Weird Island

68. ANIMALS: Oscar, the Cat Who Could Predict Death

Episode Summary

Oscar seemed like an ordinary kitten when he was adopted by Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation center in Providence, RI. But the staff and residents at Steere House quickly suspected Oscar had a unique ability. He seemed to be able to predict when someone was going to die. Heads up, this episode is more speculative than usual. And it includes a lot of talk of death. Keep that in mind while listening.

Episode Notes

Heads up, this episode is more speculative than usual. And it includes a lot of talk of death. Keep that in mind while listening.

Episode Source Material - Oscar

General on Cats

Death and Diseases, further info

Predicting Death

Studies on Scents

Bio-Detection Dogs

Therapy Animals / Our Relationship with Animals

Other Animal Abilities

Episode Transcription

Animals have some pretty incredible abilities. Throughout history, dating as far back as 373 BC, people have noticed that animals seem to have this uncanny ability to predict natural disasters. Greek historian Thucydides wrote that mice, weasels, snakes and centipedes fled the city of Helike (Hell-iki) days before it was hit by an earthquake. Scientists today are still studying this same phenomenon, some with the goal of actually using animals as an early warning system. In an earthquake prone region in central Italy, researchers tracked the movement patterns of cows, sheep and dogs and showed that they were significantly more restless in the hours before earthquakes. Another study found that a colony of toads deserted their mating site three days before an earthquake struck. And it’s not just natural disasters that animals can sense. Studies on some species of sharks suggest they may actually read Earth’s magnetic field like a map to navigate the open seas. And there’s even this type of beetle that can detect infrared radiation from as far as 50 miles away. So, there is pretty compelling evidence that animals perceive a variety of things that we don’t, even if we don’t always understand how they do it.
But a natural disaster, like an earthquake. There are things we can wrap our minds around there, because there are some signs before an earthquake happens that an animal could, conceivably, pick up on–like atmospheric changes or even certain smells. But back in 2007, an article came out about this Rhode Island cat with an ability that seemed even more mysterious and uncanny than being able to predict an earthquake.
This cat’s name was Oscar. And Oscar could predict when people were going to die.
I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of RI. And this week, I’ll be telling you about Oscar–the cat who could predict death. And sharing some speculation on how that might have been possible.
Oscar was adopted as kitten. Not by an individual or a family. But by the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, RI. He wasn’t the first cat to make Steere House his home. Years before, in 1991, when the current facility was being built, a stray cat started hanging around the construction site, living in the unfinished building and stealing scraps of food from workers. When the building was done, the cat waltzed right into the lobby and made himself at home. At first, the staff tried to shoo him away. But day after day, he kept returning, until finally the staff gave in. They named him Henry, after the organization’s benefactor, Henry Steere–and he became a staple of the Steere House community. In the 10 or so years that he lived there, the nursing home became increasingly animal-friendly. And when he passed away, his loss was felt acutely not only by the staff, but by the residents and their families–who asked if new pets would be brought in to replace Henry.
Not long after, six cats were adopted, along with a handful of other animals. Oscar was one of them. He and a kitten named Maya were each adopted from separate newspaper advertisements, and they took up residence on Steere Home’s third floor–which was dedicated to the care of patients and their families dealing with the late stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and other related dementia disorders.
Maya was described as a sweet and loving girl, but Oscar–well, he was a bit of a grouch, as his name might imply. He was initially described as a “sort of very scared cat, who wouldn’t really like to come out.”
But, then something began to change. Nurses noticed Oscar began emerging more from his typical hiding spots in the supply closet or under a bed, to curl up on the beds of certain patients.
Geriatrician Dr. David Dosa wrote a book about his experience with Oscar, and in it, he describes how, one morning, a nurse asked him to stop by and see a patient. The woman was about 80 years old, and had been living on the unit for about 18 months. Three months before, she began losing weight–and had been diagnosed with colon cancer.
When the doctor entered the room, he found the patient resting and everything seemed fairly normal. So, he asked the nurse if there was anything she was specifically concerned about. She just pointed to the cat curled up against the woman’s right leg. While it sounded silly, she had noticed that recently Oscar seemed to show up just before patients passed away. An hour or two prior to their death, he would saunter into the room, leap onto the bed, and curl up with them. So, while this patient seemed relatively stable, she wondered if the cat perhaps knew something she didn’t.
