Quote:
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
Cats are dumb.
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Compared to what? Us? I'm not sure where I have this regard (maybe my 25+ year subscribtion to Nat'l Geo, or something else altogether perhaps) but among the animal kingdom, cats, ranging from regular housecats to the big predator cats, are near the top of the intelligience charts, even surpassing simians and some primates.
Also, this could be a good starter point to dispel such a broad claim (and hasty):
HowStuffWorks "Domestic Cats"
Quote:
They're reading into this too much.
First of all, it's a nursing home. So that alone makes it a bit easier than most places to predict that someone is going to die within hours or days.
Second, it's entirely possible that the people who were near death were treating the cat with extra kindness, knowing themselves that they weren't long for this world.
...or, perhaps, the cat was able to get more table scraps from these patients because, you know, maybe they lost their own appetites while in the throes of death.
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I also think that some of us are trying too hard to overthink this study (well, featured story really) and come up with scenarios that seem all too unlikely, just to ease our thought process and say to ourselves, "
well, if this, this and this play out, then this story amounts to little more than hogwash".
I don't see how feigning propped 'what-if' contemplations like the ones above helps any more than responding by saying where is the scientific basis for such a ridiculous claim as a feline harbinger of death? Neither is any more productive in ascertaining the root of the story and happenstances in which this cat has alleged fortold
imminent death.
Yes, at the moment, there is no scientific evidence of a certain receptor that allows a cat to hone in on the waking dead, but that may be more as a result of us never looking close enough to care. Or maybe this is a 1 in 500,000 occurrence that this particular has been embued with heightened recptors to the lingering signs of terminal, failing health in humans. This is an ongoing eerie circumstance, and with more instances in which this cat is able to certainly provide further correct cases of declining mortality, the more intriguing (and supposedly stronger) it actually becomes.
I just take the word of the reporters and with what the hospital staff have witnessed thus far, and make my inferences from there. It's not altogether unlikely that this one cat has better senses than you or I, but to detect death? I may like to know more him in the future, even if it is found out that all cats have this innate ability, yet only this one cat was able to properly make use of it (if by only freaking out the entire hospital staff at first).