Cat Walks 200 Miles to Get Back Home: Scientists are Stunned
No one knows how a cat got lost during a family trip. But they do know that she made it home without so much as a bus ticket. Doctors and scientists have no idea how Holly the cat made it all the way back to her home in West Palm Beach Florida. The cat’s owners, Jacob and Bonnie Richter, went to a rally in Daytona Beach on New Year’s Eve, only to be saddened that Holly had gotten lost in the mix.
The couple did have a microchip implanted in the cat to find her, but before they could, she made it all the way home. It is the chip that allowed them to track her trek back to the house.
“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”
Scientists say that dogs are the ones most likely to be able to find their way home, not cats. But even with dogs, a walk this far is extremely rare. They say that cats can navigate with familiar landscapes and remember locations via sight and smell. They can also figure things out based on the direction of the smell.
“Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Patrick Bateson said.
Scientists also say that cats exhibit complex behavior, like two-timing their owners and visiting the homes of others for food and affection. Maybe these little creatures have more going on than we might expect.
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Cats and other animals are VERY cognizant of the location of the sun AND their distance from it (intensity). While they can understand the variance due to the time of the year they are MOST comfortable with it being in the RIGHT place at the right time.
Too far north and the sun goes down in such a manner that the day lasts too long. CLoser to the equator and it goes down too quickly.
East and West movement is achieved in their attempt to locate the IDEAL (where they were exposed to the elements the longest, usually their first year).
Sadly, most animals just get it wrong and die somewhere – especially those not outside enough.
Jerry Flynn
January 23, 2013 at 10:40 pm
Human instinct is almost simular to animals we used the Sun as well ad the stars to navigate the Ocean. The Africans on the Ship Amistad was trying to use the stars to navigate the ship back home to Africa….
william
January 24, 2013 at 12:07 pm