In an earlier vlog post (“Canine navigation”) I discussed briefly the evidence that dogs have some kind of magnetic compass sense.

As I said, it’s been known for a long time that dogs are really good at finding their way home - even when taken to unfamiliar locations.

But I hadn’t then seen an important review article by Michael Nahm which summarises a lot of interesting early research on the navigational abilities of dogs. I wish I had known of it when I was writing Incredible Journeys/Supernavigators. It would have been worth a whole chapter!

Have you ever heard of Colonel Edwin Richardson who set up the ‘British War Dog School’ in 1917? The dogs he trained brought secret messages back to their handlers from the front line during the First World War.

Richardson first got interested in the homing ability of dogs when his own dog found its way home from the centre of Brighton, where it had got lost in crowded streets. It was the dog’s first visit to that city, and he was taken there in a carriage on a winding and “not at all direct” route.

Richardson’s house lay “several miles” behind Brighton, but the dog was seen heading towards the house in the evening, apparently travelling “over land he had never seen before, and in a totally different way of travel from that on which he had set out in the carriage that morning”.

Very puzzling!

This is how Richardson himself described the work of of his courageous ‘war dogs’:

“…the messenger dogs for the British Army were concentrated in units behind the line and were dispatched in groups to those parts on the line where particularly strenuous fighting was expected. They went up in the charge of their keepers, each man having three dogs. Having arrived at Brigade headquarters the keepers remained there and the dogs were taken from them by troops occupying the front line . . .

“They were frequently taken up to their posts at night, over ground utterly unknown to them previously, and were released some hours afterwards with their messages. Sometimes they returned by the way they had been taken up, but more often chose a more direct route straight across the country . . .

“It will be remembered that this would lead them over trackless ground, or along trenches and roads crowded with every sort of traffic, through villages full of troops and every sort of obstruction and temptation.

“That these dogs accomplished this work is one of the wonders of the war. How they did it cannot be fully explained, for the reason that we do not fully understand the influences which control the animals when under an overpowering desire to return to the place from whence they came. Suffice it to say that it was the determination to return to a beloved master, as represented by his keeper, and that as a result of this emotion, portents and signs indistinguishable to man were waymarks on the journey.”

Strangely enough, the dogs seemed to perform even better when the going was tough: “…when the conditions were so bad, the night so dark and thick, the ground so water-logged and shell-marked, and on certain occasions quite new to the dogs… the dogs seem to work much better than usual”..

As one of the keepers - who had been very worried that his dog, Jock, wouldn’t make it home - reported: “It seemed as though ‘Jock’ divined my fears, and put out an extra effort to show they were needless”.

But these amazing homing abilities were not equally distributed among all dogs.

Richardson “found it necessary at the training school to study the psychology of each dog as the bent was much more highly developed in some dogs than in others. Dogs of wise and affectionate natures were the only ones of any use in the strenuous work they had to perform in the field, and the great lever by which the homing instinct was initiated, was that of devotion to the man who was deputed to be the dog’s keeper.”

Richardson himself was baffled by the dogs’ navigational abilities which he ascribed to “an intelligence quite apart from, and infinitely above, any guidance from the senses”.

Well, we now know that dogs have a magnetic compass sense and that no doubt plays some part in how they manage such amazing feats, but that can’t be the whole story. A compass by itself is not enough. Maybe dogs really do have the ability to form ‘cognitive maps’ as well.

A fascinating recent article by Kateřina Benediktová and her colleagues (to which I owe my discovery of Michael Nahm’s article) sheds new light on this.

That’s quite enough for today, but don’t worry - I shall be returning to this subject soon. There’s much more to say!