Cats Are Stupid

To The Editors:

 

Regarding "House cat manages 200-mile trek home" (Sunday Page A2 Newsmakers), as a cat owner of some 35 years, I feel compelled to throw some cold water on the assumption in the article that Holly the cat performed some amazing feat of navigation by travelling on foot 200 miles from Daytona Beach, Fla - where she was lost - to her West Palm Beach neighborhood. For perspective, it's important to remember that there are some 86 million cats as house pets in America, cat owners are notorious for travelling with their pets, and cats are notorious for getting lost.

 

If only 10% of all cat owners took their cats on vacation, and only 10% of those got themselves lost, that would still be a total of 860,000 cats lost on vacation each year. As reported in the news, there's typically only a single story of a lost cat successfully returning a long distance to their home each year, for an abysmal success rate of .000001%. Common sense tells you that with that many lost cats, it's not a matter of smarts that sees the cat safely home; it's the law of averages.

 

Don't get me wrong: I like a feel-good story as much as the next person, but that doesn't alter the fact that cats - as much as we love 'em - are stupid, and routinely get themselves lost travelling to the end of the driveway, much less across state. Our greater concern should be ensuring that cats aren't lost on vacation in the first place, but please don't mention this to the Obama Administration, lest they attempt to fund such an effort with taxpayers' dollars.

Pete Smith
Cypress