Cats Hiding in Ceilings
Apparently, it's a thing!
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Cats are masters at hiding. It’s a natural response for a panicked cat to crawl into places that offer concealment, to stay there, and to remain completely silent. These instinctual behaviors—hiding out of sight and remaining silent—are a cat’s primary mode of protection from predators. I call this behavior “The Silence Factor” and it kills many cats every year (more on that later).
Back in 2015, I was in Indianapolis presenting my “Lost Cat Behavior” workshop at a national animal welfare organization’s conference. The room was filled with TNR (trap-neuter-return) and cat rescuers, most who spent their time caring for cats (feeding stations, trapping, fostering, adopting, etc.) but not trying to find cats when they went missing. When it came time for me to talk about The Silence Factor, I told my favorite story that demonstrates this behavior. It was a phone consultation that I did back in 2005 where a woman called to say that her cat had escaped from a veterinary clinic.
The woman was desperate! She told me the cat was a feral that she took into a Los Angeles area veterinarian to be neutered. When the veterinary technician took the cat out of his carrier, the cat freaked out! It bit the technician who let the cat go and it began to run around frantically in the examination room. The technician decided to leave the room to go get help but when she came back in the room, the cat was gone!
Directly above one of the counter tops there was a ceiling tile that was missing. The technician surmised that the cat had jumped up onto the counter top and up into the ceiling through the area with no tile. The veterinary staff looked up into the ceiling but did not see the cat (no surprise there). Thankfully, they knew to put a baited humane trap up in the ceiling to see if they could humanely trap the cat. However, after only two days, the cat had not entered the humane trap so they took it down, assuming the cat had left the building.
By the time the cat owner contacted me, it had been 9 days since her cat had vanished. She wanted to pay to fly me and my bloodhounds down to Los Angeles to “track” her cat as the veterinary staff told her that the cat must have escaped from the building somehow.
“I have good news for you,” I told the woman. “Your cat is NOT lost, you don’t need my bloodhound, and you don’t have to pay me anything. Your cat is still hiding in that ceiling!”
I instructed the woman to simply tell the veterinary staff put that humane trap back up in the ceiling again. After explaining that a panicked cat would not “escape from the building” but would probably now, after 9 days, be hungry enough and acclimated enough to the area where he was hiding that he would now respond to food. She agreed to follow my instructions. Ten minutes later, she called me back. This time, she was crying.
“They say they won’t put the trap back up there,” she told me between sobs. “They insist the cat left the building. They are treating me like the nutty cat lady!”
I asked her for the phone # for the veterinary clinic. I called and spoke to the office manager, explained that its normal for a cat in these circumstances to remain hidden, silent, and not respond to the scent of food until it has reached a threshold point of hunger and thirst. Typically, this threshold point can take anywhere from several hours (for more friendly, gregarious cats) to 12 days (for cats with a fearful, skittish temperament) before they will respond to food. I suggested that they put the humane trap back up in the ceiling and they did.
Incredibly, that hid up in that ceiling for a total of 21 days before it finally responded to the scent of the cat food and entered the trap! The veterinary staff was shocked, the cat owner relieved, and I was happy that I had a great story for my workshops and my online course that demonstrates this particular behavior.
So, back to my workshop in Indianapolis. After my talk, a woman, Cathy M., came up to me in tears. She explained that a cat she had rescued named Cauliflower had been missing for 5 weeks. He was a semi skittish cat who Cathy forced herself to adopt out because she had one-too-many cats. But a few days after adopting him out, the adopter called Cathy to say that Cauliflower had vanished. He was an indoor-only cat and the adopter couldn’t imagine HOW Cauliflower had escaped outside, but he wasn’t inside her house anymore.
Cathy responded and during the search of the adopter’s house, she discovered that a ceiling tile inside the laundry room had been pushed aside. The adopter said that this missing ceiling tile was “new” and told Cathy that the ceiling led to an isolated storage room. Cathy and the adopter went around and entered the storage room and discovered that yet another ceiling tile and ceiling insulation were on the floor. Cathy knew that this was evidence that Cauliflower was in that storage room. She had set a baited humane trap hoping to catch Cauliflower.
Cathy left water and that trap inside the room for 2 weeks, but the food and water were not touched at all. Assuming that the Cauliflower was no longer there, the adopter insisted that the cat had somehow escaped from that room and was now outside. She removed the humane trap and gave up all recovery efforts. Cathy did all that she could, including shelter checks, flyers, and other efforts to find Cauliflower. But ultimately, she resigned that she would never see the cat again.
Weeks later, as Cathy sat in my workshop, I mentioned that panicked cats will hide in silence and that when cats are in a panicked state due to displacement, they initially won’t respond to food or water. This is a common behavior I’ve called “The Threshold Factor” and I gave case examples of it. I also debriefed several other cases where cats survived after being trapped without food or water for several weeks, including an elderly cat who survived 5 weeks without food and water trapped under a deck. All of these stories gave Cathy what she needed—education and hope!
When Cathy came up to talk to me and after my presentation, she told me about Cauliflower’s case. Cathy said, “I think he was in that storage room and that he could still be alive!”