Comments on: Nursing home cat identifies terminal patients?

By: Dave UK

Dave UK — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:38:28 +0000

Excellent logical conclusion to this story:

http://www.dailyredundancy.com/archives/1031.html

By: Irishman

Irishman — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:13:12 +0000

I don’t think he means they stop treating them. I think it’s more an attitude thing.

By: Marlayna

Marlayna — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:00:13 +0000

“Itâ€™s conceivable that after a few â€œluckyâ€ events where the cat attends a patient who died, some staff start believing that the cat predicts death, and treat the feline-attracting patient accordingly, thus accelerating the progression to death.”

Tell me you’re kidding!

Even if they were pretty sure the patient was going to die sooner than expected, why for the love of God would they stop treating them?

By: Drbuzz0

Drbuzz0 — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:56:41 +0000

Have we established that the cat is predicting the deaths and not somehow killing the patients? Perhaps the cat is covered in ricin or is radioactive or has been infected with some highly contagious cross-species virus.

By: Irishman

Irishman — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:10:27 +0000

Ken G said:
> I have two comments: first, great reporting BA, but where did that last bit:
â€ Itâ€™s times like those that peopleâ€™s minds are more easily swayed by things that arenâ€™t true, but that we wish were true.â€
come from? I think though dost protest too much. Are you suggesting that a dying person who has a cat curl up with them *wants* to believe they are dying? Or are you talking about the calming effect of a cat when someone is deeply illâ€“ but you yourself mentioned that is a perfectly plausible fact! So I think you kind of threw that in as a non sequitur, which is a bit of overkill for a skeptical position.

Phil’s talking about the attitude of the staff and families, attributing to the cat the motivation of caring for the dying patients.

By: Irishman

Irishman — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:04:35 +0000

For those of you proposing that the cat enjoys dying patients because they don’t bug him, you are explaining why the cat picks them, but not how.

The hospice staff think the cat is standoffish and doesn’t like people. They think the cat doesn’t spend a lot of time with the non-dying patients. Now maybe there’s some confirmation bias or “full moon effect” going on, but the pattern seems to indicate the cat only hangs out with the soon to die. How does the cat know those are the patients that won’t bug him?

I did consider the possibility the cat is contributing to the deaths. I hope that has been investigated. However, I would expect there to be some connecting symptoms if that were the case. No one seems to notice the pattern of every patient dying by anaphalaxic shock, or suffocation with cat hairs in their mouths, etc., so that link seems sketchy.

Is it possible the cat is responding to the behavior of staff/family of the patients, how different they behave? Perhaps, but the article suggests that sometimes the families and staff are alerted by the cat, rather than the other way around. Note that all the patients are terminally ill, so predicting their death is not a matter of if but when. The cat seems to have better timing, more accurate than the staff. This matches the description of occurrence 13, where the nurse observed the patient nearing death, and the cat showed up at the 2 hour mark.

I’m leaning toward biochemical.

By: The Kitten of Doom [Respectful Insolence] · Articles

The Kitten of Doom [Respectful Insolence] · Articles — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:45:54 +0000

[...] senses something common to people who are within hours of death, but to do answer this question, as Phil Plait points out this is what we would need to [...]