Every feline parent’s greatest fear unfolds when a doorway or balcony is left unlocked, and your pet escapes. It roams away into uncharted terrain, attracted by the numerous odors and noises of the environment, but it gets too late when she is several kilometers away from home. When dinnertime hits, your feline is nowhere to be seen.
A runaway feline might appear to be helpless; although many cat parents will confirm, they’re never as confused as we believe. Felines can locate their footsteps in strange environments because of their superior navigational ability, highly acute senses, and incredibly sharp memory.
How do cats navigate so perfectly without the need for any additional devices? What motivates animals to embark on these adventurous journeys, and how would they come back to safe environments once they’ve finished discovering? Let’s figure out a little about kitty navigational tendencies and how they locate their homes.
Feline Adventurers
We’re not sure what makes felines exceptionally skilled travelers; however, we do understand they’re not the only ones. In addition, when we look at all the living creatures in the natural world, humans appear to be newbies whenever it refers to navigating skills.
Vertebrates, birds, bugs, and amphibians all show extreme concern when it comes to location and orientation. Salmon fish spend years traveling the oceans before coming to the streams where they were bred to mate. The journey of monarch butterflies involves multiple years, yet they are magically able to get back to the exact mating sites every year.
Homing pigeons are already so good at locating that they got their title from it. Even when homing pigeons are drugged and transported thousands of kilometers away from their own perch, they would start returning away as quickly as they recover. They were also employed as signaling molecules before the introduction of computers; attach a letter to the leg of a pigeon and it would arrive at the receiver’s residential address in a short time.
Felines hardly roam long distances since they do not relocate and prefer to have their own distinct territory, and strolling is much harder than flying or paddling.
However, they seem skilled at exploring the locations they visit; therefore, they are skilled at traveling hundreds of kilometers if necessary. It’s still unclear how cats do it; however, researchers have a few thoughts.
Scent Power
Felines have exceptional sight and hearing abilities, but it is less often recognized that they indeed have extraordinary sensory organs. The nose of a feline is nearly 40 times much stronger than that of a person with up to 200 million smell detectors. Felines also have a transplanted receptor in their lips that detects odors; it’s thought that whenever they put their tongues outside, they’re actually sniffing stuff with their lips!
Felines utilize fragrances for almost everything since they can detect so effectively. Special receptors on the face, claws, and rear emit chemicals when stroked. These chemicals are generally undetectable by people; however, they act as identification credentials for felines, conveying essential data like the feline’s gender, nutrition, sex, body weight, and capability to reproduce.
It’s likely that your feline paws on objects as it feels better; however, it’s also since it imprints its fragrance. It not only alerts other felines that the thing belongs to them. Yet, it provides satisfaction to the feline since it recognizes its own fragrance and can readily identify the item in the long term by smelling it. Your feline can identify its house by fragrance over short ranges by releasing its fragrance across its area.
Male felines that still have not been sterilized might discharge urine mixed with hormones over their territory; its odor is so powerful that people can detect it from a long distance; thus, it’s a highly magnified odor indication for felines. Your feline could utilize the odors left by stray felines in the area to navigate out its territory if it is aware of them: “Well, it smells exactly the black kitty half a block away — I should be getting anywhere near!”
But even if your feline has wandered far beyond its area and fled the town? Sometimes even the utmost strong feline nose cannot detect the smell of territory, so more unusual wayfinding strategies are employed.
A Fixed Landmark
People depend primarily on monuments for direction. If people don’t own a roadmap or someone who can help them, they glance around and seek to identify anything. Humans could estimate their area and begin to regain lost surroundings whenever they see a recognizable structure, tree, or road sign.
Felines utilize markers to travel as well; however, their extraordinarily advanced abilities of spatial skills give them a benefit. You’ve undoubtedly seen your feline navigate rather intricate routes, like hopping from the ground to the tabletop to the cupboard to the side of the freezer, often without batting an eyelash or disrupting its settings.
Felines are professionals at shifting and recalling how to travel depending on the positioning of their paws in relation to different things, particularly landmarks.
Our felines’ routes around the area sometimes appear incredibly complicated. Yet, they always take the exact route twirling through the strands of that exact shrub and hopping among these exact wooden posts. They are unable to recognize the road markings or distinguish between a temple and a college but; because of their exceptional geographical perception, they utilize their unique system of cues that direct them safely.
The Cosmic Compass
The sky served as a guideline for early humanity. Even nowadays, people often use the sky to position themselves. Therefore, if they understand the exact time, they could find the north by looking at the sun’s position. It’s a little difficult at nighttime, particularly in places with lots of city lights, but stars like the appropriately called North Star could help people find their way.
Animals, like humans, utilize the sky to navigate. Scarab insects navigate themselves by looking at the Andromeda Galaxy. If the night is obstructed by mists, they get utterly confused. Migrating seagulls use the skies in the same way, never deviating from their path, regardless of the circumstances. Unless it’s cloudy, they’ll wander off route or perhaps even in a loop.
