25-06-2003, 07:44 PM
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Another garden bandit bagged!
writes:
I don't get it. How can they navigate? I've been lost
more than once in the woods and had to laboriously
figure things out with topo maps and a compass,
and I consider myself a hell of a lot smarter than
a racoon, and with an education. The coon never even
made it to kindergarten.
Every study done comes up with multiple answers. Smell, magnetic fields,
wind direction, "road marks," etc. are some of them. Unlike us, they
don't bother with "thinking it through" with maps, etc., they just "follow
their nose" and get there.
We've all heard stories of dogs going hundreds of miles to find their way
home. My husband found a dog in the median on the freeway when he worked
for the highway department. He brought it home where it spent most of the
day in the northwest corner of our yard looking westward. Our ad in the
paper was answered . . . he belonged to a couple who lived at the coast
(west!) and had lost him at the rest area north of town (several miles
from where he was found). There is no doubt in my mind that the little
dog would have eventually somehow made it home; he was definitely headed
in the right direction but would have encountered many hazards in the
100-mile trek.
We humans often under estimate the power of smell in animals because our
own senses have long gone "civilized" and no longer (if they ever did)
have the ability of most wild critters.
We also tend to forget, or overlook, that a dog smelling at the car window
on a drive isn't after the fresh air but is actually keeping track of
where it is and can easily re-trace short distance trips if allowed to do
so. It seems logical that other critters do the same thing.
Maybe others have more specific answers.
Glenna
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