Cat's Territorial Instinct

All felines are by instinct territorial creatures. The feline territories have been object of several biological studies, from which we know that the dimensions of their marked space depends on their way of life, of the availability of food there is (or in the case of suburban cat, the number of houses in the neighborhood that can offer them tasty food) and, in the case of non sterilized males, the number of females in the zone.

You can distinguish to parts in a cat's territory. First there is the nearest zone to their base, where cats like to sleep and feel at home. It's the so called homely territory, which he will defend no matter what against the invasion of strange cats, overall in the case of females. Farther from the home limits there is the hunting territory, much less frequented. Normally, male cats home territory is more or less about ten times as big as that as of a female, and can reach a dimension of up to 40 hectares.

This data makes reference to alley and farm cats that live in close to wild life conditions. Of course, the territorial instinct of a domestic cat suffer from great variations. If he is allowed to go outside the house, its home territory will be the garden or the court yard, while the hunting territory will possibly include several of the neighbors court yards.

Cats mark their territory with the odors of the head and base of the tail glands, and with spurts of urine.

They also constantly patrol their home territories to defend them from rival cats, fighting against them or with a fixed stare.

In zones in which the population of alley cats are numerous, the spaces and trajectories of ones and others are well defined, including in what is referred to temporary borders (there can be cases of fights originated by one cat that one day gets up early and decides to venture inside the space of another).

House territories
In the case of cats that never go out from home, the territorial behavior suffers even more variations, but it doesn't disappear.

Inside the house, the cat chooses a certain number of fix places to sleep, some of them are apparently arbitrary. (One of the possible reasons to choose a place is for the heating conduits to pass under it).

The domestic cat also selects several strategic point on which they can observe and guard his hypothetic hunting territory.

But the territorial instinct is not limited to defending its territory from intruders. As much as moving furniture as if we construct a shed or putting a new bench on the garden, its sure that the cat will go to inspect them and even mark the new element with his odor to incorporate it to its exterior home territory.