The Journey Home

Leading theories about how pets find their way home: magnetic fields (cats), scent (dogs), and the stars (birds) .

Dogs extend their scent range by moving among overlapping circles of familiar scents—much the way cell phone coverage relies on interconnected footprints from different cell towers. A dog that wanders out of its own immediate range might pick up the scent of, say, a familiar dog in the next circle. That might point it to a circle that contains a familiar person or tree or restaurant trash can, and so on.

Cats, like other animals, might rely more on magnetic fields—a faculty that could turn out to be quite common in mammals. “There are some studies that show that the ears of most mammals contain iron.”

One of my favorite childhood books was The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford. Three household pets, a Labrador, a bull terrier, and a Siamese cat (!), traverse 300 miles across the Canadian wilderness to make their way home.

Having lived my entire young life on a 44-mile-long island, I had to use almost as much imagination for Journey as I did for Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, but the effort was worth it.

Such is the power of a good Odyssey story, a story, it turns out, that had a factual basis.