The other day a friend who is about to move house asked me if I had any tips on what to do with her cat so that she would not run away and try to return to their previous house. She had been told that she would have to keep the cat shut up for 15 days.
First of all, every cat is different, as is every other creature, so what they will want to do will do depend a great deal on the bond they have with us. Is it stronger than the bond they feel with the place where they have lived before?
I have moved house many times and never had a problem with the cats wanting to go back to the previous house. What I always did try to do was take the cats to the new place once the furniture was in place so that it would seem like a recognisable home. I also tried to take them towards the end of the day so that when they arrived at their new home, once they had had time to explore the space, they would be fed and could settle down for the evening. The other thing I did was not to change the litter tray before moving but to keep it so that it would smell familiar to them.
A South African friend once told me that his mother always rubbed butter on the cats’ paws. They would then spend some time licking it off and by then any urge to run had been counteracted.
However, that is not what I want to share with you today. This request brought back a memory of an incident which I still think is astounding.
We were moving from one friend’s house to another’s while ours was being completed. We moved our things to the new place, and decided to spend the night there but left the cats with a view to bringing them the following day.When we woke up the following morning, we were amazed to see the cats outside the new house. They had never been there before. Not only that. They were sitting right in front of the window of the room where we had slept.
To get there, they had to open the window of the room where they usually slept, climb down a steep slope, cross a dry river bed, walk along a paved country road and then a dirt track which led up to the house. How did they know where to find us? How did they orient Was it smell? Was it some other non-local intuitive sense?
To this day I have never found an explanation for this extraordinary event, but I often imagine the scene of ten cats walking in Indian file behind Pancho, the big, beautiful black cat, who was always somehow special.