Dr. Dosa examined the patient, and saw no major reason for concern. He wasn’t sold that the cat being there meant anything, so he brushed the superstition aside and continued on with his rounds. Not long after, as he left the hospital, he received a call from the nurse–letting him know that the patient had passed away less than an hour after his visit.
“David,” she said, her tone grave, “I really think the cat knows.”
Over time, Dr. Dosa became convinced as well. In 2007, he published a short article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Oscar’s abilities, in which he stated that Oscar had correctly predicted 25 consecutive deaths. Dosa stated that Oscar’s appearance always seemed to be in the last 2 hours, and (quote) “His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death.” In the years following Dosa’s article and later his book, staff at Steere House continued to not only observe this phenomenon, but rely on it. If Oscar appeared in a patient’s room, nursing staff would quickly reach out to the family, letting them know they should come right away. And in this way, Oscar’s abilities–which could strike some as unsettling or disturbing, began to become seen as a gift. A kindness. To families who were given the opportunity to say goodby. Because of this, some people began referring to him as an Angel of Death. Or just an angel. By 2015, it was believed that Oscar had predicted over 100 deaths.
When I heard this story, I was both intrigued and skeptical. How exactly was the cat doing this? And why? What reason would a cat have to go to someone who was dying?
So, I ordered Dr. Dosa’s book and started reading. And what I quickly realized was that this book was not going to give me the answers I was looking for. And, in fact, the more I dug in, the more I recognized no one had the answers. Not only because this specific case was observed, but not necessarily researched. But also because the theories that have been offered up are harder to research than I would have imagined. There are a lot of seemingly basic things–about animals, about ourselves–that we just don’t understand yet. This research entailed me finding out over and over and over again that we don’t know as much as I thought about the world around us. Wait until you hear about some of the things we don’t really understand.
So, for all of these reasons, this episode is going to be a little bit different from what I typically do. I did a whole bunch of research on theories I had, and theories I found on the internet. I looked up facts and studies that maybe were related to those theories and maybe weren’t, and then I called up some smart people I know and I put it all on the table to debate some of those theories with them. So, from here on out, you’re going to hear lots of speculation. I can’t promise any of this is good science. I didn’t even make it through all my high school science classes–I traded for art classes instead. So, take it all with a grain of salt, dig in more yourself if this piques your interest, and then write to me and tell me what you think. And heads up, we’re going to be talking pretty in depth about death and disease, so if this makes you uncomfortable. Maybe go listen to an old episode today instead.
Alright, let’s get into some theories. The one you’ll see most often, and the one I researched most, has to do with smell. Many have theorized that Oscar could tell that someone was going to die because of some smell he picked up on.
Becky: There are dogs that are able to predict seizures, or like they can tell when the person they’re working with.. Like there are dogs for detecting hypoglycemic episodes in diabetics. Like they’re trained for that. How do they know that? With the seizure thing, maybe they’re seeing certain muscle fasciculations or something. Or with the diabetic thing, that has to be some sort of odor they’re picking up. Because when someone’s in diabetic acidosis you can smell it on their breath. Like fruity or something. So, like, I think there are definite cases where they’re smelling something that a human wouldn’t be able to smell.
This is Becky Lambe. She’s one of my closest friends, and an amazing veterinarian. And she’s totally spot on. A ton of research has been done with dogs, exploring their ability to detect different conditions. As she mentioned, dogs can successfully alert a handler before they have a seizure. And not just moments before. They’ve been shown to identify a seizure an average of 68 minutes before it happens. Then there are Diabetic Alert Dogs (they go by the acronym DADs) who are trained to sniff out a chemical called isoprene that rises during an episode of low blood sugar. In cases of Diabetic ketoacidosis, even our comparatively weak human noses are able to pick up on a characteristic fruity smell.
There are actually a few different examples of diseases associated with unique odors that humans are able to perceive. Typhoid fever apparently can make you smell like baked bread. Yellow fever, like a butcher’s shop. Dehydration might make your sweat smell like ammonia. But while the list is relatively short for humans, some scientists have suggested that for dogs, they might be able to sniff out almost anything.
