By: Georgette Virgo

Somewhere in Norway, a striped cat named Selma squeezes past a half-open window and drops into the courtyard, disappearing between bicycles and snow-flecked trash bins. Her owner only knows that the apartment has gone quiet. Under Selma’s chin, a matchbox-sized device wakes up and begins to trace each step she takes, turning a familiar neighborhood into a moving string of coordinates.

The secret life of domestic cats has been sustained by speculation and myth: whispered theories about where they vanish to, which neighbors sneak them food, and how they always seem to find their way home. In 2026, those mysteries are colliding with a global boom in pet technology that seeks to convert intuition into data, anxiety into dashboards. Across Europe and beyond, a wave of GPS collars and activity trackers is recasting cats’ unchaperoned wanderings as measurable, archivable behavior.

One company is Lilcat, a cat-focused offshoot of the Norwegian dog-tracking brand Lildog. Built on the same GPS and cellular technology that underpins its dog devices, Lilcat offers a GPS tracker and activity monitor for cats, combining live location tracking with an activity meter and historical maps of a cat’s territory. Around it, a broader question lies: what happens when the inscrutable instincts of the neighborhood cat encounter the forensic gaze of always-on tracking?

A Pet Tech Surge and a New Kind of Map

The last few years have seen an acceleration in connected pet gadgets. GPS trackers have moved from curiosity to near-mainstream, especially for pet owners who worry about roads, predators, or theft. Guides for cat owners now describe GPS collars as “lifelines” for animals prone to roaming or confusion, highlighting location alerts and activity tracking as tools to catch trouble early. Underneath the marketing, these devices rely on the same global navigation satellite systems and low-power cellular networks that form the backbone of the modern Internet of Things.

The problem cats pose is distinct from the one dogs pose. Dogs generally move under supervision, tethered to leashes or confined to yards. Cats, by contrast, slip in and out of homes as they please. Microchips can reunite a lost cat with its owner once it turns up at a clinic or shelter, but they do nothing in the hours when a cat has failed to return, and its owner is imagining every possible misfortune. That gap is where companies like Lilcat now operate.

Lilcat’s tracker, now in its second generation, is physically modest: roughly 3x4cm, weighing 28g, and clipped onto a cat-safe collar designed to detach if the animal becomes snagged. Inside, GPS chips are paired with NB-IoT and LTE-M radios to send a cat’s position back to an app, which displays live location, activity levels, rest patterns, and a record of where the cat has been over time. Owners can track their cat in real time with what the company describes as unlimited range, provided there is coverage on supported networks.

Those movements, collected in thousands of small dots on a map, quickly form patterns. A cat’s daily routine resolves into loops and corridors: fence-lines patrolled at dawn, hidden sleeping spots, brief dashes across a busy road. Lilcat’s “map history” feature invites users to “discover their territory” and “know every detail of your cat’s daily life,” turning intuition into a kind of living cartography. It is this quiet accumulation of evidence that has led to one of the company’s most unsettling claims.

“Most cats have more than two homes, and their owners are oblivious,” says Morten Sæthre, Lilcat’s founder and spokesperson. He describes seeing one map after another in which a cat’s trail spends hours each day in another building, on another sofa, living a second life in plain sight.

Second Homes, Hidden Risks

The revelation that a cat maintains multiple households is charming until it collides with veterinary reality. Cats with special diets can be put at risk if they are unknowingly fed different food around the corner, and carefully measured calorie plans can be undone by extra meals in a second kitchen. Sæthre is blunt about the pattern he sees in the data.

“The cats could get fed the wrong food or more often than desirable, sending cats off the chonk-charts,” he says. The company’s marketing leans into this, encouraging owners to connect changes in weight and energy to the unseen parts of a cat’s day.

But Lilcat’s ambitions extend beyond weight management. The brand’s central pitch is that real-time tracking can serve as an early warning system: if activity levels suddenly drop or a cat stops moving in an unusual place, something may be wrong. Stories circulating in the wider pet-tracking world make this pitch tangible. For Sæthre, the presence of a location signal in those moments can be the difference between a frantic search and a targeted rescue.

“The era of ‘missing cat posters’ is over,” he says, though lost-pet flyers still pepper lampposts in most towns. The statement is less a description than an aspiration: a belief that cheap sensors, robust networks, and the ubiquity of smartphones can eventually turn many disappearances into solvable puzzles. If an app shows a cat has not moved from a neighbor’s yard in hours, the owner can knock on that door instead of stapling photocopies to trees.

There is, however, a more abstract risk to consider: what happens when every detour is visible? A tracker that shows a cat crossing a busy road each evening may prompt owners to curtail the cat’s outdoor freedom or to renegotiate informal arrangements with neighbors who have been quietly sheltering the animal. In some cases, the data may strain relationships as much as it relieves worry, exposing acts of kindness and oversight that had previously been hidden by ignorance.

Magnetic Instincts in a Noisy World

Behind the expansion of pet tracking lies a more fundamental question: what, if anything, is being replaced? Research suggests that cats, like many animals, can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it as a rough compass to orient themselves and navigate unfamiliar territory, a phenomenon known as magnetoreception. Under calm conditions, that internal sense appears to help them find their way back to known locations. But as human environments become denser, with power lines, steel frames, and electronic noise, those magnetic cues grow less reliable.

“Cats use Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves, choose direction, and navigate unfamiliar territory through magnetoreception,” Sæthre says. “Though magnetic fields can be disrupted and interfered with by stress and fear, more so, human environments make the magnetic field noisy and less reliable. It’s important to remember that cats don’t have a built-in GPS system, but rather a vague compass function leading them in the right direction under the correct circumstances. In today’s modern world, full of environmental noise, a little assistance could be helpful. At the very least, a peace of mind for loving cat owners.“

Rather than depicting trackers as a technological intrusion into a natural system, Sæthre casts them as a partial repair for an environment humans have already disrupted. As cities accumulate steel, concrete, and electromagnetic interference, relying solely on instinct may be less fair to animals than it once was. A small device on a collar, in this telling, is not a replacement for an ancient sense but a backup for a compass we have unintentionally scrambled.

In that framing, the debate shifts from whether to track to how to handle what tracking reveals. A map of a cat’s movements is, in practice, a map of human behavior: which doors are open, which gardens are welcoming, which garages are left ajar. It lays bare the informal social networks that have always existed around outdoor cats, now rendered with timestamps and coordinates.

For Lilcat, the challenge is to translate those maps into reassurance rather than control. Its home page urges owners to “track your cat in real time” and “discover their territory,” but it also emphasizes a 14-day money-back guarantee and the inclusion of a cat-safe collar. The company presents itself as an early warning system, not a surveillance operation, emphasizing “worry-free experiences” and “peace of mind” as much as raw data.

In Trondheim, Sæthre watches one more tangled route on a screen resolve into a set of familiar paths and resting spots. The cat whose movements he is examining has, it turns out, three regular stopping points beyond its official home. “What we’ve learned,” he says, “is that the biggest secret in modern pet life isn’t that cats disappear—it’s that they are constantly found, by people who never realized they were part of the story. Our job is to give everyone just enough clarity to keep them safe, without taking away the mystery that made us curious in the first place.“