This way home: A dog’s magnetic sense of direction

And we would probably need a GPS device to navigate our way. Well, we’re not dogs, are we? But that is a shame in this case, because a 2-year-old hunting terrier called Pablo walked that very journey, finding his way all by himself. Pablo was on a camping vacation with his family when he went missing at a pit stop on the French-Swiss border. A few days later, he resurfaced at the family home in Nimes — hundreds of kilometres away.

 The question is: How did he do it? We have known about canine navigation skills for years. Perhaps we even envy dogs for their sense of direction. We’ve certainly used them for it: During World War I, for instance, European armies used dogs as messengers, letting them carry letters and instructions to the dangerous front lines. But there is little research into why canine navigation skills are so good. Scientists have studied other animals, such migratory birds and reptiles, far more than dogs. “Our knowledge of dogs’ sense of direction is mainly anecdotal,” says Hynek Burda, zoologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences. Burda says we’ve assumed in the past that dogs rely on a sense of smell to find their way. But that is starting to change, as he and his team have a compelling theory. They think dogs may use the Earth’s magnetic field.

 It all goes back to 2013 when Burda noticed that dogs crouched down to defecate or urinate in a north-south orientation. Burda’s team ran a study and came up with a possible explanation: that dogs can sense the Earth’s magnetic field. That sense is called magnetoreception — it’s like an internal compass.

 They were left wondering whether dogs could use that internal compass to find their way around. And seven years later, the team collected its first evidence to suggest that, indeed, dogs can. Using GPS, they analysed the routes that hunting dogs took to return to their owners after they had chased an animal over unfamiliar terrain.

 They were surprised to learn that those dogs that walked back via a new route — instead of retracing their steps — had started off by running along a north-south axis for about 20 meters (65 feet) before choosing a way back. Burda calls it the “compass run.” “We think dogs do the run to recalibrate an internal compass, like a navigation system in a car that needs a few seconds to figure out the car’s location,” says Burda.

 Those dogs that performed a compass run ended up returning to their owners via a more efficient route than the others. The same internal dog compass is what might have saved Ziggy’s life.

 One night, a few years ago, the Jack Russell Terrier strayed from his family’s home in Ireland. After crossing through a forest, he reached a road and was hit by a car. But despite being unable to move his back legs, Ziggy made his way home. His owner, Tom Prendergast, saw Ziggy appear from the pitch-black night, dragging himself up the driveway. “I was surprised he was able to find his way back in his state. But I also always knew he had a great sense of navigation. I’d trust him to find home from pretty much anywhere,” said Prendergast of the experience. If Ziggy used the Earth’s magnetic field to guide him home, he’s clearly not the only dog to have done it. But other animals seem to have a similar ability, too. The problem is that those internal compasses are still a bit of a scientific mystery.

 This article was provided by Deutsche Welle