No, it’s not a car but a sleek black cat. This video, from NBC News, tells the story of a moggie who found its way home over a distance of eight miles after the family was relocated in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
Now I read this kind of story frequently—frequently enough that I think there must be something true about animal homing. While I know a bit about the homing of pigeons, I’m ignorant of dogs and cats. Have there been any scientific studies about how pets find their way home?
But did Porsche really find his way home? If I were a reporter, I would have asked the owners one question: “Did Porsche have a collar and tag when he was lost?” (And don’t forget that he didn’t seem to have missed many meals!)
Oh, and if you have any stories about your pet doing this, feel free to add them.
h/t: Steve
8 miles in 6 months is nothing. You wander around for long enough and you are bound to find yourself somewhere that looks familiar.
Crossing a scary bridge over water sounds like the behavior of an animal with a goal.
If he was an outdoor cat, he may have crossed the bridge and wandered over eight miles many times. They can have a quite large territory that they patrol often and becme familiar with, probably by scent, I would think.
On the other hand, how frequently do you hear about pets that got lost and stayed lost? That kind of story must be far more common, but doesn’t make the evening news; they’re limited to flyers on telephone poles.
“On the other hand, how frequently do you hear about pets that got lost and stayed lost?”
That. By pure random chance, a few pets will stumble upon familiar territory. Would this be the “Availability Heuristic”?
Not an answer, just another story:
“New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex.
For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty.
KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/21/lost-cat-goes-on-200-mile-journey-to-find-its-way-home-hard-to-explain/
Many years ago we took my grandmother’s cat from town five miles out to the ranch. The cat stayed a couple of days, then disappeared. In a few days the cat was back at home in town. We took the cat out again, and the same thing happened. Cat lived in town from then on.
I suspect that all the missing cats and dogs around my place have been eaten by cougars. There have been a couple of cougar sightings around here in the last 15 years or so.
Coyotes are far more likely to be the culprits in any predation on cats or small dogs.
I have heard that dogs who are lost will circle in widening circles over time. If so, they would perhaps stumble upon their own or familiar scents and thus find home. I kept my son’s adult cat, Beatrice, for him one summer years ago, she disappeared from May til October and we were very sad, deeming her gone. But she returned, thin but OK. It is a rural area – coyotes, but few cars. I doubt if she was absolutely lost but perhaps wandered too far to easily come home. Or was she seeking him? Cats and their secrets….
Partially to help prevent against exactly this sort of eventuality, I frequently take Baihu on walks (on leash, generally with him on my shoulders) all throughout the neighborhood. If he ever was to get out…well, he’d still be at risk from cars and dogs and what-not, but I know he knows the area well enough to find his way back.
b&
When I was a kid my dog got loose and showed up at my school having never been at my school. We wondered if he followed my scent which if true is impressive since all the other kids walked that same way too.
Also, unrelated, the reporter lady looks like the reporter lady they always use on Doctor Who 🙂
Four-legged animals can range pretty darn far. This is only story because “cat wandered several days over a large number of square miles, and smelled its owners at one point” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
My father once had a cat that jumped in the window of his van unknowingly to him before he left to go to a store. When he arrived about 5 miles away, the cat darted out and would not return to the van. Some weeks later the cat returned to my father’s house. Not sure how it found its way back. A long way to use scent but you hear stories like this somewhat frequently.
As a child we would often take our cat on vacation with us. When driving back the cat would sleep until we got to about 25 miles from home when he woul get excited and stick his nose in the air vent. He would then look out of the window until he saw a land mark.
Clearly he could smell home from a long way away and I imagine that in the right conditions of prevailing winds could find his way home from tens or hundreds of miles away
Hell after being out to sea for a day or two I can smell land before I can see it and a cat or dogs sense of smell is orders of magnitude better
I love these stories. When I was a kid, we had a cat named Tiger that would disappear for days, sometimes weeks. When he returned, he would be all battered from fighting the neighbourhood dogs or whatever else was challenging him in the wild (we lived in the northern bush of Canada). Sometimes he got into it with a skunk. He’d stay home until his wounds healed and was well rested and then headed out again for the next adventure. Then one day, he never came back.
Our cat, Rhapsody, did get out once and was gone for a couple of days, during which we were frantic. I finally thought of making a “scent beacon,” putting the bag of used litter on a heating pad on the back porch before I went to bed. Rhapsody was sitting at the back door the next morning when we got up. I have no way of knowing if that helped him find his way home, but it’s something I would try again.
