Couldn't resist posting this one! From the BBC News website
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6917113.stm
This is the summary...
"A US cat with an apparent ability to sense when a nursing home's residents are about to die is baffling doctors."
and this is interesting...
"The case is the subject of a study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine."
Any chance one of our research ferrets could find the actual article?
Couldn't get any further...Volume 357:328-329 July 26, 2007 Number 4
Next
A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat
David M. Dosa, M.D., M.P.H.
Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.
Oscar the Cat awakens from his nap, opening a single eye to survey his kingdom. From atop the desk in the doctor's charting area, the cat peers down the two wings of the nursing home's advanced dementia unit. All quiet on the western and eastern fronts. Slowly, he rises and extravagantly stretches his 2-year-old frame, first backward and then forward. He sits up and considers his next move.
In the distance, a resident approaches. It is Mrs. P., who has been living on the dementia unit's third floor for 3 years now. She has long forgotten her family, even though . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Source Information
Dr. Dosa is a geriatrician at Rhode Island Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University — both in Providence
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/357/4/328
Perhaps Mongrel could help?
Doesn't read like a 'scientific' article, does it? Although it does seem to be in a 'proper' journal. However, I would like to know how far this particular 'study' has been taken - it's a very common belief amongst cat-owners that their animals show concern when they are ill. Instances of this are anecdotal, of course, but a cat in a nursing-home could be an interesting case - if it's studied properly, that is.
But in a nursing home....people die on an almost weekly basis????
Is it my imagination, or do I remember reading an article about how dogs can be trained to sniff for cancer? Might this not be a similar phenomena?
Dr B - yes of course people die regularly. Tch. This is why I thought this might be a good case study - if we could read it - the suggestion being made is that the cat only sits with people just before they die. In the enclosed confines of a nursing home it should have been relatively easy to map the cat's daily movements systematically and show that this suggestion was true - or not.
I am, admittedly, bothered by the storified quality of the opening lines, but would still like to read it.
Is there actually a claim that this cat does this due to psychic ability?
Of course this just looks like reports of observations of the cat's behaviour so we could simply be dealing with the usual things like confirmation bias, recall bias etc.
Having said that, whenever I see stories like this I'm never particularly amazed by them. Animals tend to have far better senses than we have (especially hunting animals like cats and dogs) so if there are physiological changes that occur in people with medical problems, particularly those that produce odours, I don't see why animals shouldn't be able to detect them when we can't.
It would be scientifically interesting if this cat were electronically chipped and its movements monitored 24 hours a day and then a correlation between its movements, sleeping pattern, and deaths in humans were looked at.
As an anecdote:
My Mam told me a story, that a friend told her about her friend (FOAF story), of a dog that started acting oddly around a man one evening. Whimpering and all that (the dog not the man, he wasn't married
) all evening long.
The man had a heart attack during the night. He survived but the behaviour of the dog was seen as a (retrofitted) warning sign.
I have no idea how accurate this story is but assuming it's true, I don't see it as being paranormal in any way. It could just be the superior senses that dogs have compared to us.
So, if this cat story is true, or at least accurate, then I would say it's down to the superior physical senses that cats possess rather than any psychic ability they have.
That would be my experimental hypothesis, but then again, I'm no Rupert Sheldrake.
.
Oh, bugger! I thought you just had to do it once, and that was IT.Originally Posted by Dr B
:-)
Weekly reincarnation?
I think Dr B's onto something here.
.
So, the cat sleeps next to people just before they die - this is a correlation right?
So, does people dying cause the cat to sleep next to them, or does the cat sleeping next to them cause them to die?
Correlation does not imply causation (!)
It could be either way around. I'd have it put down to be on the safe side.
.
Perhaps...
A lot of people are allergic to cats.
Cats seem to know who is allergic to them and generally hang around them in order to make them suffer.
So...
This cat, knowing that some of these people are allergic, chooses to go and sit by them, triggering an allergic / asthmatic reaction and causing their deaths.
Therefore, the cat is not sensing impending death, it's causing the deaths.
[note to self - don't post stream of consciousness stuff....]
Last edited by Dr B; 27th July 2007 at 09:52 AM. Reason: clarity
I know a nurse who nurses terminally ill people untill they die - she said that the act of death has a "smell" and she knows when her patient is going....I'm not a nurse so I don't know...
But they are all going to die are they not? After all, it is the terminally ill? ???
Of course - but I'm talking about the moments before the act of death (if you can call it that)
Her patients only die once!
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