• Question: How do cats find their way home?

    Asked by nny to Ashley, Bernard, Carsten, MariaMagdalena, Monique on 8 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Carsten Welsch

      Carsten Welsch answered on 8 Nov 2015:

      Cats have pretty extraordinary senses:

      Smell: Humans have approximately 5 million scent-receptive nerve endings in the nose. The average cat possesses 19 million of these scent receptors !

      Hearing: Cats can hear sounds that are two octaves higher than what humans can detect. This can help them orient themselves.

      Touch: Each and every whisker and piece of fur on your cat receives information from the environment and sends it to your cat’s brain for processing.

      Navigation: Not entirely clear, but entirely possible that cats, like birds, can detect the earth’s magnetic field. This would give them an added sense of direction, even without visual cues.

      Enhanced senses surely help finding your way home and cats are pretty intelligent overall so should have a good chance finding their way back. Although the sad truth probably is that most lost cats never make it home…

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