Somebody call Rupert Sheldrake. I smell a Templeton-funded research project.
As David Byrne says: “Cats like houses more than people.” My sister-in-law just moved house about 1km away. Her two cats kept escaping and returning to the “old” house every chance they got. After catching and retrieving them I don’t know how many times, the neighbours have adopted them now. So much for loyalty…
Quidamwp’s story above reminds me of my old d-g. He’d doze in the back seat of the car on long journeys, but no matter how long he’d been in the car would get up expectantly when we were about 5 minutes from home. I assumed he was scenting something, but just maybe he remembered the car swinging through a series of bends in the right sequence for “nearly home”. I could only take that one route so I never got to conduct an experiment.
I suspect it is sensing the turns. All my dogs have done that and if you go another way they take notice. If you go past where they expect to go they will poke you as if to say, “hey you missed it! What’s going on?”
My wife drives differently when she gets close to home after a long journey. Perhaps she’s relieved to be nearly home. Perhaps I do the same thing. Anyway, she tends to sit up especially straight, drives a bit faster, gets a bit lazy with the gears and less smooth with the steering.
It’s quite noticeable. I’ve no doubt that an animal could pick up on cues of this sort, maybe something like that is going on.
Perhaps and I think when she visually sees it’s not the same, she knows. All the dogs I’ve ever had seem to know when people are coming home well before they are in the driveway or in visual range at all. I often wondered if engines have a certain sound to them that the dog can discern from other vehicles & hear well before humans can.
Could be. Also, if you know that the pet knew people were coming home, someone must have been there to observe the pets. Did that person know someone was on their way home?
I don’t know about you but I look forward to my wife coming home from work. I wouldn’t be surprised if my cat notices that.
Usually not and the person won’t even be in the same room as the pet but the pet will suddenly run up to the window or run to the door….you’ll look & no one will be there but then a few moments later you see the car.
It’s not just cats. An old friend used to mistakenly go back to his old flat when he was drunk. Eventually the new occupants got used to him scratching at the door and let him in to sleep on the sofa. I don’t think they ever adopted him though. Having said that, I once dropped him off at his (new) house and he tried to go to sleep in a skip outside. The skip had a cover on it and when I went to steer him into his house he kept complaining that he was locked out which, in a sense, I suppose he was.
So maybe it’s just cats and….him.
LOL! The New Occupants were very tolerant people!
I had a cat that got spooked on Guy Fawkes night (we used to have fireworks) and ran away. We found him a year later living under a school not 300 metres away, and took him home. He’d been living off kids’ discarded lunches I guess. He wasn’t able to find his own way home even that small distance, and what’s more both my brother and I attended that school and he didn’t even have the sense to follow us home!
One of my father’s patients and his family moved from Melbourne to Darwin (very bottom of Aus to the very top), leaving their much loved family cat with friends because they were concerned that he’d not cope with the extreme heat and humidity.
Eight months (or thereabouts) later, the cat arrived on their doorstep – in Darwin – somewhat worse for wear, but back with the family it adored.
That’s no mean feat, when one considers the vast array of savage and venomous northern wildlife the cat would have had to avoid on it’s journey, particularly while looking for water.
Whether 8 or 8000 miles, cats are more amazing and heroic than we give them credit for.
Wow. I think that’s the farthest I’ve heard!
Definitely the farthest I’ve ever heard of, too!
That’s quite some feat. Returning home is one thing, but finding a new home thousands of miles away, that’s amazing. I wonder how the cat managed to obtain the family’s forwarding address?
I have no idea, but I do believe the local paper did a story about it at the time…this occurred before Cyclone Tracy in ’74. Was quite the talk of the town for a long time.
“Talk of the town for a long time” does not actually inspire much confidence in the authenticity of the story, since it’s well known that stories get magnified and distorted in the course of multiple retellings.
At this point there’s no way to know what actually happened, but here’s a plausible guess:
The family moved to Darwin and left their cat with friends in Melbourne. The cat didn’t like the new arrangement and went back to its old home in Melbourne. A family member, returning to Melbourne to wrap up some business, found the cat hanging around the old house. Or maybe the new owners notified the family that the adoption wasn’t working out. Either way, the family had a change of heart and decided to bring the cat with them to Darwin after all.
And in the intervening 40 years, “the cat came home” morphed into “the cat found its way to the new home in Darwin”.
