How Cats Find Their Way Home: You'll Never Guess
Everyone has heard about the ability of representatives of the feline family to find their way home even from an unfamiliar place.
If dogs are helped in this regard by their sense of smell, then the secret of cat navigation causes real admiration in many. Let's figure out how cats navigate the terrain.
Animals have well-developed vision, smell and hearing, and in addition to these senses, they also have memory. But this is the limit of the field of scientific knowledge.
Animals use all these opportunities in a comprehensive manner.
And the same sense of smell in a cat is developed no worse than in a dog. It is much sharper than a human one, thanks to which the animal catches the smallest details, which helps to orient itself in space.
In this regard, hearing is no less important than sight.
During the study, it was possible to find out that along with the video sequence, the sound is also reproduced in the animal's memory. This feature also helps to find the way home.
In addition, the cat has whiskers and eyebrows, which allow it to detect the slightest changes in the environment. This tool helps the four-legged creature navigate in the dark when vision is not helpful.
But don't idealize the capabilities of cats. Domestic pets have a much worse sense of direction than strays.
All these skills simply won’t help an animal that has grown up in comfort, and stories about cats returning home, overcoming hundreds of kilometers, are more of a work of fiction.
