(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Oscar, the cat who could predict death. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-06 I wrote this diary (my first!) in response to Tevye’s post about Scout, the dog who escaped from an animal shelter and took up residence at a care facility. It was too late for me to leave a comment in Tevye’s diary, but I thought people who enjoyed reading about Scout would also be interested in Oscar, a cat who lived in a nursing home and could predict the death of its residents. (The photo is not of Oscar — I couldn’t find one that was public domain — that’s my cat Tikka.) Oscar was born in 2005 and was adopted by the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Unlike Scout, though, Oscar wasn’t an overly friendly fellow. His talents lay elsewhere. Predicting when death will occur in a nursing home setting is difficult, and clinicians are often unable to inform a patient’s family of an impending death in a timely enough manner for them to say their goodbyes at the bedside of their loved one. This is where Oscar’s special talent provided an important service. Oscar would make his own rounds of all the wards in the nursing home, observing all the patients, but otherwise he would remain aloof. He would not seek out attention in the form of cuddles or treats from the patients, he would just observe them. He remained indifferent to most of them, most of the time, but when he did decide to lavish his attention upon one of them, by curling up beside them on their bed, it invariably meant that death was imminent. If Oscar walked into a patient’s room and decided to stay, that was a death knell. Oscar was so uncannily accurate in his assessments, in fact, that after about six months the staff realized that something very unusual was going on, and developed an Oscar-based protocol that involved calling the patient’s family in to the facility in anticipation of death if Oscar curled up on the patient’s bed. It seemed to the staff as if Oscar were trying to comfort people as they died. “His mere presence at the bedside,” wrote staff geriatrician Dr. David Dosa, “is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death.” Dr. Dosa later published a touching book about dementia – “Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.” The family of one patient that died while Oscar was in attendance reported: “it’s not that we trusted the cat more than the nurse. Not exactly. It was … well, there was just something about Oscar. He seemed so convinced of what he was doing. He was so clear in his intention and his dedication.” And Joan Teno, a physician at Steere House, remarked that “it's not that the cat is consistently there first [before staff]. But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours.” As of 2015, it was believed that Oscar had accurately predicted 100 deaths. No one knows how Oscar could predict impending death, but some have speculated that he might have been picking up on a particular smell given off by the body as its cells began to shut down. No such material explanation works, however, for the abilities of some other cats (and dogs) who appear to know, through no normal means, when their owners are about to return home. In 2011 biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book entitled “Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home,” in which he documented a series of experiments that explored dogs’ (and cats’, and even horses’) abilities to predict when their owners formed the mental intention to return home. Sheldrake found that dogs were the most responsive, and would move to a window or some other favourite place at the precise moment that their owners, who were many miles away, received a randomly-timed phone call from the experimenters to begin their homeward journey. One story that Sheldrake recounts is of a mother who always knew when to put her son’s lunch on, even though he worked as a merchant marine, and had no regular hours. But the mother would always know when the son was on his way home because the cat, with whom the son was very close, would always move to a certain spot beside the door about an hour before the son walked in, giving her time to prepare the meal. The emotional connection between a person and their pet turned out to be vitally important. The closer the emotional connection, the stronger the effect noted by Sheldrake. Here is a 5-minute YouTube video (in German with English subtitles) that shows how Sheldrake’s experiment worked with a dog called Jaytee. Two time-synchronized cameras were utilized, one taking footage of Jaytee at home, while the other followed Sheldrake’s research assistant Pam Smart around town. By comparing time stamps, it was possible to pinpoint the exact moment when Pam began her return journey, and simultaneously observe Jaytee’s reaction as he waited at home. Feats like Oscar’s and Jaytee’s demonstrate abilities of consciousness, such as telepathy and precognition, that should be impossible under the mainstream scientific paradigm of materialism. And yet those abilities exist, and have been well documented by scientists like Sheldrake and many others. Consciousness has abilities that science cannot explain, or doesn’t want to. One would think that science would be intrigued by findings like Sheldrake’s, but the official stance of science is that consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of matter, and so the evidence is ignored. That, in my opinion, is a great shame. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/6/2197683/-Oscar-the-cat-who-could-predict-death?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/