answer:How does one live? Why do we eat, drink, sleep and stay warm? We kind of just do… I don’t think there’s a gene in there that’s called “The gene for knowing how to pee in a yard” – more or less, our brains are constantly sending, receiving and processing information (little kitties brains are too). The receptors in your cats bladder sent the “time to go pee” message to his/her brain, your cat’s brain then said “Hmm…where to do this…”, then either received sensory optic data or just drew from memory that a nice open yard would be a reasonably ideal place to unload at. Then, viola! Pee. It all happens in less than a second. I think Neurology has a better shot at explaining this action than the study of the animal’s instinctive nature – unless you’re asking why your kitty did this in the yard and not on your bed… even then I’d still go with just Neurology. What I really wonder is how birds just know to create nests, or how they know to travel south for the winter. How feline animals instinctively know how to hunt (they all get low, in the same precise position before striking prey), etc. all sounds like more instinctual stuff to me.