As Hume says, which is less miraculous: that the events happened exactly as you’ve related them? Or that the story got “improved” somewhere along the line?
Ye gods, I had no idea relaying something extraordinary could be turned into such a cat fight (pun intended!)..so I’ll just go crawl back in my box now….
Sorry if my comment came across as hostile; it wasn’t meant that way.
But surely you’ve heard the expression “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Yes, indeed. I’ve also heard the expression ‘truth is sometimes stranger than fiction’, but perhaps that one doesn’t really fit here. Also wish my father and the cat owners were still around to verify it 🙁
I really don’t want to be rude, but I can’t understand how this could happen. I find stories of huge journeys of cats and dogs who find their way home dubious, but plenty of other animals do that as a matter of routine so I’m willing to accept that cats and dogs might have the same ability.
But in the other direction? Finding a family in a new house on the other side of the continent? Surely this is nonsense.
I don’t think the cat’s family doubted it.
I believe you believe the family, sure. But so what?
This is just skepticism, I hope you don’t take it as a personal attack. I just cannot believe that a cat could find a random house 8000 miles away.
Finding its way back, per…haps…. but come on. unless you are attributing psychic abilities to cats they probably can’t do what you’re saying they can do.
I understand your doubt, I truly do!
Perhaps this link might help, although it doesn’t mention the cat I’m referring to, but #4 on the list, “Howie” comes very close:
http://www.petmedsonline.org/record-distances-travelled-by-lost-cats.html
No, it doesn’t help at all. That’s just a list of anecdotes, there’s no reason at all for anyone to believe any of the stories are true.
Besides, they are stories of cats that supposedly walked home to their original house, not ones that magically found their previous owners’ new house on the other side of the continent.
Again, not trying to be rude, just trying to get to the bottom of things.
How did your father find out about this if his patients moved clean away to the other side of the country?
We were living in Darwin at the time. His patient wasn’t his patient until he and his family also moved to Darwin.
Um… so what?
There’s no difference. A patient told your father a story. There’s no particular reason for you to believe it.
Why on *Earth* do you believe in and defend a silly story that can’t possibly be true?
I’m surprised nobody’s yet mentioned that many of the big cats have absolutely huge ranges, with the jaguars and tigers first coming to mind…if I remember right, it’s not unheard of for a single such cat to claim hundreds of miles as its territory.
I’ve no idea how that compares with the smaller cats — or, most relevantly, the African Wildcat. A quick Google search suggests they might roam a bit as well.
b&
We had a black lab for several years that loved children. Since we could not fence the yard the dog often got out, but stayed in the near neighborhood. He hated loud vehicles and once chased a very loud motorcycle and, when the river stopped at a nearby stop sign, grabbed the driver’s pants leg and pulled him off the cycle, causing some minor damage to the cycle, but not the driver.
At that point we decided we must give him up to a family that could care for him in a proper environment. A colleague found a family that lived on a farm 12 miles away. I took the animal to my office for the day; my colleague took him home in town with him overnight and delivered him to the farm the next day – over a varied path.
About two months later when I arrived home, the dog was in the driveway, wagging his tail in greeting and clearly excited to see me. The family that took the dog went on vacation and the dog took off, although there was someone at the home to care for him. They think he missed the children. He found his way back to our home in about two days.
We think he must have really ‘homed,’ since there was little time to wander and find us over 12 miles, but we really do not know how he made it. It was exceedingly difficult to return him to the farm family after his demonstration of fidelity!
I don’t know how far they went, but I’ve had cats which would disappear for over two weeks then return.
I recently read about a cat who went missing for (I think) 8 weeks and was given up for dead but then turned up again. The owner decided to attach a GPS device to its collar and tracked its movements afterwards.
It was just hanging out at other people’s houses.
I’ve no idea where Fortran goes when she’s out, but she comes back several times a day. She often comes in apparently just to make sure I’m here and then goes right back outside again. She sometimes vanishes for four or five hours though and she could cover a lot of ground in that time and could certainly get fed by other families. We thought about putting a GPS on her but decided not to. There’s a busy road nearby and if we found out she was running back and forth across that, we’d just be worried all the time.
One last anecdote: a friend once moved house and he carried his cat to the car, the people from a few doors down accosted him and accused him of stealing their cat. They were entirely convinced that it was their cat and had been living in their house for years. My friend had owned the cat since it was a kitten and had no idea it was spending so much time at someone else’s house. It had just turned up at their place one day and they ended up adopting it, not knowing that it lived just a few houses down.
