Psychic Kitty - Qu’est-ce que c’est?
Apparently, there’s a cat at a nursing home in the US that can predict when patients are going to die, and it’s somewhat baffling the doctors.
According to the author of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far… Staff now alert the families of residents when he sits down next to their ailing loved one.BBC News
Although rather disappointingly one of the doctors at the home, while acknowledging the cat’s prowess, thinks the answer is more likely to be biochemical rather than psychic.
If you wanted to investigate the thing scientifically, I suppose the thing here would be to question things like from how far away can the cat sense death? How long in advance? Is it always the same sort of condition, or a variety of conditions? Can the cat sense when people are about to die suddenly, are just people in the process of ’slipping away’?
Well, bollocks to that.
The biomedical answer seems like a pretty decent candidate to me, but as it’s the least interesting of the possibilities, I am instead going to explore two other options:
- Appointment With Death
- Is it just that Terry Pratchett’s idea of the Grim Reaper being a cat-lover is accurate? In other words, Grim will phone up the cat before hand, tell him about the impending demise of whichever patient, and then arrange to bring a bit of invisible fish along if the cat sits on the right bed just to be doubly sure that old Grim doesn’t get the wrong person by mistake. Or maybe the cat notices the ‘Grim Reaper flap’ clattering?
- Psycho Kitty — Qu’est-ce que c’est?
- Or is it something more sinister? Is it actually the cat that is murdering all these people in their beds, but trying to make them look like natural deaths? After all, I bet no-one would think twice about seeing the cat in the medicine room without authorisation…
See, who want’s a boring biomedical explanation when you can either have the Grim Reaper turning up with scythe, or a homicidal psycho (jungle) cat…
Hello. I am 
Maybe they are dieing because the cat sits next to them! Has any one thought of that. Maybe the cat is sucking the life from these people!
Sorry just read the rest of the post. I need to keep my comment pants on
And of course there’s the really boring possibility: maybe the cat is not really identifying the people who are dying. This calls for a double-blind test - poke out the cat’s eyes and the doctor’s eyes and see what happens.
is the cat mentioned in the wills of any of these patients?
i think you’ll find the conclusion to the investigation therein.
elementary my dear watson, now take him away.