Velociworld

HOMING DEVICES

What is it in a dog, or cat, that gives them such a sense of direction, wherein they can activate their internal GPS and find their way home? I'm sure wild animalia can do that, too, but the last time I tried to examine this trait in a bobcat I was clawed most cruelly.

I was thinking of my old mutt Brutus. We had him in Savannah, then we moved to the farm when I was nine. Probably 45 or 50 miles as the tobacco juice ejects from the vent window. Remember vent windows? Cars don't have those anymore, unless you're driving a '69 VW. Perfect for smoking, and flicking the butt out, and starting forest fires.

Anyway, after a year or so at the farm our resident gimp, Shorty Lamb, decided Brutus was killing his chickens. Maybe so. But Brutus was a gimp himself, with a bad leg like Shorty, and the Lamb place was a mile away, and Brutus was a lazy fucker. The fact that Shorty owned two retarded Boxers with cast eyes like Jack Elam, and necrotic cases of mange, did not enter into the equation of the murder of barnyard pimps, though. Shorty was convinced it was Brutus. He threatened a bit, and snarled, but we ignored him, we providing a lifeline of crapulous sidework for the crusty little diesel mechanic.

So to make a long story fatally insipid, Brutus disappeared one day. We figured Shorty had taken him into the woods, and shot him. My brothers and I were calculating the precise amount of gasoline it would take to burn down Shorty's double-wide, without of course killing his 500 pound sex slave Sadie, or his two daughters.

Then we received a call from our old next door neighbor in Savannah, Tommy, who said old Brutus was hanging around his yard, forelorn. The best we could determine Shorty had dropped Brutus on the side of the road near his diesel garage in the industrial blight of Garden City, and the gimp had found his way the last 15 or 20 miles back to suburbia without getting road clacked.

Like a homing pigeon, dammit!

An aside: at D Day many of the soldiers were given homing pigeons, which they secreted in their tunics, so as to send word back to England of progress on the ground. As I recall there was a 100% failure rate on the homing pigeon programme. Most of them drowned, or suffocated. The few that wended their way back to mother soil merely had notes that said Fucking Help!

So it's rather strange to contemplate a dog or cat can find his way 40 miles home, while those most intelligent of mammals, the porpoises, continually ground themselves upon the beach to die, their internal GPS befouled by ear parasites, like that Wrath of Khan Star Trek movie. And I can't even find the ears on a porpoise.

Another aside: my old neighbor Tommy was taken prisoner of war at the Battle of the Bulge. Stuck in a damned stalag, browbeat by Nazis. Never bitched about it, though. Nicest guy you'd ever meet. Had an Airedale named Walter. Although I cannot speak to Walter's internal GPS, because all he ever did was jump up on the five foot brick fence between our yards, and patrol. For Nazi vermin, no doubt.