A cat named Oscar, who lives in a nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island, has repeatedly proven that he can sense the impending death of a person. More than 50 cases have been documented when Oscar visited patients shortly before they died and spent the last minutes of his life with them.
The unique story of the visionary cat was told by Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University in the United States. According to the doctor, over the past six years, the cat has rarely made a mistake with the diagnosis. Sometimes even the medical staff made the wrong decisions, while Oscar accurately predicted death.
For the first time, Dr. Dosa told the world about an amazing animal in an article published by the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. Since then, the cat has foreseen more deaths, convincing doctors that what is happening is not just a series of coincidences.
Eventually David Dosa released a book describing his observations of the unique animal, entitled Making rounds with Oscar: The extraordinary gift of an ordinary cat.
The book describes a typical Oscar day. According to the author, the cat walks around the rooms of the nursing home throughout the day, rarely spending time in the company of old people who are still fighting for their lives.
If the cat presses against someone and settles down next to him, then with a high degree of probability this person will not be in the near future. Interestingly, Oscar starts to scratch the door of a closed room if there is a dying patient in it.
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One day Oscar came to a woman with a blood clot in her leg. He lay down on a cold limb and lay on it until the very death of the old woman. There was also a case when Oscar, having completed his "examination" and did not find anyone who needed help, returned a couple of hours later to escort a dying patient to another world.
To test the animal's paranormal gift, the nurses tried to put Oscar on the bed of a patient who, they assumed, was about to die. But the cat jumped out of bed and went to another. The man to whom Oscar had moved died that very evening. And the patient, whom the staff predicted a quick death, lived for several more days.
According to The Telegraph, in his book, Dr. Dosa does not try to give any scientific explanation of the cat's abilities. But he suggests that Oscar, like dogs smelling cancer cells, can smell ketones, the distinctively scent chemicals released by dying cells.
Jill Goldman, a California-based certified animal behaviorist, has another theory: the cat pays attention to the lack of mobility in humans and associates this with poor health. After all, it's not a secret for anyone that in this way domestic cats feel the illness of the owner.