Why a lost cat will not come when you call
Your cat is gone. You walk the street calling its name. Nothing answers. It must not be here. So you move on to the next street.
Here is what the research says. By the end you will probably think differently.
First: it can hear you
The ability to tell which direction a sound came from is called sound localisation. Close your eyes and have someone clap. You know roughly where it came from. That.
This has been measured in cats (Heffner & Heffner, Journal of Neurophysiology). The answer is about 5 degrees — accurate enough to place a sound within a metre at ten metres away.
So the cat is not only hearing you. It knows which way you are.
It knows its name
A team including researchers at the University of Tokyo published an experiment in 2019 (Saito et al., Scientific Reports).
Cats were played several words that sound like their name, one after another, until they stopped reacting. Then they were played their actual name. Cats living in ordinary households moved their ears or heads again.
They can tell their own name from other words.
But note what the reaction was. Ears and heads moved. Almost none of them ran over, meowed, or flicked their tails.
And cats living in a cat café showed no clear difference. Being called many names by many people may blur it.
It knows whether the voice is yours
The same researchers ran another experiment in 2013 (Saito & Shinozuka, Animal Cognition).
The owner's voice, and a stranger's voice. Cats responded differently to the two.
This matters practically. The person calling should be the owner. Several friends calling loudly is worse than the owner calling alone.
So why does it not come?
It hears you. It knows its name. It knows where you are. And it stays put. The reason is fear.
There is a scale for measuring stress in cats called the Cat Stress Score (Kessler & Turner, 1997). An unfamiliar place and unfamiliar people put a cat under heavy stress.
And the first thing a stressed cat does is hide.
The hiding box experiment
This was tested directly (Vinke, Godijn & van der Leij, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 2014).
Cats newly arrived at a shelter were split into two groups. One group was given a box to hide in. The other was not.
The result: the group with a box showed clearly lower stress scores on days three and four.
And one more thing. Cats in the group without a box turned their litter trays upside down and tried to hide underneath. A hiding place is not a nice extra for a cat. If there isn't one, it will make one.
Cats newly arrived also spent long stretches inside the box for the first two weeks.
A lost cat is in exactly this state. Unfamiliar ground, frightened, wedged into something, not moving.
Which means
Silence is not evidence that the cat is not there.
It may be the opposite. It may be in the hedge two metres away, hearing you, facing you, and unable to move.
Think back to where cats were actually found in the study of 1,210 missing cats (Huang et al., 2018): other people's gardens, shrubs, under decks and porches, garages, behind furniture, basements.
Every one of them is a hiding place.
What to do instead
1 The owner does the calling. Do not gather a crowd. The more unfamiliar people, the less likely the cat is to emerge.
2 After calling, stay still. If you keep walking while calling, a cat that starts to come out will not reach you in time. Wait in one place for a while.
3 Put out somewhere to hide. Its carrier, or a cardboard box, near where it got out, with its own bedding inside. The hiding box experiment says something useful here: a cat will use a hiding place if there is one.
4 Crouch and look underneath. Standing and scanning will not find it. Cats are found close to the ground, in tight dark places.
5 Search at night too. The next section explains why.
Night can work better
Behind a cat's retina is a reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum. It bounces incoming light back through the retina a second time. This is why cats' eyes shine in the dark.
A 1951 study (Gunter, Harding & Stiles, Nature) found that this layer lowers the minimum light a cat needs to see by roughly six times. Where you can see nothing, the cat can see.
For a searcher, what matters is the other half of that: because of this layer, a cat's eyes shine back when light hits them.
Hold the torch low, near the ground, not at your own eye level, and sweep slowly. Two points of light may come back at you from deep in a hedge or under a car. A place you searched three times in daylight is worth one more look after dark.
The studies used here
Heffner & Heffner, sound localisation, Journal of Neurophysiology. Cats localise sound to about 5 degrees.
Saito, Shinozuka, Ito & Hasegawa 2019, "Domestic cats (Felis catus) discriminate their names from other words", Scientific Reports 9(1). Household cats distinguish their own name; the response is ear and head movement.
Saito & Shinozuka 2013, "Vocal recognition of owners by domestic cats (Felis catus)", Animal Cognition. Cats respond differently to their owner's voice than to a stranger's.
Kessler & Turner 1997, Cat Stress Score. Unfamiliar environments and unfamiliar people place cats under heavy stress.
Vinke, Godijn & van der Leij 2014, "Will a hiding box provide stress reduction for shelter cats?", Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Cats with a hiding box scored significantly lower on stress; cats without one upended their litter trays to hide.
Gunter, Harding & Stiles 1951, "Spectral reflexion factor of the cat's tapetum", Nature 168(4268), 293-4. The tapetum lowers the visual threshold about six-fold.
Said plainly
None of these studies looked at lost cats directly.
The sound experiment, the name experiment and the hiding-box experiment were all done with cats living normally or newly arrived at a shelter. We could not find research that followed cats actually lost outdoors and measured them.
So this article joins several studies together and says "it is probably like this". Each study is solid; the joining is our interpretation.
With that said, one conclusion is safe: do not decide a cat is absent because it did not answer.