Hundreds of kilometers to find their master: how do we explain the secret of cats’ travel?

To the world, even if these behaviors are not unique, they remain exceptional. “Most of the time when cats get lost, they will stay within a three-block radius.”, as you say. Joana Lagarrigue in particular points to a study by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), which wanted to better understand what happens when cats are left to their own devices in the wild. To do this, scientists tracked 92 cats with a GPS collar in a limited area of ​​1.1 km for a month. Cats appear to spend the vast majority (79%) of their time 50 meters or less from their home, traveling an average maximum distance of about 352 metres.

So we’ll never know what happened to Coxi’s cat’s head to allow her to travel 600 kilometers, but as science, cat behavior and cat biology advance, our behavioral scientist offers several lines of explanation. First, “Because the cat is a very routine animal, this move caused quite a commotion and it is likely that he tried to find the bearings he had in his old house,” she believes. next one, “We know that the cat has a spatio-temporal memory, that is, it is able to determine its place in space according to the experiences it has gone through. We also know that the cat has a very strong sense of smell, 70 times more developed than the human sense of smell, and its hearing is three times more developed From a human. These are the main senses a cat will use to learn about its environment and find its way around.”