The news is frequently filled with amazing tales of cats that, days, months, or even years after going missing, managed to find their way home. Numerous anecdotes exist regarding cats that, following the family’s relocation, went back to their previous residence, which they regarded as their own. However, the way they get home is still somewhat of a mystery.
It is clear that cats have a natural ability to "home," meaning they can sense direction using senses other than taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing. Sea turtles and salmon are guided by magnetic fields, dolphins and migratory birds by the sun and stars, pigeons by low-frequency sound waves, dung beetles by the Milky Way, and salmon by magnetic fields. Furthermore, how do cats navigate?
There have only ever been two published studies on this subject in the entire history of science. Let’s examine them!
In 1922, American professor Francis Herrick published a paper "The Homing Powers of the Cat". Herrick observed a cat, transporting it to seven different places at a distance of one to three miles from its home. The experiment was not exactly humane: the cat"s return home was guaranteed by the kittens from which it was separated, and the cat was transported to each new place by car in a tightly tied bag. At the new place, Herrick put the cat in a wooden box, to the lid of which a rope was tied, leading to a specially equipped shelter. The researcher went into hiding, opened the box remotely, and then watched the cat"s behavior until it disappeared from sight.
What’s incredible is that, once it was freed from the box, the cat headed in the correct direction if it wasn’t distracted by anything! Out of seven tests, the cat confidently headed home in four of them. In one test, it escaped but eventually found its way back, and in another, it made a mistake but quickly realized it was in the wrong place and turned around.
What’s interesting is that, in test #7, the cat was sedated prior to the trip and was unconscious the entire time. After realizing it was lost in a strange place, the cat took a while to find its way home but eventually made it there.
- a cat, being of sound mind and memory, ALWAYS knows which way its home is;
- this knowledge does not depend on sight, hearing and smell.
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Illustration from the work of F.Herrick: the arrow indicates the direction of the cat"s movement home.
The cat returned within 4-78 hours of being released in each of the seven tests. And the cat didn’t get lost and never come back until the eighth and final test, when it was taken 16.5 miles.
Furthermore, two significant facts were verified even though the scientist was unable to comprehend HOW a cat finds its way home:
a cat, being of sound mind and memory, ALWAYS knows which way its home is;
this knowledge does not depend on sight, hearing and smell.
In 1954, the second experiment was carried out. Precht and Lindenlaub, German scientists, collected their house cats in bags and put them in the middle of a maze with six evenly spaced exits. The majority of cats picked the exit that led to their home right away rather than meandering through the maze. Simultaneously, the cats’ perception of "homing" was directly related to the distance: if the house was no more than 5 kilometers away, they could choose the correct exit with ease; however, as the distance increased, they started to experience trouble locating the right path.
When cats were brought back to their homes in between tests, their "homing" results were more accurate than when they were left in the lab. However, there was absolutely no sense of "homing" in the kittens that were raised in the lab and never ventured outside!
All cats are capable of "geolocation," but stray cats and those who live in private homes with plenty of space to roam around are said to have the most developed "geolocation" skills. Studies on the movements of cats using GPS beacons have revealed that they can travel up to three kilometers from their homes, but seldom much farther. Regretfully, a lot of lost cats end up not coming home because of accidents or other outside factors.
The likelihood of a domestic cat returning home is extremely low if they have never left their walls. Without appropriate training, their capacity for "self-guidance" vanishes, but if the cat is brought to the country and given permission to walk around, it may regain. However, where would a cat go if it gets lost in the city after spending six months in the country and six months in an apartment? Unanswered question.
However, if a cat can innately determine the correct path back to her home from any unfamiliar location, how does she do it? Scientists know that smell, hearing, or visual memory don’t function in this environment. Then, there’s only one possibility: cats can detect and navigate through the Earth’s magnetic fields.
Cats use a combination of their keen senses, instinct, and environmental cues to navigate home with remarkable accuracy. They can navigate familiar environments by using their keen sense of smell and hearing, and they may even be able to follow the Earth’s magnetic field. Their exceptional homing instinct enables them to find their way back to their secure areas, demonstrating the depth of their bond with their territory.
Although this is still only a hypothesis, one fact suggests otherwise: iron has been found in the inner ear of a cat. This implies that the cat’s ears may contain an internal mechanism that functions as a compass.
