About six months ago my family adopted a three year old male Bengal. His previous owners were having a lot of trouble with him peeing in inappropriate places and being destructive. Whatever was causing this type of behavior we haven't seen any of it since we got him. We re-named him Kiba and he is a wonderful addition to our home who we love dearly.

About three weeks ago Kiba ran outdoors and was gone for over a day. We live in a wooded rural area with lots of undeveloped forest. None of our neighbors saw him and we couldn't find him in any of the hiding spots around our house. We left our basement door open in hopes that he would come inside during the night and sure enough he was down there the next morning.

Just about the time we had all recovered from that scare Kiba escaped again. He got outside on the morning of Dec. 6th and just about the time we were sure a wild animal had caught him, he appeared in our basement, after 8 days outside with no sign of him. He is skin and bones, seems to be limping a bit, and is desperate to be petted and cuddled. He's showing every indication of having missed being at home so I'm at a loss as to why he didn't just come inside earlier.

Most of our cats have been indoor/outdoor (we have three others right now, all domestics we got at the shelter) and none of them have ever done anything like this. Our two oldest started out as indoor cats initially and eventually managed to escape outside so regularly (and boycotted the litter box so effectively) that we eventually just started letting them go out. The thing is even the first few times they got out they were always crying to be let in as soon as they got hungry/cold/tired, and none of them have ever been gone for an entire day.

I'm wondering if anyone has any idea why Kiba would be different when it comes to getting outside. According to his previous owners they actually tried to make him go outside an he was terrified and hated it. Could he have just been so confused he couldn't figure out that we'd let him in if he came to us? I'm just really at a loss as to why he'd go outside in the first place. Has anybody else had something like this happen? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. We have no idea how to keep this from happening again or how to help make it easier to find him if it does.

Has he been neutered?

That may be the problem.

How long had you kept him inside before he went out. Perhaps he needs more time to get used to his new surroundings.

Had this problem in a previous cat, he used to go missing, but ended up going back to our old house which was about 4 miles away.