Grim rea-purr: The cat that can predict death

The footsteps down the corridor of the Steere House Nursing And Rehabilitation Centre are light but purposeful as Oscar makes his way towards the end of the hallway and stops outside room 310.

The door is pulled firmly shut and, untroubled, he sits down outside it, and waits some 25 minutes until a nurse's aide appears, her arms full of dirty linen.

"Ah, Oscar," she smiles, and with a nod, almost as if she were expecting him, allows him to pass into the room where a frail elderly lady, her body ravaged by cancer, is sleeping fitfully. Oscar sniffs ostentatiously around, resists the blandishments of the relatives gathered round the bedside, struts out and continues on his round. For the lady in room 310, the time has not yet come.

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Oscar was raised in the nursing home

The patient in the next room into which Oscar pokes his grey-and-white head is not so lucky. This time, Oscar weighs the situation carefully, then leaps on to the bed and curls up beside the woman lying in it.

A few moments later he is spotted, snuggled up there, by a passing nurse who immediately raises the alarm, not kick-starting a security alert to rid the ward of an unwanted intruder but a frenetic flurry of activity as medical records are fetched, a priest is called, and relatives are alerted to the likelihood of the patient's imminent demise.

Because Oscar, as everyone in this nursing home is agreed, has special powers - more even than the doctors and palliative care specialists who come to tend to the terminally ill here.

For like a harbinger of bad news, Oscar is able to discern the exact moment at which the angel of death comes to stand at their bedside. It is an unusual skill, certainly. All the more so because Oscar is just a cat.

The fluffy, two-year-old, grey and white brindled pet was adopted by the dementia unit at the home in Rhode Island and named by its residents after a famous American hot dog brand.

Oscar curls up next to patients who have just a few hours to live

Yet his skills of divination are beyond question - and have even been the subject of an article in as august a publication as the New England Journal Of Medicine. To date he has predicted the deaths of 25 patients, and done so with such accuracy that he has completely won the trust of even the initially incredulous medical staff.

"This cat really seems to know when patients are about to die," says Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician at Rhode Island hospital who also attends patients at Steere House.

"We started to see something was happening about 18 months ago and at first I think we were all very sceptical. But it's not an unusual occurrence for patients to die here, so we've had plenty of opportunities to witness and observe the phenomenon."

The first signals come as early as two days beforehand, when Oscar leaves his usual favourite solitary spots under a doctor's desk or sunbathing in the windows of an empty office and begins doing his rounds, padding round the corridors of the unit, visiting patients but never lingering.

"When somebody's not ready to die, he leaves," says Dr Dosa. "He doesn't settle in their room until the day they die. Sometimes it can be as much as four hours beforehand, but he's universally there, curled up on their bed, two hours before they take their last breath."

Oscar was just a kitten, a small, stray bundle of fur, when he arrived at the home in July 2005, and since then he has not failed to spot a single death. On occasions, his skills have been sorely tested, for example when a visiting palliative care expert, Dr Joan Teno of Brown University, noticed that a patient seemed to be running out of time.

"I think it was around the 13th patient," she says. "Their breathing had changed, and their extremities were cooling. We'd already noticed Oscar seemed to have form in predicting when someone was about to die so I asked if he'd been in. Mary the nurse said, 'No' and I said, 'Oh, let's put him in there and let him keep his streak going.'

"So we did. Oscar went in, sniffed around - and promptly left the room. The next morning I asked how things had gone overnight and was told the patient had died at 2.30am - about ten hours after I'd predicted. And Oscar had gone back into the room, and stayed there, two hours beforehand. So he's obviously a better prognosticator than I am."

As far as those who work there are aware, there is only one death at which Oscar has not been present - and that wasn't because he didn't notice it, but because relatives of the patient asked for him to be removed from the room.

Oscar has predicted 25 cases

Standing outside, Oscar began such a noisy commotion of frenzied caterwauling, miaowing and scratching at the door that he had to be removed from the unit. Clearly, he wanted to be in the room and was not happy about being told he had to stay away.

