Dogs find way home by following their noses

(Democrat-Gazette photo illustration)
(Democrat-Gazette photo illustration)

Q: Our dog escaped from the car. How did he find his way home the next day from nearly 3 miles away?

A: What took so long? Dogs are well known for their ability to backtrack. Most animal behavior experts attribute their navigating ability largely to a hypersensitive sense of smell.

Three miles is not a great distance, compared with some of the epic homeward journeys that dogs have occasionally made, and a 3-mile radius would be rich in odor guideposts.

The theory is that a dog creates a map of scents from odoriferous sites like a food store or fertilized garden — or even just a hint of an owner's scent in the ground or air.

Dogs are especially sensitive to the odor of the people in their lives. One study used MRI imaging to study activity in the caudate nucleus, a brain area associated with the expectation of a reward.

Dogs of varying breeds were exposed to their own scent or that of a familiar dog, a strange dog, a strange person or a familiar person. By far the strongest activation followed exposure to the scent of a familiar person.

Another navigational clue may come from dogs' suspected sensitivity to differences in magnetic orientation. A study of dozens of dogs found that they usually preferred to defecate with their bodies aligned in a north-south orientation, a preference that disappeared when the magnetic field was disturbed.

Style on 04/22/2019

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