Oscar the Therapy Cat

I have blogged before about animals' uncanny ability to sense the supernatural in ways that people can not.  One of my favorite examples of this is Oscar.   Oscar is a therapy cat that  lives at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island.  Oscar has been doing rounds at this nursing home since 2007.  He walks from patient to patient and sniffs them and when he finds a patient that is near death,  Oscar stops and curls up next to that patient.   Oscar has been reliable in his predictions of death since 2007.    He has never been wrong.

So reliable and fascinating are Oscar's predictions that he has been featured in the very prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.  Doctor's compete for years to get a piece of a publication placed in this journal, but Oscar topped them all.  One of the first cases involved a patient who had a blood clot in her leg that was ice cold at the time. Oscar wrapped his body around her leg and stayed until the woman died. In another instance, the doctor had made a determination of impending death based on the patient's condition, while Oscar simply walked away, causing the doctor to believe that Oscar's streak (12 at the time) had ended. However, it would be later discovered that the doctor's prognosis was simply 10 hours too early – Oscar later visited the patient, who died two hours later.

Oscar's stories are so prolific that an entire book has been written about him, he has been featured on CNN, he was featured in an episode of House,  and he has been on CBS.  Doctor's and scientists have struggled to explain Oscar, but to me the answer is easy.   Cat's see things we don't.  They see ghosts and they know when death is coming.