Dogs have been trained to detect lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer and colorectal cancer across all four stages of the disease. Dogs can predict migraines, warn before a narcolepsy attack, and detect early onset of Parkinson’s–even years before a person can be diagnosed. Most recently, dogs have been trained to sniff out Covid-19 with an over 90% accuracy rate. So they’re about as reliable as a PCR test.
Do cats have the same aptitude for smell? That’s my friend John. He joined Becky and I to discuss what might be going on here.
So, it’s difficult to compare. Part of that is ease of training. Like how easily can you train a cat, dogs are much easier to train. But if you had to judge by a raw metric, who has the better sense of smell? I think dogs probably do. But cats also have a very strong sense of smell? Yeah. Wow, I don’t think I knew that.
While much of the research in animal bio-detection has been done with dogs, it seems cats could conceivably do this as well. In trying to understand who has the better sense of smell, I was surprised to learn that when it comes to cats, we’re still relatively early in understanding how they behave and how their brains work. And, on top of that, we’re also not really clear how the sense of smell works, either. Yes, our very own sense of smell–we don’t understand it completely. And that makes answering this question difficult. Here’s what we do know. We know that chemical signals are an important component of communication for cats. It’s believed that cats may have fewer scent receptors than dogs. But smell isn’t that straightforward. There are different kinds of scent receptor proteins, and cats might have more of one that is believed to control the ability to separate one scent from another. So, cats could potentially be more sensitive to differences in scents. And that might have made Oscar’s job of predicting death pretty nuanced.
Becky: These are people who have been living in a nursing home and steadily declining for a variety of reasons, and that’s part of it, too, because these people are dying from different causes, so I would assume depending on what they were dying from, there would be different odors coming from them.
How might that have worked? Oscar was seemingly able to identify when people suffering from a variety of conditions were nearing death. Remember, he lived in a Memory Care unit, around patients who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementia disorders. And while it’s possible to die from dementia, in most cases death occurs due to an underlying illness or complications of the disease. Which means that Oscar could conceivably be picking up on different smells associated with different diseases, and yet he was coming to the same conclusion.
And that brings us to what I’d like to call Theory 1A, which assumes that not only was Oscar able to pick up on smells we aren’t able to perceive–which, I think, seems very likely to be the case–but he was able to isolate a smell consistent with the process of dying.
I talked about this theory and more with Liz Miele. And her name might sound a little familiar to you. If not, you need to check her out because Liz is a standup comedian.. And she’s also kind of an expert when it comes to cats.
Liz Miele, I am a standup comedian but I also wrote a book called “Why cats are assholes.” So, both my parents are veterinarians and um I like to say that they’re both assholes as well, so I feel really qualified for this topic. But in general, I’m kind of a crazy cat lady with a little bit of knowledge because my parents are smart.”
My favorite part about that article, is just the idea that as somebody that loves cats and is constantly at a party just trying to get someone’s housecat to love them and I’m constantly trying to take pictures of stray cats when I’m on the road and stuff, there is something very funny about like being excited to see a cat and there being like these whispers that if it comes to see you, you’re gonna die. And you’re like “Nevermind! Nevermind!”
Here was Liz’s take on what might be going on here:
But in general, from what I understand. There’s something about your chemical when you’re going to die. Something like your chemical makeup changes and they can sense that. That’s apparently what that is. And it makes sense that your body is changing if you are about to die, because your body isn’t about to function anymore, but as somebody who is not a doctor, I don’t really know what that means. But from what I’ve always understood, that prediction, whether it's a cat or another animal, it’s because something is shifting.
Her thought is that there might be some consistent markers when a person is dying.
This is also in line with what Dr. Dosa has suggested. In his book about Oscar, he admits he doesn’t know exactly what’s going on here. “Ultimately your guess is as good as mine,” he writes. But then he speculates, “It [could be] likely that he’s responding to some smell when cells start to break down.”
Which made me want to know.. Does death itself have a scent?
That is a very complicated question.. Because here’s the thing: Death does have a smell–you’ve probably experienced it. Maybe you’ve had a mouse die in the walls of your house. Or you’ve smelled the decomposing rotisserie chicken in your trashcan. There’s definitely an unpleasant smell when something dies. Studies have found that two awful-smelling compounds are produced when organic tissues decompose. These two compounds have been given the evocative names putrescine and cadaverine–and they’re partially responsible for the smell we associate with death. Humans can identify this smell, and animals can, too. You’ve almost certainly seen crime shows where cadaver dogs are used to sniff out dead bodies.