His insistence was all the more peculiar because although Oscar purrs contentedly as he nestles close to those who have just hours to live, he normally prefers to stay aloof from human company.

As Dosa puts it, "Oscar is not usually particularly friendly. He actually doesn't like spending time with either patients or staff. Sure, you can usually bribe him with some food if you want to, but that's about it."

So what draws him so strongly towards those who are nearing the very end of their lives?

"That's actually the most puzzling part of it," observes Daniel Mills, a specialist in veterinary behavioural medicine at Lincoln University. He believes the idea that a cat, or indeed another animal, might be able to intuitively sense the proximity of death is not nearly as fanciful as it seems.

"Animals are particularly sensitive to a whole range of cues of which we are not always aware and can pick up on minute chemical changes," he explains. "For example, you can train a dog to predict an epilepsy fit in a patient before they even sense it themselves, or even detect cancer, so it seems reasonable to suppose you might be able to train a cat to detect that a person was terminally ill, particularly as they have such a good sense of smell.

"The challenge is that it's hard to see what the cat might get out of it. After all, the person they've gone to sit with dies - so why should it engage in that sort of behaviour?"

He postulates that one 'admittedly far-fetched' reason might be that metabolism changes shortly before a person dies, "and often the body makes a last-ditch surge. So perhaps they get a little warmer, and the cat seeks them out because of that. It would be very interesting, macabre though it sounds, to see video footage of this happening, to get a better insight."

Others have also speculated that the cat might be responding to physical signals - subtle changes in smells and hormones - not fully understood by humans but detectable to the whiskery feline nose.

Laurie Cabot, the 'official witch' of Salem, Massachusetts, where the infamous 17th century witchcraft trials were held, has another theory.

In her view, Oscar is acting as a 'familiar' - the term witches of old used to refer to the cats who were their constant companions - which means that he is in psychic communication with the patients he visits.

"He knows they are going to die because he is picking up on their brainwaves," says Cabot, a descendant of a family that arrived in America on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims. "Science has found that the brainwaves of cats never go into Beta mode, they are always in Alpha. And it is in the Alpha range that all psychic things happen.

"This little cat Oscar knows all the patients in the unit and he is trying to help them, just like the cats that I've always kept will curl up on my chest and try to heal me if I feel upset or am ill. In this case, though, Oscar is not trying to heal, he is clearly trying to help these people walk over into the other world."

Cabot might find further support for her theory in the fact that Oscar does not leave the patient after they have died, preferring to stay with the body until the undertaker arrives. Then those who have cared for the patient escort the corpse out in a procession to honour the patient. Oscar, because he lives in the locked dementia unit, is not allowed off the premises, but he always walks with the funereal procession to the door, and watches as it leaves.

Dr Teno shares Cabot's idea that Oscar is a compassionate cat, but she prefers a slightly more prosaic explanation for the way he behaves.

"He's not a bad omen," she says, "He comforts the dying patients - and what's striking is that, in a centre that offers a real gold-standard in end-of-life treatment, Oscar seems to be mimicking the behaviour of those who work there. He makes the room feel like more of a homely setting, and has become part of the soothing ritual."

Certanly, some relatives of those who have had the 'Oscar experience', feel his contribution was positive. "Oscar's presence gave a sense of completion and contentment," says Jack McCullough of East Providence, whose mother and aunt both died at Steere.

"What could be more peaceful than a purring cat? And what sound more beautiful to fill one's ears when leaving life? He brought a special serenity to the room."

Not everyone might agree; but although Oscar is the only one of the home's six cats to behave in this way, he might not be unique.

Since his story began to hit the American papers, his nursing home has received dozens of e-mails and letters from people all over the world who say they know a cat that appears to have similar powers.

And as long as Oscar continues to predict, rather than to curse, there can surely be no harm in it.

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