to go into a curious kind of trancelike autopilot. Blind dogs can also home. The impressively direct homing routes taken by many dogs (and cats and horses) suggest that magnetic fields might be involved in some ways.

But ultimately, the richest puzzle is the question of animal emotions. Why is their home or family so powerful a bond that they will walk up to 3,000 miles to find them—sometimes dying of exhaustion soon after finishing the trek? Dogs cannot talk about emotions. But here we have abundant evidence of the intensity of loss or absence they can feel.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about the cognitive and emotional lives of these amazing animals they will come to a better understanding of how they accomplish these journeys?

RS: Yes, I'm now firmly convinced that emotion is the key to the mystery of these astonishing journeys. Perhaps most astonishing of all are the journeys where a dog finds their person or family in a completely new place: Irish terrier Prince walking from London to Armentieres in France to find Private James Brown in 1914, or the spaniel named Joker in World War Two. When his owner Stanley Raye was posted from Pittsburg, California to an island in the Pacific, Joker walked 30 miles to Oakland harbour, got onto a boat, and then ignored numerous island stops until he found the one where Raye had been sent.

There are many other such cases of dog-person bonds across the world, with an impressive number of boat journeys involved. Such trips raise the question: do most homing dogs use their people, rather than place, as a beacon? One basic fact is clear: homing on place or person involves some kind of uncanny bond across space, a kind of non-local force of emotion not yet fully recognised by biology or physics.

Yet non-local forms of perception have been used or recognised, notably in the form of remote viewing by government intelligence agencies; or simply to find missing persons or objects. A striking case in the latter category changed the life of Dr. Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, when a veteran dowser, Major Harold McCoy, located a stolen harp belonging to her daughter.

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There is strong evidence that a dog can even home on an imprint or trace left by a person. Rupert Sheldrake, a pioneer in the uncanny abilities of animals, studied a U.K. dog, Pepsi, which could home on six different addresses of family members in Leicester. In 1909, Jannock, the dog of a Captain Bodham-Whetham, escaped from a temporary home with the Captain's friend and visited two different places where Jannock and his master had lived two years before. This involved separate journeys of 23 and 37 miles.

In Australia, in 1941, a Mrs. Scarr left her kelpie dog, Ginger, in Orange with relatives when she travelled 200 miles to visit her sister in Wollongong. Ginger walked to Wollongong, where he'd never been, and settled at a shop which he refused to leave. The shop had been visited several times by Mrs. Scarr.

Sheldrake has also shown that people once had these homing abilities. In addition to cases he cites, I found that William J. Long, the wonderful American naturalist, had seen this in his Native American guide Simmo, who said simply: "When I goin right, I feel good; but when I goin wrong I uneasy."

So here, as in so many ways, animals link the people of a fiercely tech-driven world back into the wild powers of both human and animal life. Think of all those romantic songs of alpha-male endurance, the oceans, rivers, mountains, miles they would cross for the beloved. And without a word or a boast or false promise, dogs... have actually done it. Sometimes, home really is where the heart is.