Has your dog ever gotten away and run round the neighborhood a bit only to show up at your doorstep a few minutes later?

My parents had a cat that did that. He’d run off but eventually show up at our door. Eventually he became an indoor cat.

Willow escapes under the loose parts of the chain link fence that I have all around my back yard sometimes (or used to, before I gave up trusting that fence – and her), and might run around the neighborhood for up to an hour or two. And when she comes back to the front door she is especially quiet about waiting for me to let her back inside, because she knows that she has been a bad dorg then. In fact, at those times she is just a dog.

Alas poor Willow, I knew her well.

Yep. I’ve also accidentally left them on the unsecured back deck and ran an errand. Came back 30 minutes later and they were still there. Dakota was looking all guilty because she knows she’s not supposed to be on the deck with out us. I reassured her it was my fault and she was OK.

No. We don’t let Daisy off-leash outside.

I’ve witnessed this. I think they tend to follow the course that the master and dog follow on their walks.

Dogs love to do that

Not my present dog, when he goes, I have to go find him, he ain’t coming back of his own accord.

Did something spook her? Where I live and work there is often lots of gunfire (I live near a military base) so I deal with a lot of cases of dogs that are spooked so much by gunfire on walks that they leg it home.

Years ago when my, now ten year old, Jack Russell was about a year old, she managed to get out of the back garden. She was missing for exactly 24 hours which will go down as one of the worst days of my life, needless to say. Long story short, she turned up, outside the back door at exactly the same time we noticed she was missing the day before. She was absolutely caked in mud but no worse for wear. Thankfully, that was the one and only time she has every strayed very far from me.

I know a woman who owned a dog and cat that would abscond together. They had grown up together. The dog was a beautiful black male giant Schnauzer, but dumber than a box of rocks. The cat, a gentle very smart female mixed breed would spend her time grooming the hopeless dummy, and actually had a look on her pretty face that read “I apologize for my brother’s condition”. Anyway, the 2 of them held sway over a fairly large yard with a high fence. If ever the gate were left ajar, the dummy would tear out the gate and fly down the road, baying as if it were running a boar to ground. The poor cat would would chase after the fool as though she were capable of preventing him from embarrassing the family. Their owner never figured out how far they would travel, and the return times varied from a few minutes to a full day, but they always returned together. The neighbors were upset by the howls and fearsome appearance of the huge black menacing dog, in full gallop and frothing at the mouth, but the local kids LOVED it and took to deliberately opening the gate to terrify their compatriots unaware of the drill. The saga came to a sad end when someone in the neighborhood poisoned the hapless idiot who would swallow anything without hesitation. The cat remained inconsolable.

My dog escaped and wandered off once. The back yard wasn’t terribly secure at the time and she got out. I was frantic, went to the local park and to a friends house to see if she had gone there, no luck. I headed back home and there she was, sitting at the front door waiting to be let in. She never did it again though, even though we never did fix that fence.

My sister’s Maltese ran home once or twice, when it started raining. She has grown out of that silly (and dangerous) habit, though she still absolutely doesn’t love rain.

You know, a dog will always come home, unless it’s abused. If nobody grabs the dog then it will always come home. People out in the country don’t fence their dogs in.

@Dutchess_III it wasn’t that she’d choose not to come home that worried me. It was that she’d see a motorbike, try to chase it and get herself killed on a busy road. (She hated motorbikes; she was a rescue and found abandoned on a busy road; I suspect she had a near-miss with one). Later in life she grew enough road-sense to be safe but back then she was only two.

@downtide Mine was just a general comment, not directed toward any one person, but yes. The roads are dangerous for dogs and cats. :(