It is known that some animals can sense death. Rosalie Abryu, who studies the life of chimpanzees in captivity, described the following case: a young female died of illness, so the male was transplanted into another, distant cage.
He could neither see nor hear his girlfriend. However, the behavior of the male surprised everyone: he clung to the bars of the cage, as if he wanted to break them, then began to scream loudly and shrilly. What a scream it was!
“The male screamed for a long time, looking around, as if he knew about something, and then, when another chimpanzee died, he behaved the same way. He screamed and screamed and screamed. The chimpanzee's lower lip drooped, as if he saw something that is inaccessible to us. His scream was not at all like what I usually heard. His blood was cold,”Rosalie later said.
The behavior of vultures is also surprising, sometimes at a distance of many kilometers, unmistakably determining the place where the dying creature is. Scientists have long tried to find out how vultures manage to sense what is very far from them.
Hyenas and jackals are known to be attracted to the sounds and smells of a dying animal. However, the researchers suggested that the vultures pick up some kind of special signal in the air, so strong that the birds can easily detect even hidden prey. Thanks to their excellent vision, vultures can see any object from afar.
After a sick or wounded animal is found, the whole flock flocks to it, which sits at a distance, and then patiently and attentively watches the last movements of its agonizing victim. Long-term observations of the life of representatives of the fauna have allowed scientists to assert that a dying animal emits a powerful impulse only if it is subjected to violence.
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Thin-sensitive cats
The first place among animal predictors is rightfully taken by such a seemingly familiar creature for us as a domestic cat. Her unusual behavior during illness and at the time of the death of the owner was noted back in the Middle Ages. Often it was the death of the owner that caused the death of the animal itself.
In 1928, Minister of Commerce Maurice Kokanovsky died in a plane crash in France. At the same moment, his beloved cat died in terrible agony at his house. The day before the tragedy, the animal behaved very restlessly: it rushed around the house, refused to eat, and meowed loudly. After the autopsy of the cat, the veterinarian was unable to determine the true cause of death. In his opinion, the animal was perfectly healthy.
In a nursing home in Providence (USA) lives a cat Oscar, who senses when a person dies. Oscar is a loner by nature. Dislikes human society and is uncommunicative. But periodically he comes to sleep with this or that patient.
The cat entered the wards and sniffed patients, climbed up to them on the bed and always fell asleep at the feet of those people who were supposed to die in a few hours. If the cat could not enter the dying man's room, he began to scratch the door. The paramedics began to trust the cat Oscar so much that when they saw him sleeping on someone's bed, they called the patient's relatives so that they could come and say goodbye.
They say there were cases when the cat refuted the predictions of optimistic doctors. On one occasion, the doctors put Oscar on the bed with a patient whose death they were literally waiting for. But the cat jumped off and went to sleep with the man on the next bed. The man to whom Oscar went to sleep died a few hours later, but the first lived for several more days.
At first, doctors were afraid that because of such a cat, relatives would take their loved ones from the hospice, but the opposite happened. Relatives of the dying, are glad that there is such a cat. Many managed to say goodbye to their loved ones thanks to the cat, and they know that the cat will be next to the dying person to the last.
Many doctors have tried to explain this phenomenon, but their opinions are conflicting. Someone refers to the usual feline sensitivity, someone claims that it's all about special chemical reactions that occur in the body of a dying person, and Oscar catches them. Some even say that all the predictions of the cat are pure chance, but the fact remains that Oscar is a cat that feels the approach of death.
Plants
Until now, we were talking about higher animals - birds, monkeys, hyenas, cats. However, scientists say that other forms of living organisms, such as plants, can also sense death.
This was first discovered in 1966 by the American forensic scientist Cleve Baxter, who conducted experiments to identify emotions in plants. There were five plants in the room, one of which was connected to a lie detector. From time to time Baxter entered the room and tore off a leaf from any plant. When the researcher entered the room for the third time, he noted that the writing device, to which one flower was connected, recorded a signal at the moment the criminalist appeared in the room.
The plants seemed to sense when the forensic scientist approached them with the intent to harm them. Sometimes it seemed that they could read a person's mind. Despite the fact that Baxter's assumptions were not accepted with a bang in the scientific community, scientists became interested in this phenomenon and conducted a number of studies on the problem of plant response to certain stimuli.
So, the English biologist L. Watson in his laboratory, where there were indoor plants, conducted experiments to identify the "feeling of compassion" in plants.
For this, the scientist placed three philodendrons in separate sealed rooms. Each plant was connected to a writing device. In the fourth room, on the stove, there was a large pot of boiling water, next to it was a special device, with the help of which a large number of live ocean shrimps were dumped into the boiling water.
The rooms where the philodendrons were located were deserted, and no one knew exactly when the shrimp would be lowered into the water. As a result of previous experiments, Baxter made sure that plants can "read" some human thoughts. Watson pursued a different goal - to find out whether representatives of the flora are capable of perceiving the feelings of other living beings?
The scientist repeated the experiment with shrimp seven times. At the same time, in five cases, all writing devices recorded the manifestation of activity on the part of each plant at the very moment when the shrimps were thrown into the pan, which allowed Watson to assert with confidence: the plants catch the signals sent by living organisms at the time of death.
The biologist suggested that almost any organism at the time of its death - tragic, unexpected - sends a powerful impulse perceived by other organisms. This does not apply to cases of gradual, natural dying, to which plants could not react in any way.
