A friend of my daughter has had to go overseas and before she left, two weeks ago, she found a new home for her beloved cat with another friend of theirs. The following day he was missing and his new owner couldn’t find him anywhere.
Then his old owner emailed her to say that her former neighbour had written to say that her cat was back in his old home garden. This seemed impossible since it was a 10 k journey through a city and the cat had not seen where he was going. He had been transported by car inside a cat carrier covered over with a towel!. But it was true.
He was found in the garden of his old home looking a bit thinner and rather scruffy! After eating about a lb of food he settled down for a good sleep. Hopefully he will stay put now.
I wondered how they find their way home and found this online info:
Cats can judge within three inches the location of a sound being made one yard away. This is an essential skill for a predator that needs to catch a mouse hiding in tall grass.
Cats rank high up on the intelligence scale, and one of their greatest assets is memory. Studies at the University of Michigan and the American Museum of Natural History show that cats can remember problem-solving strategies for as long as 16 hours.
The phenomenon of cats finding their owners in a place where they have never been before is scientifically known as Psi-trailing. Many well-documented stories tell of cats that have walked hundreds, even thousands of miles to find their owners.
Cats seem to have an instinctive ability to find their way home; tests have shown that they use the earth’s magnetic fields to navigate.
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Do cat’s have a right to choose what family they want to live with? That is the question I raise in my post, WHAT RIGHTS DO CATS HAVE, I ASK , which describes a cat who chose to live at our home rather than with its “owner.” The post is located at http://www.carolyncholland.wordpress.com in the folder Cats. Let me know what you think! Carolyn
@Carolyn C. Holland: I read your post and that cat clearly felt happier at your place. The dogs probably made home an uncomfortable place to be too
about 9 months ago i was going to have to move for 3 months from my home and i couldnt take my cat with me, i found her a great home with a farm, 4 hrs from my home and the people were grest wrote to me every day for a month,well one day they called and said shes gone missing. 8 months later my daughter and i are heading to bring her to school, out of the front bushes comes cloudy moewing, lil dirty but happly fit. i was in disbeleaf. i let her in the house and when i got back she was laying on the bed purring and playing with the cat toy my daughter refused to give up. ….. home for good i will never give her up again she earned more then her right to stay and ill do every thing to keep her if any comes out again.
It’s amazing how animals can use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate! I wonder whether humans could do it at some point and whether we lost the skill…
I just reported a similar story on my blog of a cat travelling 2,000 miles across Russia when his owners left him in Uzbekistan – check it out! It’s one hell of a story!