Cat's 200-mile journey
Discussion
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howabou...
Exhausted and emaciated, barely able to stand and too weak to miaow, the cat appeared from nowhere on New Year's Eve in the back garden of a Florida family home.
For six days, Barb Mazzola and her children put out food and milk for the nervous animal, eventually coaxing her inside their house in West Palm Beach.
They fell in love with the cat, a tortoiseshell with distinctive black, brown and ginger patterning. But when Mrs Mazzola took it to the vet, she reluctantly asked if the cat had an implanted microchip that would identify its original owners.
She did. And it turned out her name was Holly and that her owners Jacob and Bonnie Richter lived just a mile away.
But what was truly remarkable was that they had lost Holly two months earlier when she bolted out of their mobile home on a trip to Daytona Beach – 200 miles north along Florida's Atlantic coast.
How Holly, a house cat who rarely ventured outside, managed to make it to back to her hometown from unknown terrain so far away has baffled animal behaviourists.
It has also turned her into an internet sensation among feline aficionados and spawned countless theories about how sights, sounds and smells, an inner compass or some memories of the drive north may have guided her homeward odyssey.
"It is a complete mystery," said Marc Bekoff, a University of Colorado professor who specialises in animal behaviour. "She may have had some basic sense of direction and then got clues from sights or sounds as she got closer, but the truth is that we have no idea how she got home."
What seems certain, judging from the state of its paws, is that it walked home by road and pavement, rather than somehow hitching a lift or going cross-country. Its back feet, the ones that cat use to propel themselves, were swollen, rubbed and raw and the claws were worn down to stubs.
Mr Richter, 70, a retired airline mechanic supervisor, wonders if the cat somehow oriented herself by the busy highway that runs down the coast, keeping the ocean to its left as it headed south on her journey home.
"Evidently, she had some sort of inner sense or magic that kept her on track," he said. "I have no idea how many of her nine lives she must have used up because there are a lot of crossroads and lot of traffic, not to mention all the other threats from nature and other animals."
The "homing" instincts of migratory animals, from birds to wildebeest, taking guidance from the sun, weather and magnetic field been heavily studied – but there is little data or scientific evidence about cats' abilities to navigate long distances outside the familiar terrain around their homes.
Dogs are thought to have better prospects on long journeys as they may have inherited genetic traits to orient themselves from their forebear, the wolf, and they are also more likely to seek out help from humans.
But many felines are wary of strangers. And Holly had clearly been eating and drinking little as she shed half her 13lb body weight and was severely dehydrated.
However the cat made it home, Mrs Richter, 63, a retired nurse, said there was one clear moral to the survival story – the value of implanting pets with microchips, devices the size of a large grain of rice that injected under the skin by syringe and carry identifying data.
"If there is one message I hope comes out of this, it is that other owners get their animals back after having them microchipped because they heard about Holly," she said.
The centre of this feline saga is meanwhile regaining its strong-willed persona, a trait of tortoiseshells that is often referred to as "tortitude".
"It was devastating to lose her, but I never gave up hope that she'd turn up somewhere," said Mr Richter. "She's her old saucy self again. It's a joy to have her home."
Amazing!
Exhausted and emaciated, barely able to stand and too weak to miaow, the cat appeared from nowhere on New Year's Eve in the back garden of a Florida family home.
For six days, Barb Mazzola and her children put out food and milk for the nervous animal, eventually coaxing her inside their house in West Palm Beach.
They fell in love with the cat, a tortoiseshell with distinctive black, brown and ginger patterning. But when Mrs Mazzola took it to the vet, she reluctantly asked if the cat had an implanted microchip that would identify its original owners.
She did. And it turned out her name was Holly and that her owners Jacob and Bonnie Richter lived just a mile away.
But what was truly remarkable was that they had lost Holly two months earlier when she bolted out of their mobile home on a trip to Daytona Beach – 200 miles north along Florida's Atlantic coast.
How Holly, a house cat who rarely ventured outside, managed to make it to back to her hometown from unknown terrain so far away has baffled animal behaviourists.