Researchers can’t know for sure, but felines could also explore the cosmos. Their exceptional peripheral vision could undoubtedly be ideal for this form of direction, permitting them to see perhaps the smallest stars with ease. It also might describe why they prefer to begin their enormous excursions in midnight darkness.
Magnetic Field Theory
Magnetic field lines surrounding the entire Earth are unseen energies that push or draw each other depending if they are positively or negatively energized. Magnetic field lines emerge from the earth’s center and travel to the ground, where they are impacted by the waves and other electromagnetic power from beyond. Depending on the severity of the current at that particular moment and geography, every area on the earth does have its own distinct magnetic identity.
The magnetization flows straight downwards in a continuous direction at a specific position; this would be the North Magnetic Point, which travels constantly pointing straight. The magnetization around the north pole is extremely strong that the electromagnetic center of the arrow is constantly drawn towards it, regardless of where the compass is located on Planet. People might require a particular gear to identify it, but most creatures, including felines, are capable of locating magnetic polarity using simply their brains and instincts.
Several magnetic elements, like hematite and montmorillonite (both equivalents of iron, a vital element present in foods, notably the proteins that constitute the most significant portion of cat feeds), are discovered in significant quantities in certain species, notably homing pigeons. These substances are hypothesized to be linked to the nerve cells, which use them to produce magnetoreception, an extrasensory perception.
Magnetic elements are attracted to the earth’s magnetic field, yet they could receive data about the intensity of the force from any location. When a creature recognizes a site’s magnetic characteristics, it may travel to that area by tracing the strong magnetic patterns that correlate to it.
Magnetoreception is more than a guide; it’s also a complete GPS technology. It’s unclear if felines have these increased levels of magnetic elements; however, if they really do, it would indicate why they’re such good explorers. They store the magnetic characteristic of a site as well as its look, fragrance, and noise whenever they want to recall it later. When it’s time to return to that location, they have to trace the ground: they get an instinctive perception of navigation.
Microscopic Maps
It’s likely that navigating takes place at the atomic scale, specifically amongst protons. According to Bell’s Theorem, every particle is coupled with some other particle, and they move in different ways. Once one atom’s rotation is changed, another quickly changes its orientation to match, especially if the particles are isolated from one another, and whenever one particle is sent into the universe while the other stays on Planet!
Some experts believe that this remarkable, unbreakable attachment may play a part in a feline’s capacity to come back home after being separated from it for a long time. A few of the atoms in a feline’s body may form bonds with particles from its ideal surroundings and remain in synchronization with one another, irrespective of the whereabouts of the feline. The protons in the link might act as a guide network, reflecting one another and pulling the feline back to the particles that were left alone.
This is already a theory in its development, and far more study on protons in general and how they may affect a feline’s brain is required. Even if this concept is correct, it demonstrates the power of the attachment that a feline establishes with its surroundings and the humans who reside there. Even when the relationship isn’t accurate back to the quantum scale, it is compelling that it can’t be broken by hundreds of kilometers.
Read also: Do male cats remember their kittens?
When can a feline not locate its way back?
While it is a universal fact that felines are great explorers, this is not true for all of them. Some felines have difficulty figuring out their surroundings all-around home, nor does the external environment. Variable diversity is to be expected in any characteristic, although some felines are much more inclined than the rest to be influential explorers.
The majority of veterinarians and psychologists advise keeping felines inside. Feral felines are not just a hazard to wild birds, small rodents, and other wildlife creatures, but they are generally at a higher risk of disease and damage than house pets. The risks a feline confronts outdoors, from vehicles to migratory birds to other animals, are numerous and constant, based on an average lifetime of approximately ½ of a domestic feline.
Going for a walk does appear to offer one advantage for felines, which is improved navigational skills. Due to their extensive expertise in this area, feral felines are significantly good at spotting their return journey. A stray feline is a master at finding its route back since it needs to be; a domestic feline that gets misplaced has no past experience about how to travel to its area – or how to take shelter or prevent the hazards that meet it along the route.
Read also: Do your cats recognize your face and voice?
Outdoor felines, for instance, have remarkable navigational skills as a result of their circumstances. They should be professionals at navigating their territory in need to obtain basic necessities, and any feline that is unable to accomplish that will not be able to procreate. As a result, the best proficient pathfinders prefer to reproduce among themselves, passing on their skills and expertise to the following generation.
Final Thought
For the time being, scientists don’t know how felines recall where they reside. We’re also baffled as to why certain felines are more adept at navigating than the rest. They do recognize that this ability isn’t without any limitations. Day after day, felines go missing. There’s no assurance they’ll be able to navigate home if they’re spooked outside their usual area. It’s recommended to always allow your feline outside on something like a harness if you’re worried about maintaining them nearby.