Meet Taffi's Cat: Goodbye Kitty

Taffi doesn't have much time for living things, aside from the vegetables from her garden that she pickles like they're her liver. But if she had a cat it might well be this one.

Oscar the nursing home cat can sense death

His name is Oscar. He's not the friendliest cat. But he has an uncanny knack for predicting within hours when nursing home patients with whom he lives are about to die.

Perhaps, much like Taffi, Oscar enjoys feeding on the occasional soul.

Every day, Oscar makes his rounds among the patients, entering each room and giving each patient a sniff. When he senses that someone is near the end of his or life, he will hop onto their bed and curl up beside them. Within hours, without fail, the patient will die.

Same thing happens to the crowd at Changes when Taffi walks thru the door. Only it doesn't take hours for the crowd to die away, it's practically instantaneous.

Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician from Brown University in Providence, tells Oscar's story, noting that the feline has never been wrong yet.

Unlike Oscar, for Taffi "Wrong" is her middle name.

"His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death," Dosa writes.

Seriously, I think this cat could give Taff some lessons. Sometimes her victims don't die, they're just afflicted with warm, salty, flat beer. But that's a whole other story!