.COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT
Homo PUPPY.
I have just had experience while training a young spaniel- s Norfolk springer—of the astonishing sense of direction or homing instinct in dogs. The dog, which is a year old, had been with me only three days • and had not been out of the garden. On the fourth day I took it by a roundabout route to a field about a mile away. In some old gravel workings the dog, who had behaved .perfectly and was walking dis- creetly to heel, suddenly howled with pain, ran round in frantic circles and paying no heed to voice or whistle, made straight for home across a railway, through difficult wire fehces and across country much too broken to admit of any wide or general view. He reached home in an exhausted and still terrified state. There is little doubt that the terror Was caused by a wasp's sting, which maddens most dogs ; -but what astonishes the psychologist in all of us is that the dog in' this condition of temporary mania, should be able to make stiaight for a new home by an unknown route, and there seek protect ion from people scarcely known to it. Along what route does this instinct work ? Experience, which partly accounts for similar capacity in Homer pigeons and in some miiive races—the Australian blacks, for example—could have little to do with it. That the homing power is almost devoid of what we call reason is Made more Certain in the example given above by the mad terror of the animal at the time..
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