I had a cat that I at first thought was insane, but he later was vidicated. I lived in a duplex at the time, and the other side was inhabited by a newlywed couple and their newborn baby.
This cat would go into the living room closet, and claw at the floor, and moulding as if he were “trying to dig to China”. Incessant clawing, skritching, scraping for hours. If I closed the closet door, he’d yowl until I opened it again. This went on for months, until one day I saw the neighbors outside with their pet…
They had a GIANT pet rat! The size of a six month old kitten, easily. It’s tail was as thick as a man’s pinky at it’s base. It was over a foot in length, not including tail!
Well, I’m not afraid of rats, I’ve had pet rats before. (Though not that big!) I petted it, and asked where they were keeping it. They showed me into their apartment, and showed me it’s cage. The cage was right beside my closet! It corresponded exactly, I went and paced the distance!
Somehow, my cat sensed the prescence of that rat through the walls, and had been trying to get at it all that time! I apologized for calling him crazy and became more understanding of his attempts to kill the giant rodent. I did move soon though, the poor kitty was driving me nuts with his fervor.
I think cats and dogs can sense evil intent, or ill wishes in people too. I also think they can sense other things that we can’t.
Heh. My cat woke me up at three AM in the morning once because someone was trying to crawl through my dining room window. Unfortunately, I was working as an armed guard, and the guy saw the weapon and took off like the proverbial rocket. The cat still wakes me at three AM every day, but that’s because he wants me to feed him.
I had two rabbits at different points in time whose cages were in the same spot, in the back of my bedroom. They would often stand up and beg at nothing and act as though they were being petted by something. I later found out that years earlier, before we lived there, an old man had had my bedroom and apparently died in it. I think maybe he came back sometimes and the rabbits saw him and he petted them.
A few years ago, GrizzWife and I were going through IVF. A few days after embryo transfer, one of my sheepdogs became “velcro puppy” to GrizzWife. Everywhere she went, he had to go to. And he took every chance to try to lick her exposed skin (arm, leg, hand, fingers, etc).
We had three transfer attempts and two of those produced pregnancies. During the first pregnancy, the embryo stopped growing after about seven weeks. The second pregnancy produced our GrizzCub.
My sheepdog’s odd behavior toward my wife coincided exactly to the times she was carrying viable babies.
My other sheepdog could not have been more clueless to the whole procedure.
Neither of these were unexplainable, but funny at the time. We had had company over and were saying goodnight out on our covered patio. Of course Schwarz (our dog) came outside with everyone else. He started a low growling and dipping his head, which caused conversation to stop. We all proceeded to look out toward the pasture, but couldn’t see much of anything, as we were all standing close to the patio’s light source. Just as we all seemed to be at our most quiet and eye-strained, three pheasants took off from the rafters directly over our heads.
The second, I was home alone and in the shower. Schwarz started barking like crazy, and then I heard someone knocking at our side door. I knew it was probably someone who knew us, since it’s the less obvious door to go to. I wrapped up and went to the door, to find my SO’s cousin knocking. As I opened the door to let him in, Schwarz jammed past me and took off for the side of the garage. I just had time to wonder what the heck he was doing, when I heard, “Hey, hey HEY!” coming from the other side of our garage. Then I saw a stranger come running out, doing up his pants, with Schwarz hot on his heels!? I called Schwarz back to me, and asked the cousin what was going on. I guess his friend couldn’t wait to use the toilet after the long drive, and had decided to take a leak in the bushes out of sight. Poor guy.
So what’s the thesis here? That cats and dogs are equipped with senses other than the five that humans have? And that these supposed senses are evidence of types of stimuli which humans cannot detect—what we humans would label paranormal stimuli? Sounds like a circular argument to me.
How 'bout a rational (and factual) explanation? Certain animals have certain senses which are simply more acute than the corresponding senses of humans. Thus these animals are able to detect a stimulus at a lower threshold. Some of you seem to believe there’s a mystical element to this. There isn’t.
I’m not entirely doubting this story, but “numerous occasions” might be a bit of “local lore,” an exaggeration. Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881 and died on September 19, 1881. He was in office for the four months prior to to his shooting and likely spent much of 1880 and the early months of 1881 on railroads campaigning. He would have had little opportunity for “numerous” visits to any home.
I had a dog when I was younger, and she did have a few freak-outs. The first story is pretty mundane, and happened only a few times:
I used to live in southwestern Indiana. We had the occaisional tremor, and about 2-3 minutes beforehand, the dog would jump up and start barking at the entertainment center. Then, the entertainment center, this giant wood thing, would start rocking back and forth with the tremor. Then it would stop and she’d whimper and hide.
The second story is kind of freaky, and I’m not sure what to think of it - maybe it’s a ghost, or maybe it’s a combination of low-frequency noise that only she could hear and a faulty door.