So, death definitely has a smell. But perhaps the more relevant question here is, “Does dying have a smell?”
Well, I think there could be. But what I think is interesting about that is why can a random cat detect that but with all the medical and scientific research we’ve done, why can’t humans identify that?
That was Becky again. From what I can tell, humans haven’t identified a single, consistent odor associated with dying. But that might not be that surprising.
Remember all of the diseases that dogs can sniff out? Researchers are trying to build machines that can do exactly the same thing. They’re calling them electronic noses, and they could be pretty revolutionary in diagnosing and monitoring things like lung cancer, brain tumors, bowel disease and diabetes in a way that is non-invasive, painless and inexpensive.
But there’s one hurdle. Researchers might know that a dog can sniff out something like lung cancer, but they mostly don’t know exactly what chemical compounds dogs detect to alert to the presence of the disease. And that’s because we really don’t understand, yet, why things smell the way that they do. We know some of the physical mechanics of smell–but we don’t know what makes one thing smell one way and another thing smell another way.
Most of the smells we encounter, they’re not a single chemical hitting a receptor in your nose. The smell of coffee, for instance, is a combination of hundreds of chemical compounds experienced together in a certain pattern. So, when a bio detection dog is learning to identify the smell of a specific illness, they have to sniff past all of the smells that combine together to make each of us unique to find one whiff, or pattern, that is common to every person who has the disease.
I heard a great analogy for this, where scents were compared to songs. When you hear a song, you don’t hear each individual note in the song. You hear how it all comes together.
Example song - Amazing grace
You probably recognize that song, without necessarily knowing all of the notes in it. And in the same way, when you smell something, you don’t experience each individual chemical compound. You experience a scent as the total pattern. Dogs can learn the pattern without identifying the components, and that’s how these electronic noses are being developed as well. Scientists are skipping over the question of how smell works, and are instead training the electronic nose through AI.
So something like lung cancer, for instance, might be possible to diagnose simply through training. The pattern that equates with lung cancer could be recognized just a like a song. Even if the notes or instruments or key changes, you still are able to recognize that song. The parts are different, but the relationship between them–is the same.
So this begs the question, if a dog or a cat can sniff past everything that makes us unique to identify a common pattern of a disease, could it possible go a level deeper, and sniff past differences in diseases to find a common thread–a chorus, maybe, if we’re using the song analogy–that’s the same among everyone who is dying of different causes? Is there a scent of death itself we just haven’t had the opportunity to identify yet?
The closest connection I could make to something that might suggest this could be possible, was a study that suggested that there is a consistent smell associated with aging that could be identified across cultures–and couldn’t be fully explained by grooming or diet or other obvious environmental factors. In the test, volunteers smelled sweat samples from people of different ages, and they had the easiest time identifying the smell of people who were considered elderly. When I told people this, they seemed to immediately know what I meant.
I deeply associate that smell with wrinkles.
Whether you associate that smell with wrinkles or just the hug of your favorite grandparent, participants in the study consistently rated this smell as less intense and less unpleasant than those from younger groups. I mean, maybe this is relevant, and maybe it’s not at all. But it says to me that there maybe are patterns that are familiar to us that change throughout our lives and maybe change before death–we just don’t know how that works yet.
Liz: Now, what’s interesting is this cat was brought up in this nursing home it’s interesting to see maybe how its senses have shifted and changed…
Now, I wonder when it comes to something like Oscar being a cat that senses death, I wonder if that’s just like bomb sniffing dogs and drug sniffing dogs, I wonder if that’s a skillset that was innately brought up because of the situation it was in. Which is, it would sense a different smell, and then somebody would die, and it’s something that accidentally was learned and cultivated because like, I think that the stereotype that cats are curious is absolutely true. There’s so much in my apartment is interesting to my cat… So I wonder if the only thing that’s curious in this environment, that’s changing, because they eat the same stuff every day, is kind of the chemical reaction that happens and this is their life. It just kind of makes sense that this cat would have this magical power.
Like Liz mentioned, because Oscar was raised in a unique environment–where death is more common than in many other environments, he may have been uniquely positioned to pick up on something humans just haven’t been able to yet.