We had a cat when I was young that was lost for nearly a week. We spent time wandering the neighbourhood calling his name and eventually caught his attention 4 houses away from home. He was very enthusiastic in his greeting, followed us back home with great joy (tail held stiffly upright) and stayed close to the house for quite a long time after. Not all cats have a good sense of direction. Of course I can’t be sure how far he wandered before we found him, but it seemed like he was very relieved at being found.
I heard a story like this recently. My sister had a young man boarding at her place for several years and he owned a cat called Medusa. When he moved out he took Medusa with him. Unfortunately, the place he moved to did not allow pets, so he gave his cat to another friend to mind. Not long ago my sister was sitting at home when a cat jumped through the window (there is always a window open for their cats), which turned out to be Medusa. They had not even heard she was missing, so it couldn’t have taken long for her to find her way there.
As Medusa obviously thinks she’s ‘home’, my sister will be keeping her.
I grew up in the outskirts of suburbs of a small town. A lot of farms and orchards in our area, which led to a lot of feral cats. We attempted to deal with the feral cats with as much humanity as possible. At first we tried capturing them and driving miles away and releasing them. But within days, they would be back. We tried driving them further and further, and ironically, they got better and better at finding their way back. It got to the point we could drive them 50 miles away and they’d be back within a week.
Sadly, we eventually started killing them, because we were out of options.
we eventually started killing them
Given that you were going for ‘humane’, I hope you followed through quickly after starting.
Speaking of cats coming home (or not), have you seen Kurosawa’s final film (Madadayo, 1993)?
I’ve never seen a professor get so upset over a cat that didn’t return.
Big picture science has a podcast on animal navigation that may be enlightening.
http://radio.seti.org/episodes/Time_for_a_Map
As far as we can remember, my brother-in-law’s dog had visited us only once before, yet, when he was left alone one night because of a family emergency, he dug out of his back yard and ended up at our front door. We live about 6 km apart and there are 2 major motorways to cross as well as at least 8 corners to turn.
In the particular case of Porsche, it doesn’t look that hard. ‘Home’ was right on the water’s edge. The place he was relocated to was just a couple of miles inland. Assuming Porsche was intentionally looking for ‘home’, he’d have to sense the direction of the coast from two miles distance, then when he reached the shore, turn left or right (50-50 he’d get the right direction just by chance) and another 6 or 7 miles would lead him right past his house. If he turned the wrong way, then maybe after some distance (10 miles? 20?) he’d have to U-turn and backtrack. So the odds in this case aren’t really that great.
On reflection, considering he was ‘missing’ for 8 months(?) but well-fed, it’s entirely possible he was ‘adopted’ by someone, came on the shoreline some time later in the course of his daily roaming (how much territory does a ‘domestic’ cat cover?), and decided to investigate further. I don’t know how distinctive the shoreline is there or whether there would be any visual or other clues to the direction to take.
Good point, probably not very difficult for a cat to smell the sea. Heading in the right direction and given a bit of luck…
How many cats have not found their way home?
You’re right, but we still have to explain cats that *did* find their way home. I think people here have made a very good start.
I always supposed that dogs operated basically on olfactory signals, but here’s some evidence that they operate on visuals too.
My wonderful immigrant neighbors sadly moved back to where they’d come from (Iowa). In everyone’s estimation, their dog Oscar (who came from Serbia, rescued by the Canadian ambassador’s wife while my neighbors were in the Peace Corps there) liked me more than he liked his own people. It was almost embarrassing – Oscar would just go nuts when he’d see me, but I would have figured that the recognition was more olfactory and auditory than anything else.
Oscar hasn’t yet made the trek from DesMoines to Pittsburgh, but I learned that there’s a sculptor in DesMoines who looks uncannily like me. Oscar had never met the guy, but when out for a walk one day he saw the sculptor in his yard, and went nuts.
Wallace was only 3 days old when the mother cat died. Dad brought Wallace home & we doll-baby bottle fed her. When she was 6 months old Dad took her back to the warehouse, about 6 miles away to work as a “mouser.” She stayed at the warehouse one night and then disappeared. The freeway in San Diego separated our house from the warehouse but Wallace found her way back in only 6 weeks, bedragged, but home. She stayed with us for 14 more years. RIP