Anyway, my dog used to sleep next to me on my bed every night. She was a big dog in a little, tiny yappy dog’s body. Every once in a while in my old house, everyone in the house would hear footsteps come up the stairs and down the hall when no one was there. My mom slept on the first level next to the stairs and my sister and I had rooms next to each other upstairs and slightly down the hall. So the footsteps would come, my door, which I locked every night, would swing open and I would hear loud, heavy breathing in the room. My dog would freak out completely. She’d hop up, hackles up, snarling low and snapping. Then the breathing would slow then stop, my door would swing shut and the footsteps would recede. It happened every once in a while - maybe every month or so. It used to scare the shit out of me, and I wanted to change rooms, but there were cold spots in the spare one, and my dog refused to go into the room. As a kid I had this notion that my 9-pound dog could protect me, so I insisted being in a room where she would sleep on my bed.
Now I live in a condo that dates to 1904 - around the time of the World’s Fair. My cats freak out every once in a while, and there are weird noises, but, hey, it’s an old building. It creaks.
We had two cats, and we lived in San Francisco for years. Twice one of them ‘predicted earthquakes’ by getting restless in the night, walking over us in bed repeatedly, and vomiting. One of those was for the Mt. St. Helens eruption (3 states away), and the other was for a not-very-exciting 3. quake where we lived.
We told her to stop predicting earthquakes.
There wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway, and she had more false positives, say 20, during her lifetime at that place. And a number of false negatives, ie she missed quakes that did happen.
So we told her that, and she did stop predicting earthquakes. Good kitty.
There are some precursors to quakes, however, that animals could pick up on: barely perceptible creaks and shudders, and piezoelectric effects. And, since the proliferation of car alarms, you can be clued in to the P-waves which transmit faster than the S-waves and get there first, by a bunch of car alarms going off. This worked in 1989 (the Loma Prieta). The conditions were a big enough quake 50 or 100 miles away, to allow enough of a jolt to set off the alarms, and enough distance to allow some seconds of delay.
Pardon me, but that’s some really fuzzy thinking there, Mary. Your cat predicted an “eqrthquake” three states, and over 1000 miles, away . . . by vomiting? How did you time these events? By what mechanism are they linked? Or did the cat just happen to puke on the same night Mt. St. Helen’s erupted (an event which wasn’t primarily an earthquake anyway) and you’re reading more into it than is logically possible?
And then you told her to stop. And it worked. Except for a handful of false positives and a handful of unpredicted quakes. To this I would ask, since you seem so sure your cat is can predict seismic events, how do you know those 20 are indeed false positives? Maybe your cat predicted some little 3.0 quake in Tibet that went unreported. Or there was a quake that occurred somewhere on the globe that’s 2/3’rds covered with water. Or maybe there was a quake on Io that kitty picked up. Are you telling me that your cat has only vomited 20 some times in it’s life?
What utter crap. Your cat cannot predict earthquakes. And none of you people’s dogs are detecting ghosts. What other idiocies do you people believe? This is preposterous.
This is a joke, right? Because cats being restless at night, walking over people in bed, and vomiting is really unusual cat behavior. I wonder what my cats are predicting when they do this kind of stuff.
In addition, the Mount St. Helen’s eruption was an event, or rather a series of events, that occurred over more than a week. Which of these evenings did your cat puke on you? And why do you think that it was a prediction of that eruption? Maybe the cat was merely predicting that you’d you buy a new pair of black pumps.
One of my girlfriends has a seizure disorder, similar to epilepsy. Anywhere from ten to 30 minutes before she is about to have a fit, her husky Kahlua whines and tugs at her sleeve or pant leg as if trying to get her to go for a walk. At least she then has time to turn off the stove, get out of the shower or whatever, comes in pretty handy and Kahlua is rarely wrong.
Her doc theorizes that it’s a scent the dog’s picking up on that we just can’t smell.
Thanks for the rationalism, UncleBeer. Was thinkin’ I was gonna have to bust out the brain stick there for a minute.
However, I have something about my cat to share.
See, I have absolutely no idea when he’s getting a boner, but without fail, lickety split, he’s rolling back onto his haunches with his tongue in his groinal region.
Err… gotta disagree with you here UncleBeer, at least in part.
When I was working on my masters in geology and teaching several labs, one of the things we shared with the students was the apparent ability of some animals to “predict” seismic events. Obviously their senses in some regards are more finely tuned than ours, or maybe more accurately you could say that we’ve insulated ourselves from contact with any precursor sensations to a greater degree than they have.
Observations of fish jumping out of water, rabbits refusing to go into their burrows, nervousness in pets, etc were made immediately prior (hours to days) before earthquakes. I’ll try and come back with a cite later (busy w/ work) but MaryEFoo’s assertion may have some validity to it.
We’ve built a world of carpet and insulation, shock absorbers and stereos that filter out sensations that animals in burrows and water are much more exposed to. While the signals might not be quantifiable, I’d be inclined to think they are to an unknown degree valid.
I use our cats as mystery-sound validators. If I think I hear something, I will look at the cats to see if they show any interest or even acknowledgement that there was a sound. If the cats are ignoring it, I ignore it. If they’re turned towards it or fleeing the room, it’s time to check it out.