In an article published on the Telegraph.co.uk on February 1st, a story reveals how a cat has managed to predict some fifty deaths in a Rhode Island nursing home. A cat named Oscar has the strange ability to detect when the patients in the nursing home are going to die and the cat will often curl up by the patients that will die during their final hours.
According to an assistant professor from Brown University and a geriatrician, Dr. David Dosa, Oscar has been monitored for a period of five years and the records indicate that the cat is hardly ever wrong in terms of predicting patients’ deaths. Oscar is not a social creature and he was adopted when he was a kitten. He now resides at a nursing home for people suffering from extreme dementia: the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center located in Providence.
The information about Oscar’s predictive capabilities was first documented in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Dosa in the year 2007. Since that time, Oscar has predicted an additional 25 deaths with complete accuracy. Oscar does not spend any time with patients that are not near death and only approaches those that are very close to dying. What’s more, if a patient is near death and Oscar cannot get into the room because of a closed door, the cat will scratch at the door in order to get in.
In one incident the nurse put the cat near a patient that they believed was very close to death. The cat would not remain by the patient and instead, headed off to another room and to a different patient who later died the same evening. The patient that the nurses believed was dying did not die for another two days. It has gotten to the point that when Oscar curls up with a patient, family and loved ones are immediately notified. Dr. Dosa suggests that Oscar, much like dogs that can actually smell cancer, may have the ability to smell ketones, the odored biochemicals generated by dying cells.
So is it something physical that the cat is capable of like smelling ketones or is it that the animal has some kind of psychic abilities. I’m leaning toward the latter. The fact that the nursing home has several other cats and none of them do what Oscar does kind of defeats the argument that cats can smell ketones from dying cells. It would certainly be interesting to see more research into the matter. Is it something the cat psychically senses or is there really something physical that makes Oscar unique? Animals have the ability to detect earthquakes before humans do and they can even sense when really bad weather is coming, so is there something about the death experience that animals can also sense? In Tails of the Afterlife: True Stories of Ghost Pets, author Peggy Schmidt writes of an incident where a dog’s puppies, sensing their father’s death, all began to howl simultaneously just before the dog’s passing and that the puppies didn’t stop howling until after the dog passed on. Clearly, some animals have the ability to sense death. What’s most interesting is that some animals respond to what they sense while other animals illustrate no response at all.
Find out more about Oscar.
Find out more about Tails of the Afterlife: True Stories of Ghost Pets by Peggy Schmidt.
