Can This Cat Predict Death?

If you’re a patient at Rhode Island’s Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, there’s one visitor you don’t want stopping by your bed: a white and tortoiseshell cat named Oscar.

Not because Oscar isn’t friendly — by all accounts he is — but because according to a doctor who works there, David Dosa, Oscar has the mysterious power to predict who’s going to die.

He is said to wander the building, stopping to see patients who only have a short time to live — in some cases surprising the staff with the predictions. The cat is credited with correctly predicting at least 50 deaths at the nursing home over the past five years.

Oscar first rose to prominence in 2007 when Dosa wrote a piece in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine about the cat, and later in a popular 2010 book titled “Making the Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.”

What might explain Oscar’s strange powers?

There are a few things to note about the story. First, though Dosa’s piece about Oscar in The New England Journal of Medicine is sometimes described as a “study,” it was nothing of the sort. No scientific experiments or medical research was conducted on the feline’s alleged death-detecting abilities; the piece was instead a personal essay.

There’s nothing wrong with essays, but they are essentially stories and anecdotes, which don’t necessarily carry any scientific or evidential weight.

In an analysis of Dosa’s book about Oscar published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine, researcher Joe Nickell found a troubling lack of scientific rigor surrounding the cat’s surprising abilities:

[Dosa's] evidence is the kind disparaged in science as anecdotal. That is, it is based on personal narratives that may be affected by mistaken perceptions, faulty memory, folkloric influences, and many other faults…. Biased selection is a very real problem: there is a natural tendency for believers in some phenomenon to collect stories supporting it, just as there is for disbelievers to collect stories discrediting it.

And because Dosa admits to making up some events and creating fictional characters in his book, Nickell concludes “there is no point in trying to evaluate the anecdotal evidence: it has been manipulated — in the interest of telling a good story, of course — so it is scientifically worthless.”

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