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1ACTIVE LISTENING MAIN STORY

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

There is a strong pull in most everyone to a place we call home. A sense of belonging that for most people is where we are born or where we grow up. Humans feel connected to these places and feel pulled to return home. But there are lots of animals that work even harder to find their way home.

Moscow Dogs

A group of stray dogs in Moscow have a slightly different lifestyle to their canine friends elsewhere in the world. You see, dogs in Moscow commute.

These dogs wake up in the morning in their homes in the suburbs. They stretch, move around and then join the throngs of Muscovites heading into the subways underneath the city. They get on the train, ride it to their destination, and get off again, the same as any normal commuter.

These dogs are professional beggars. They know that the best place to beg is in the center of the city, but the best place to sleep is in the suburbs. Since that distance is too far for them to walk, they ride the subways. At night, after stealing hot dogs and crumbs from tourists, the dogs get back onto the train and ride the rails all the way home, to sleep for the night. The next day, they wake up and do the exact same thing all over again.

The Moscow dogs’ daily commute between where they work and where they live seems like a very human way of life. They seem to have the same sense of home that we do. When they are done working for the day, home is where they go to sleep, eat and be with their family.

While the Moscow dogs and their subway commute is unusual, other animals have more natural migrations. Of course, we all know about migrating birds that fly the same path every year at the same time, and monarch butterflies, that migrate thousands of kilometers each year to escape the cold. But there are many animals that go to extreme lengths to find their way home.

The New Zealand Eel

The New Zealand freshwater eel is one of the world’s greatest travelers. These eels are born on the bottom of deep, warm, ocean, such as the ocean off the coast of New Caledonia or Fiji. The eels then drift as larvae all the way to New Zealand – about 1,500 miles. As they drift, the larvae feed through their skin. When they arrive in New Zealand, the recent immigrants use the brackish water – which is half salt water and half fresh water –to dramatically transform into glass eels, which look much more, like the eels we are used to seeing. Then they swim up into New Zealand’s streams and rivers, for about 14 years. At this point, they are 20 to 40 inches long. That’s when they begin a long swim home to New Caledonia or Fiji. When they arrive back in the deep, warm waters of the South Pacific, they lay their millions of eggs before they die.

Why do they swim all the way home? No one knows. There are many environments closer to where they live that are suitable for them to lay their eggs. Maybe the eels are unaware of these alternative environments, and this is just how it has always been done. But maybe the eels actually feel a calling – a calling to go home. If so, it’s the same calling that the salmon feels.

The Pacific Salmon

Pacific Salmon begin their lives in high freshwater mountain streams. They stay in this environment for the first few years of their life, thriving in the nutrient-rich riverbeds. Then they slowly begin to make their way to the ocean. It’s a taxing journey of hundreds of kilometers – only 10 percent of salmon ever see the Pacific.

Before they adventure into open water though, young salmon (or smolts, as they are technically known) spend time in brackish water in order to get used to salt before they enter the sea and become salmon. They live the next five years of their lives here in the ocean, waiting to reach sexual maturity. And that’s when their trek home begins.

Once salmon have reached sexual maturity, they begin navigating back home. They don’t just return to any mountain stream though– they begin swimming all the way back to their exact spawning spot.

This is called a salmon run. The salmon push their way up against the current of the river, leaping rapids, waterfalls, and braving grizzly bears, fisherman, and other predators. Exhausted, they arrive home, the home where they were spawned, to lay their eggs and die, their bodies feeding the next generation.

We know that salmon find their way home with magnetic navigation. But why do salmon do this, instead of just going to any mountain stream? No one knows. Maybe they have evolved that way, because it is a safer place for them to lay eggs. Or maybe it’s because salmon have a strong emotion to return home. Maybe they feel the same pull towards home that we feel – the desire to return home, have children, and pass away in our beds.

Although we can never really know the exact reason that salmon return home, it seems possible that our own sense of home is in part, instinctual. After all, if animals like the Pacific Salmon and the New Zealand Eel go to extreme lengths to return home – why not us?

Maybe it’s programmed into our genes that there’s a place to call home and to return to. Maybe the calling to return home is actually just a psychological phenomenon, the result of evolution. Maybe it’s not an emotion, but an instinct, as old as humanity itself. Maybe it’s simply an animalistic sensation.

But then again, maybe not

Humans are unique in that our feeling of home, our ideas about what makes a home, are inside us and can be applied anywhere, following us wherever we go. A sense of home can be achieved with a smell, or a simple task like baking bread. Just the scent of pine needles or of coffee brewing or cookies baking can transport you to your childhood home. The physical senses can take you right back, and make you feel like you’re home, no matter where in the world you actually are.

As we grow up and it comes time for us to build a new home for ourselves and our family, lots of us will return home. Returning home is a common theme in movies, books, legends and myths. But many people make new homes, distant from where they grew up. They shape these new homes with the things that made them feel a sense of home. And of course what really makes a place feel like home is our friends and family.

So while humans share an innate sense of home with the animal kingdom, we can make a home wherever we want.

For us, home is truly where the heart is.