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There’s no place like home: How animals find their way back to their owners is a mystery we are still trying to solve

Country Life

Lassie’s epic walk is the stuff of literary legend, but the real-life stories of animals making extraordinary journeys back to where they came from are even stranger than fiction. Richard Sugg investigates.

During the summer of 1942, Raymond Wellburn was strolling along the beach at Weston-super-Mare in Somerset when a black dog hurtled towards him and knocked him to the ground. Rushing up in alarm, bystanders found man and dog tumbling delightedly in a whirl of sand and fur and laughter.

Little wonder: the dog, Bob, had finally found his owner, after walking more than 300 miles from south-west Scotland. Four months previously, Wellburn had left Bob in Dumfries (perhaps as a gift to friends or as a working dog), before travelling back to the West Country home that he and the dog had shared.

Neighbours later informed Wellburn that this real-life Lassie had first appeared at his house and then raced off, evading capture, to find his beloved master. Bob perhaps followed his scent and probably also knew where to look, recalling their previous coastal walks together. Yet how did he find his way from Dumfriesshire to Somerset in the first place? There are hundreds of similar stories recorded of animals finding their way back to the place they came from — and, so far, very little scientific explanation for it.

Of course, we can never ask the animals in question for their rationale. However, the evidence suggests that, in some cases, it’s the people they are yearning for, rather than a place: several pets, both cats and dogs, have made epic journeys to find one person or family in a completely unfamiliar location.

Britain’s most famous example is that of Prince, an Irish terrier who padded from Hammersmith to the battlefields of France via a Channel crossing in the autumn of 1914 in search of his master, Pte James Brown of the 1st Battalion North Staffordshire Regiment. A decade later and on the other side of the Atlantic, across autumn and winter 1923–24, a collie-cross named Bobbie walked 2,500 miles home to the Braziers in Silverton, Oregon, US, having been spooked and run away when his owners were holidaying in Indiana. Worn almost to the bone, when he finally heard his name called by a familiar voice on February 15, 1924, he turned and flung himself on young Nova Brazier in a whimpering ecstasy of relief.

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Meanwhile, across rural Britain, America and Australia, all manner of creatures have embarked on similar adventures. ‘Charlie, the homesick horse, is determined to be back there for Christmas’ announced the Daily Mail on December 18, 1958, as a six-year-old animal took a dead-straight line from his new owner, Anne Tomkin in Essex, towards his old home on a farm in Cardiganshire. For 50 miles, Charlie managed to evade police, farmers and AA patrolmen — until, on December 20, a farmer tempted him with food and got him sent back to Mrs Tomkin. ‘He’s a rascal running off like this, but really he’s terribly sweet,’ she remarked.

‘He had already crossed eight rivers, two main railway lines and five arterial roads’

Back in 1911 in the US, one George Lawrence thought his pony had been stolen from his Louisiana home, until a letter from a friend in his former territory of Menard County, Texas, informed him that the pony, recognised by its brand, had walked back there — some 500 miles. Therefore, the 280-mile trip to his Welsh farm wouldn’t have exhausted Charlie, if left to his own devices — and, given that, in 50 miles, he had already crossed ‘eight rivers, two main railway lines and five arterial roads’, he would certainly have shaved some miles off the standard driving route. This uncanny ‘beeline’ habit has been seen in cats and dogs, too, with the former occasionally swimming across a river despite there being a bridge visibly at hand.

Livestock offer us further intriguing clues to the methods and motives of homing animals. ‘When I saw Polly standing there, I almost collapsed,’ admitted 82-year-old Dinah Graham in April 2000, after selling the two-year-old Friesian cow to another Dumfries farm two miles away. ‘She was standing at the gate mooing as loud as she could. I couldn’t believe how she had managed to find her way home — she had walked along a route she had never been on before.’ Polly was probably mooing because she badly wanted to be on the other side of the gate; a longing implying a very precise sense of what home was.

Cows, it seems, have form. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, reader Gillian Onslow recalled how ‘in the 1930s my father sent a cow he had bred to Ipswich market. She escaped before being sold and was back in the yard at Bradfield early next morning, a distance of some 20 miles. She had crossed the River Stour, presumably via Manningtree bridge — or did she swim?’.

The answer is almost certainly ‘yes’: witness the amazingly stubborn Cheshire cow that was twice sold by John Farish of Marston Hall near Northwich, Cheshire, some time before 1927. This animal first escaped from a droving herd en route to Northwich cattle market and trotted the three miles home, swimming a canal along the way. Later, when sold to a Whitley farm, it escaped after a day and swam 200 yards across Marbury Mere in the course of its six-mile homecoming.

‘Excuse me, do you know the way to my farm?’ Credit: Getty Images

As for pigs, in 1921, an anonymous contributor to a newspaper stated that ‘what is called the “homing instinct” is strong in the pig, and many instances of its display are recorded’. At Reading market, for example, ‘a man bought two pigs sent from a distant farm and had them taken to his home at Caversham in a sack. The next day they were missing and, in the afternoon, a witness reported seeing the pair putting their heads together as if in consultation at a point where the road forked. What they did was to reach their old home, nine miles away, by a direct line, involving the swimming of the river and a trot by crossroads’. Here, we have two more unlikely swimmers; the sack as blindfold; another very direct line; and the eerie addition of this silent, perhaps telepathic ‘consultation’. Yet this last possibility is really no stranger than the other countless inexplicable homing trips of pets and livestock.

Dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, and — possibly — hamsters have made these incredible journeys. In January 2000, nine-year-old Tasia Hadfield of Droylsden, Greater Manchester, gazed aghast at her ginger-and-white hamster, Claudia, lying stiff and dead in her cage. With impressive resilience, the grief-stricken girl put the hamster in a wooden coffin with some biscuits for the afterlife, adding a wooden spoon by way of a headstone. She arranged for her late pet to be buried in her grandmother’s garden, some 50 yards from their own home.

Not long after this, according to the Daily Mail, Claudia woke up in her box, having been in a state of winter torpor. She promptly ate the biscuits, bit through the wood and dug upwards through 3ft of soil. She then navigated two fences and a patch of scrubland before reaching her old home, where she was scooped up from under the glare of a crouching cat and returned to her overjoyed young owner. Perhaps science will be able to explain this remarkable sequence of events fully someday. For now, we may as well say: all you need is love.

Paws for thought

•  In the 1950s and 1960s, Swiss scientist Bernhard Müller found that 22 of 75 chosen dogs could successfully find their way home from a point up to 55 miles away. He observed that these homing dogs did not use their noses or eyes to navigate—indeed, their eyes appeared peculiarly ‘veiled’, they looked as if they were ‘ridden by an alien force’ and they actually did better at night or in fog

• In 1954, two German scientists put 42 cats into a covered circular maze with six exits, expecting that, by chance, one-sixth would emerge facing their home. In fact, half of the animals popped out of the hole facing in that direction

• In 2020, a group of researchers at the Czech University of Life Sciences published the results of more than 600 tests with 27 hunting dogs. Most of the dogs found their handlers by scenting back along their outbound route, but one-third of them homed by a process dubbed ‘scouting’. They did not sniff and did not retrace their outward route—instead, they made a short ‘compass run’ along the north-south magnetic axis to orient themselves

Richard Sugg is the author of 17 books, including ‘Fairies: A Dangerous History’ and ‘Dogsygen: Celebrating the Secret Lives of Dogs’. He is currently writing a book on canine homing journeys

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