How a cat finds its way home

There are a lot of stories about cats coming home from great distances. And they always not only surprise, but also make you think. How do these little animals manage to find their way home, which even a human could not do, if he was in similar conditions?

Not all cats find their way home, but many

Returning home from the same distance may take different amounts of time for different cats

There are different assumptions about a cat’s ability to find its way home, as well as what it does to find its way home. Research has shown, for example, that getting home from a distance of 5 kilometers is no problem at all for cats. But, the greater this distance, the less animals find their way back. And yet, the distance of up to 50 km, most cats overcome. But it’s true, they can spend different amount of time on it: some of them will spend 2-3 weeks, the other 2-3 months.

It is possible that the method of determining the right path affects this. Or maybe some animals just take their time. Firmly knowing that they will come home anyway. Apparently, believing that if home isn’t going anywhere, they can afford to take a break from time to time, hunt, etc. Although many cats don’t come home in the best condition – exhausted, thin, tired, which suggests that they’ve spent the maximum amount of time on the road.

Doesn’t the cat have a compass?

Even from a closed labyrinth the cat is clearly on its way home

A cat is driven home by its great attachment to its place of abode. At the same time, there are cases, when even kittens 2-3 months old came back home, when they were taken from one village to another. And the search for the way back is much easier for those animals, which live in freedom, than for those who live “within four walls”. And yet, scientists are very interested in what kind of “magic navigator” a cat has from birth.

One of the assumptions about the process of finding the way home says that, being in an unknown place, the cat will run in a converging spiral through all the neighborhood until it finds a familiar area, and then it will be easier to navigate. Whether it is true or not, but a German zoologist once staged such an experiment: he took the cats out of the city in closed boxes and previously drove them through the city in order to confuse them. And in a field outside the city, where a maze with 24 exits was arranged in advance, the animals were released. Landmarks like stars and the sun were excluded, as the maze was enclosed. The vast majority of the cats chose a passage that pointed toward their home.

“Cat navigator” vs. magnet

Conventional memorization doesn’t work in this case – the cat may not see the road they’re taking and may not be asleep at all

The hypothesis that a cat has a kind of map drawn in its head didn’t work either, because in another experiment cats were given sleeping pills, were taken far away from home, and waking up animals were able to return home unmistakably.

On the other hand, it has been precisely established that any animal, including cats, is strongly influenced by the Earth’s magnetic field. The experiment on cats with strong magnets yielded a surprising result: the animals lost the ability to find their way home.