For those of you who have outdoor cats, a question that might be plaguing you is where your cats go when they roam outside. Do they stay close to home or do they walk for miles?

The Cat Tracker Project, founded by researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, aimed at answering exactly this question.

In order to do this, they placed GPS collars on the cats of selected volunteers. The project involved 1,000 cats across four countries and they spent six years analyzing their findings.

For the most part, cats were not found to move that much. In fact, most of them spent their time more or less 330 feet of their yard. Although this was not the case for all cats; some of them covered as far as 25 acres, which is an impressive distance.

“Seven percent covered more than 25 acres, and several cats had enormous ranges,” National Geographic’s Jonathan Losos noted. “The record-setter was Penny, a young female from the suburbs of Wellington, New Zealand, who roamed over the hills behind her house, covering an area greater than three square miles.”

However, the aim of the project did not limit to measuring the distances they cover when they are not at home. Another aspect of this study was to find out how much pet cats hunt local birds and mammals for sport.

“Cats are known globally as a big threat to conservation,” lead project author Roland Kays told National Georgaphic. “So we wanted to know how far are these cats going into the natural areas and are they actually a threat to our native wildlife?”

So they put the trackers on the cats for about two weeks and started observing the routes they took and what kind of animals they came into contact with while they were out there.

As already mentioned above, most of them proved quite lazy, generally staying quite close to home, but they were occasionally found to pay visits to other houses too.

Like one cat in North Carolina that used to stay pretty close to home most of the time. All of a sudden, one day, it was found that it went to a house 0.75 miles away from her current home, and then came back.

The researchers were curious to know what lured the cat to go that far from where she used to hang out, and even started wondering whether the GPS was faulty. However, it was accurate. In fact, the cat’s owners were out of town that weekend, and the house where the cat went was the house where they used to live before.

Scientists were surprised by the fact that the cat remembered where it used to live, and also how to get there even though it had to cross a busy street to get there.

Well, this project proves once again how clever cats are, while it is a reminder that their mind is much more complicated than we will ever know.

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Source: National Geographic, Good News Network