Kitty comfort zones

The comfort zone can be influenced by previous trauma, the environment at the time, any positive or negative experience, learnt patterns or instinct within the individual or species.

In simple modern terms, it’s the same as how you feel when someone gets into your space.

Cats, a highly instinctive species, have several distances and areas that are of social significance to them. The domain a cat patrols during its normal active life is known as its home range and can be quite variable in size.

The size of the home range is positively correlated to metabolic need. It will offer sufficient sources of food to sustain the

individual cat, but it may be shared. The nucleus of this area – frequented 80% of the time – covers about twenty thousand square metres.

Cats may utilise the range evenly or develop radiating paths leading to secondary home sites for special purposes such as predation opportunities, toileting or refuge.

As the size of the home range increases, the percentage of the area visited daily drops from about 40% to as low as 5% without apparent consequences.

Footpaths to commonly used sites are selected for their length and direction. These paths and important sites may form part of the home ranges of several different cats.

Dominance plays no role in access to these routes. They tend to beused more on a first-come, first-serve basis. But when two cats arrive simultaneously at an intersection, each may wait for the other to make the next move.

Home range size varies considerably, depending on food availability and the gender of the cat. Well-fed pet cats traverse smaller territories. Females require less than half the area preferred by the males.

Tomcats like a range about four times larger than queens; they can travel from 75 metres up to one kilometre daily, on average.

Behavioural research shows that feral queens have a home range of about eight hectares, whereas a feral tom will roam over 40 hectares.

Home ranges of queens do not overlap between cat groups but are shared by females of that specific group and sometimes with the dominant male.

About 50% to 60% of the home range of cats inhabiting the same area overlap.

In stranger territories, the overlap is between 5% to 15%.

Feral tomcats do not have a specific outer boundary.

Within a home the average cat uses about 35 square metres of living space. Adults use more rooms within the residence than kittens do, as part of their confined domestic home range.

Most cats have predilection sites where they can often be found.

They will use different locations at various times of the day. Generally, feline individuals move to vacant or recently emptied sites, rather than gregarious groups.

Young independent cats will patronise the home range of their female parent during springtime. If they don’t stay within the group, they will use a new and distinct range in summer.

When juvenile males emigrate, they may establish their own home range adjacent to that of their sire.

If a tomcat is removed from a home range for whatever reason, a vacuum is created and within a few days a new tomcat will appear and establish itself. This occurs very rarely with female cats.

 Read more on this topic next week.