Oscar (therapy cat)
Oscar (born 2005) is a therapy cat who lives at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence , Rhode Island . She achieved worldwide fame through the specialist in geriatrics and assistant professor at Brown University David Dosa. Dosa wrote in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine that Oscar had unimagined skills. He could predict the death of palliative care patients. Dosa found no explanation for the cat's unusual behavior. He looked for explanations in the restricted musculoskeletal system of the dying and in the cat's sense of smell, which could possibly smell ketones , i.e. biochemicals that are released from dying cells. Dosa also wrote Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat about the hangover.
Life
Oscar was adopted as a kitten from an animal shelter by the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in the geriatric facility, which primarily cares for end-of-life Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients. The 41-bed house adopted five other cats at the same time after the first therapy cat Henry (named after the institution's founder, Henry J. Steere ) died.
After about six months, the staff noticed that Oscar, like the doctors and nurses, was making his own “rounds”. Oscar sniffed a few patients and then lay down with them to sleep. The patients he lay with died a few hours later. One of the first cases that caught the attention of the nurses was a patient with a thrombosis in her leg who was already very cold. The cat wrapped around her leg and stayed with her until she died. In another case, a doctor predicted an earlier death than the hangover that just kept going. But the doctor was ultimately wrong, the cat visited the patient a little later. Oscar's accuracy (25 matches known at the time of the article) resulted in staff calling family members when the hangover lay down with the patient.
Oscar stays with the patients until they die. Then he runs silently out of the room. However, some relatives do not want that. When asked out, he paces up and down the door and meows loudly. However, he is not particularly kind to living people. This is how Dosa described a case when an elderly person tried to stroke the cat. He hissed at the patient.
The hangover is said to have predicted about 50 cases (as of 2010).
Explanatory approaches
Joan Teno, a professor at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School who visits Steere House regularly, confirmed Dosa's report. Dosa's thesis, supported by Teno, is that the cat is sensitive to the smell of death produced by certain chemicals. Other supporters of this thesis are Margie Schenk, a veterinarian from Vancouver, and Jill Goldman, a behaviorist from Laguna Beach . Goldmann adds that the cat has grown up among dying people since childhood and is therefore familiar with death.
Daniel Estep, also an animal behaviorist from Littleton , believes that cats are more likely to respond to dying people's sedentary lifestyle. Thomas Graves, a feline expert, told the BBC that cats have a sense of when their owners are bad and that the cat can therefore predict death. He compared Oscar's ability to cats being able to predict weather or earthquakes.
Pop culture attention
The case became internationally known and taken up in various pop-cultural contexts:
- Stephen King used Oscar as a motif in his Shining sequel Doctor Sleep .
- Oscar was on an episode of the Discovery Channel series Just Unearthly! to see.
- An Oscar-inspired story is featured in When the Cat Comes (Season 5, Episode 18) directed by Dr. House to see
- the punk band Tacocat from Seattle dedicated their song Psychic Death Cat to the cat
literature
- David Dosa: Oscar: What a hangover teaches us about life and death . Droemer HC: 2010. ISBN 978-3-426-27470-5
- David Dosa: Making the Rounds with Oscar . Headline Publishing Group 2009. ISBN 978-0-7553-1813-1
Web links
- Oscar on the side of the Steere House
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tom Leonard: Cat predicts 50 deaths in RI nursing home , The Daily Telegraph . February 1, 2010.
- ↑ Maideline Sanchez: Just-Released Book Profiles Feline Angel of Death. (No longer available online.) In: The Charger Bulletin. University of New Haven , January 31, 2010; archived from the original on July 6, 2015 ; Retrieved July 5, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b c d Cat's "Sixth Sense" Predicting Death? CBS News , July 25, 2007; accessed March 20, 2009 .
- ↑ a b c David Dosa: A day in the life of Oscar the cat . In: NEJM . No. 357 , 2007, p. 328 f ., doi : 10.1056 / NEJMp078108 ( pdf ).
- ↑ Cat senses impending death The Register, July 26, 2007
- ↑ US cat 'predicts patient deaths' BBC News , July 26, 2007.
- ↑ Stephen King unearths origin of 'The Shining' sequel 'Doctor Sleep'. EW.com, February 1, 2013, accessed July 5, 2015 .
