New Yorkers Flabbergasted By Iowa Dog Who Walked 20 Blocks To Find Owner
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Dog owners in New York were looking for an explanation Friday, after a dog in Iowa walked 20 blocks to a hospital in a frantic search for her owner.
As CBS2's Dave Carlin reported, Sissy the schnauzer went from her home in Corridor, Iowa all the way to Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids – where her owner had been taken last week for complications stemming from an earlier cancer surgery, CBS affiliate KGAN-TV, Cedar Rapids reported.
"They're definitely magic," said Eva Flores of Midtown, owner of a dog named Luigi.
If dogs are not magic, they're definitely perceptive.
Sissy was seen on video frantically roaming the halls of the Cedar Rapids hospital, and breaking free from her yard to find her owner 20 blocks away.
"They somehow have an extra-sensory way of doing that," said Jeanine Murch of Midtown.
Sissy seemed genuinely worried about owner Nancy Franck as she walked the halls.
The dog's incredible journey to a place she had never been before was seen as an astounding mission of love.
When security guards found the dog, they connected the dots, and Sissy was taken upstairs for the reunion.
"I don't know how she got here," Franck said.
It has happened before. Two and a half years ago, a black Labrador retriever named Bucky made a 500-mile journey from Winchester, Virginia to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to be at the side of his owner, Mark Wessells, after being left with relatives.
Exactly how animals complete such journeys remains a doggone mystery. Owners have their own anecdotes.
"I'm not visually available to him, and he follows my scent and finds me," Flores said.
New York City veterinarian Benjamin Davidson said the keener sense of smell does indeed explain much of it.
"They have so many more smell receptors compared to people," said Davidson, of Blue Pearl Veterinary Partners.
But there is something more, he said.
"Dogs can predict people having seizures and heart attacks and stuff like that. And so the hold powers we don't fully understand at this stage," Davidson said. "Birds have, you know, they follow magnetic fields. Whether dogs and cats do the same thing, we don't know."
And until we do know, we are left to marvel. Maybe dogs are, in fact, magic.