It has also turned her into an internet sensation among feline aficionados and spawned countless theories about how sights, sounds and smells, an inner compass or some memories of the drive north may have guided her homeward odyssey.
"It is a complete mystery," said Marc Bekoff, a University of Colorado professor who specialises in animal behaviour. "She may have had some basic sense of direction and then got clues from sights or sounds as she got closer, but the truth is that we have no idea how she got home."
What seems certain, judging from the state of its paws, is that it walked home by road and pavement, rather than somehow hitching a lift or going cross-country. Its back feet, the ones that cat use to propel themselves, were swollen, rubbed and raw and the claws were worn down to stubs.
Mr Richter, 70, a retired airline mechanic supervisor, wonders if the cat somehow oriented herself by the busy highway that runs down the coast, keeping the ocean to its left as it headed south on her journey home.
"Evidently, she had some sort of inner sense or magic that kept her on track," he said. "I have no idea how many of her nine lives she must have used up because there are a lot of crossroads and lot of traffic, not to mention all the other threats from nature and other animals."
The "homing" instincts of migratory animals, from birds to wildebeest, taking guidance from the sun, weather and magnetic field been heavily studied – but there is little data or scientific evidence about cats' abilities to navigate long distances outside the familiar terrain around their homes.
Dogs are thought to have better prospects on long journeys as they may have inherited genetic traits to orient themselves from their forebear, the wolf, and they are also more likely to seek out help from humans.
But many felines are wary of strangers. And Holly had clearly been eating and drinking little as she shed half her 13lb body weight and was severely dehydrated.
However the cat made it home, Mrs Richter, 63, a retired nurse, said there was one clear moral to the survival story – the value of implanting pets with microchips, devices the size of a large grain of rice that injected under the skin by syringe and carry identifying data.
"If there is one message I hope comes out of this, it is that other owners get their animals back after having them microchipped because they heard about Holly," she said.
The centre of this feline saga is meanwhile regaining its strong-willed persona, a trait of tortoiseshells that is often referred to as "tortitude".
"It was devastating to lose her, but I never gave up hope that she'd turn up somewhere," said Mr Richter. "She's her old saucy self again. It's a joy to have her home."
Amazing!
Our new cat is a stray, we took her to the vet and it turned out she was microchipped. So we know her original name and the name of her owners, but they've evidently died or moved as they are no longer at the registered address (not that the vets will tell us what it is, just the town).
So chipping pets is good (as this story shows) and making sure that the register is updated when owners move is a good idea too.
We made some considerable efforts to find the original owners but those efforts failed, and their loss is our gain.
Two morals to my post, one, update the register if you move and two, if you do lose a pet, it may well end up in another loving home (which one hopes will be of some comfort).
So chipping pets is good (as this story shows) and making sure that the register is updated when owners move is a good idea too.
We made some considerable efforts to find the original owners but those efforts failed, and their loss is our gain.
Two morals to my post, one, update the register if you move and two, if you do lose a pet, it may well end up in another loving home (which one hopes will be of some comfort).
Amazing story, you can only imagine how heartbroken they'd be after she escaped.
We're due to move soon, but it's only about a mile at most away from where we live, the next housing estate over, so I'm a bit concerned one of ours will catch a sniff of their territory on the wind and head 'home'. Will keep them in for a while to be sure first I think.
We're due to move soon, but it's only about a mile at most away from where we live, the next housing estate over, so I'm a bit concerned one of ours will catch a sniff of their territory on the wind and head 'home'. Will keep them in for a while to be sure first I think.
Steve Evil said:
Amazing story, you can only imagine how heartbroken they'd be after she escaped.
We're due to move soon, but it's only about a mile at most away from where we live, the next housing estate over, so I'm a bit concerned one of ours will catch a sniff of their territory on the wind and head 'home'. Will keep them in for a while to be sure first I think.
The guideline is a minimum of 6 weeks (rather than the usual 2weeks) for this situation. We're due to move soon, but it's only about a mile at most away from where we live, the next housing estate over, so I'm a bit concerned one of ours will catch a sniff of their territory on the wind and head 'home'. Will keep them in for a while to be sure first I think.
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