Most cats judge you from a distance. Oscar was more specific. The question “can cats predict death?” keeps turning up online, and nearly every version of the answer leads back to one gray and white cat in Providence, Rhode Island.
The cat on the rounds
Oscar was adopted as a kitten by Steere House, a nursing and rehabilitation centre, where he lived in the unit for people with advanced dementia. In July 2007, geriatrician David Dosa of Brown University described him in an essay in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Oscar wasn't especially cuddly, by most accounts. But he would walk the unit, check on residents, and sometimes curl up on one person's bed and stay. Typically, Dosa said, he arrived a few hours before that person died, sometimes half a day. Dosa told Science News that Oscar had “predicted about 25 deaths and missed only one” over the previous year. Later retellings give higher totals, 50 or more than 100, and no two seem to agree.
Staff took it seriously enough to act on it. “It started as a ‘gee whiz’ kind of thing, but now we count on it,” Dosa said. When Oscar settled in, they could call the family.
So how would he know?
Nobody knows. Dosa's own verdict to WebMD was: “Your guess is as good as mine.”
The favourite theory is smell. “Cats can smell much better than people,” Texas A&M's Bonnie Beaver told Science News, adding that a person's odours may change near death. Vet Margie Scherk suspected a chemical released just before dying.
There are duller explanations too. Oscar may have been copying the staff, who gather around a dying resident. Or he may simply have liked very still people, since they make warm beds that don't kick.
What it doesn't prove
Oscar was one cat, in one building, watched by people who were already looking for a pattern. No controlled study has shown that cats can predict death, and a cat sitting on your bed today most likely means the bed is warm.
If he did know something, he told nobody. He just stayed, which on that unit counted for a lot.