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Oscar senses death coming
01/10/2007 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
A number of sources, says Mark, including Science News and the BBC News have been reporting about Oscar, the Providence, Rhode Island nursing home cat who can sense the coming of death. It seems that Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center adopted Oscar. The idea is that animals around a nursing home tend to cheer up their patients. Well, that is true in theory, anyway. Oscar it appears is not the most social of cats. He is usually very much a loner. However, he becomes much more social and seems to want to be fondled and to comfort those who are soon to die. He purrs, cuddles, and nuzzles people who are otherwise engaged in the sad business of dying. Humans may not be sure that the person is dying, but Oscar has an infallible sense. There will be weeks when three people die, and Oscar is there nuzzling up to each. Then next three weeks nobody will die and Oscar will spend the week by himself.
How does Oscar know who will live and who are about to die? As some have quipped, it may be that seeing Oscar the death-seeking cat coming for a patient is enough to put that patient over. Probably more likely is that there may be an aroma, undetectable to humans associated with death. A cat has a better sense of smell than a human does by quite a bit. So why do we allow packaged cat food to be so malodorous?
Dogs have a better sense of smell than do cats, leading one to wonder why dogs do not appear to smell human death when some cats do. Perhaps it is something different in dog psychology that they do not acknowledge death in humans the way cats do. Maybe dogs have more tact or may easily go into denial.
This whole issue of heightened animal knowledge is a fascinating one. One wonders what animals sense that we do not. We know that there are dogs who can be trained to sniff out narcotics. More recently they also have been used to successfully sniff out which patients have cancer. What is probably true is that most species of animals get a mix of senses at varying degrees of sensitivity and their worldview is made up of these senses.
There's an old saying: "A leaf fell in the forest. An eagle saw it. A deer heard it. A bear smelled it." Well, this tells us two things. First it tells us that each of these animals has some sense that is much more powerful than the corresponding sense in humans. Eagles (well, all birds) have amazing vision. I had never heard before that deer have really super-hearing, but it would make sense. They can direct their ears and they live by their hearing. When it comes to the sense of smell bears are even better than dogs are who are better than cats are who are far better than humans are.
The saying also tells us that these senses overlap to a very great extent. What seeing tells the eagle, hearing tells the deer, and smell tells the bear. This strongly determines how an animal envisions the world. Most humans get the majority of their information from sight. We even have the word "vision" within "envision". If I told you to memorize the room you are in, most likely you would mentally photograph it. You would memorize where light was coming from and what objects you saw. What does the window smell like?
You probably would have no idea. A dog would probably map the room in a very different way. Well yes there are probably some tables and some other things. But it would be something like, "Over here somebody has stood who has just come in from the garage. Last week somebody spilled some sweet liquid on the floor just over there. Somebody a few rooms away has opened a window." Well, you get the idea of the odour-map.
I guess in theory there are four kinds of heightened sensitivity of senses, not all of which may be real, but we do not know.
--Better knowledge processing: One might make better use of senses we have in common. I am reading a story with a superb native tracker. He sees things other people miss. Sherlock Holmes looking at a room supposedly might observe what we only see. He just looks at what we could perceive with more intelligence and is able to draw better conclusions. At least it makes for good stories.
--More acute senses: An animal may have senses we have but in more intense forms. A bloodhound can track a fugitive by the smell of the ground he has walked on.
--Additional senses: We can certainly find animals that lack some of the senses we have. A cave lizard is blind. There is no reason to believe we have all the senses that there are. It is just hard to imagine what those senses are and how they would be perceived. It is like trying to describe colour to a blind man. Birds supposedly can feel the magnetic lines of force of the Earth and use them to navigate. It has been suggested that dogs have something someone dubbed "air tasting" that gives them some knowledge that we are not privy to. It is very hard to decide if this is really another sense or a sensitive use of one of the five senses we share in common.
--Psychic knowledge: There may be ways of knowing things that go beyond perceiving by senses. Nobody knows much of what that might be. What makes this hard to study is that fact that the world is full of proven charlatans who claim to have psychic powers. Some can be very convincing.
(Aside: I cringe to see my town school system sending around a brochure of evening courses they including one that is "Have A Psychic Reading: Discover Secrets Of Your Personality And Future" and another "Spirit Encouters: How To Communicate With Loved Ones That Have Crossed Over". They are not so hot on teaching some of their sixteen-year-olds the multiplication tables, but they are right at the forefront of teaching locals how to get psychic readings.)
I tend to be very sceptical about psychic phenomenon. A local psychic had to shut down her reading business when an unexpected windstorm destroyed her illuminated glass store sign. A cheap piece of plywood on each side would have protected it, but who knew? I suppose she might have just shut down rather than go to the expense to repair the sign, but I prefer to think her business was destroyed by irony.
I hold these sceptical attitudes in spite of having some "psychic blood" in my veins. Family legend says my father's mother could see death in people's faces. Supposedly on November 21, 1963, she saw John Kennedy on the news and said, "My God, there's death in his eyes." She never taught me how to recognize it. But Oscar has the knack.
Mark R. Leeper
© Mark R. Leeper 2007
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