Dr. Dosa said, “I don’t think Oscar is that unique, but he is in a unique environment,” and regardless of what was happening, Oscar’s environment almost certainly shaped this behavior.
A second theory, which is a departure from smell, is that Oscar was picking up on something physical that might not have been obvious to the doctors and nurses at Steere House. For instance, perhaps the rooms of patients who were nearing death were simply more still, quieter, more somber. Maybe Oscar, who was supposedly not a very social cat, felt more comfortable in those rooms than others.
Or perhaps the doors to those rooms were open more often, so nurses and family could come and go easily. Allowing Oscar an opportunity to sneak in.
Maybe there’s also, there’s got to be like temperature fluctuations, maybe in a specific pattern that humans haven’t identified yet, but an animal might be able to pick up on.
Even if the staff at Steere House noticed that a patient seemed chilly, and then brought them more blankets or heated blankets–Oscar might have been drawn to that.
And then some people have a third theory. They wonder if this was happening at all, if Oscar really was picking up on something. Or if it was just a case of confirmation bias.
I don’t even know what I don’t know, but I think it’s a human trait to anthropomorphize things. I mean, we have a word for it…
I think this can be particularly relevant with animals. Because, for the majority of us, we don’t have pets because we need them to keep mice out of our house or work our farms. We have them to be our friends.
So we want to feel like they love us and communicate with us and understand us, even in ways that are probably unlikely.
But even if you believe that all of this is just our desire to see patterns where there are non, there’s some part of me that wonders.. Does it matter? Is the benefit of Oscar’s presence more important than understanding exactly how he’s doing what he’s doing?
John quote about his cats.
I believe this cat is not only this presence that feels like people are putting on it as being supernatural or whatever. Like we kind of always put on like, they can see ghosts. Like my cat will stare at the wall for like an hour, and I’ll even joke around like, dude, don’t freak me out like that. But the truth is, they just have better hearing, and they probably just hear mice in the wall or there’s something else going on. There’s always a reason. Like a bug that they see but you don’t see it. So, I think that while I do believe that it’s some kind of chemical explainable science shit that’s happening, that this cat has honed its shit for, I think that what people, religious or otherwise, I think we all are looking to feel less alone and less scared and to have this animal that represents pure love to let you know it’s going to be okay in some sense, I think it’s what everybody’s searching for.
I mean, I don’t consider myself a religious person at all, but I think that even feeling nothing towards religion, there is a part of me that knows, when somebody leaves us early, whether it’s a family member or an animal or what have you, all you hope for is that they don’t feel pain and that they’re in a better place and that somehow they’ll be in your life in some way or that your memories will stay strong. Whatever it is that you do to heal after losing someone, and I think that this cat is giving people an extra step to feel less scared and less alone. And I think both if this cat’s there and I have a family member in this home, or if I’m the person knowing that my time is being limited and is going to end soon, I think it’s just.. There’s something about that that just feels safe.
Oscar passed away in February of 2022. He spent 17 years at Steere House, bringing people peace in the last hours of their lives. We might not ever really know what was going on there, but whether you believe the explanation is scientific, or religious, or magic, or even if you believe we’re just imagining it. This story, for me at least, taught me a lot about us. It showed me that we still have so much to learn about the world around us. About the animals we spend our lives with. Even about ourselves. And that’s actually pretty exciting. Because there is so much more to learn.
Thank you so much to my incredibly smart, incredibly patient guests this week–who let me ramble nonsense for hours on end until it started to make a little sense (to me at least, if no one else). Liz Miele is a talented and whip-smart comedian–check out her comedy, she’s on tour now, and her book “Why Cats are Assholes,” which you can find on Amazon. Thank you to Becky Lambe, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. And to John Larkin–For being both an obsessed cat owner and a skeptic. And a thank you to Dr. David Dosa who wrote, “Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat,” about his experience. I’d highly recommend checking the book out. It’s much more about the human elements of this story–about the individuals who interacted with Oscar at Steere House and about what it means to provide compassionate care, which is a really worthy topic. And then, one final thank you to Sabine for recommending this topic!
I’m still on a little break, but if you enjoyed this episode and if you have your own thoughts and theories, feel free to reach out at weirdrhodeisland@gmail.com or you can find me on Instagram at weird island podcast. Until next time.