Six sense?

[vanilla]

Hi,

I have a 16yr old cat who's slightly deaf and blind. I noticed recently that my 4yr old cat is starting to sleep next to her. Not directly on her, like a foot away. He's never done that before, normally sleeps in his bed.

Do you think he knows something that we don't? Like he can sense something is up. It's like he's keeping her company, but only at night. He goes out during the day and hardly see him.

Be interesting to see what everyone else thinks.

[Mollycat]

Where would you like me to start on why I believe an awful lot about spookies especially involving animals! But I believe it's a sense we have largely lost when we replaced it with language, and animals who don't have a complex language like ours still have it. There is a massive evolutionary advantage to "feeling" a predator's eyes on you as it stalks you for prey, or that your tiny babies are in distress and you can help them. So I don't just believe in it, I believe in a logical reason for it, even if we don't understand the how.

But when it comes to knowing and responding to pregnancies, illness, dying etc it could be a combination of scent and body language that lets other animals know something is up. Subtle hormone and other biochemistry changes they can detect and we can't, the horse trainer Monty Roberts says he knows the horse's heart rate and the horse knows his when he is using his trademark join-up technique. My cat as I've mentioned many times can be lying near me when I don't move or make a sound or look, but I focus my mind on her, and she starts to purr. Maybe I am giving off some signal I can't work out, but I do know she picks up incredibly subtle stress and mood changes.

[Ruth B]

Whether they have a 'sixth sense' or not, I'm not sure, but they certainly have some better senses than we do, and make use of them. Like Mollycat says, scent plays a far larger part in their lives than it does in ours so picking up changes in scent is one obvious explanation. Even I tend to use scent a bit as a diagnostic option with the cats. I picked up Blue's early kidney problems by scent, and will never forget going into the vets and telling them he 'smelt wrong', they didn't laugh at me and took it seriously, the blood works picked up the problem (he did have a dental done at the same time which probably helped as well). With Tiggy I noticed after she started on the medication that her scent had also changed, and it was then I realised that I had been picking up her bladder and kidney problems, but as they had come on slowly until they suddenly turned acute, i hadn't noticed the change. Now i'm accepting being weird and smelling my cat regularly.

I would also say Freyja can read my mind, but I know in reality she is reading my body language, no matter how hard I try and cover it up. Tiggy and Saturn got deflead the other day as I had noticed all three scratching. Freyja still needs doing as everytime I approached her with a vial in hand, no matter how hard I tried to hide it and act relaxed, she would suddenly wake up from deep sleep and look at me as if the devil was approaching her, and be off the bed and under it. As i have to open the vial in advance, she is probably also picking up the scent from it. She is also a moth hunter, no matter how small the moth, it is a valid target in her eyes. The number of times I have seen her staring off at apparently nothing and thinking she sees ghosts only to find there is the tiniest of insects in the room later on.

Can animals see and hear things we can't, i'm sure of it, is it anything supernatural, I'm less sure, but then you take that word apart and you really end up with super nature, which does describe their abilities well (Some of you might remember a Supernature series on TV many years ago that did look at the way other animals senses worked compared to ours, and just how amazing some of them were, i still have the book from the series somewhere). I can also look at it from the other side, when I was about 5 or 6 years old, the school optician realised I couldn't see and glasses didn't help. I have seen numerous opticians and visited several eye hospitals over the last 45 years and everyone is still as confused as they were when it was originally discovered as to the cause. My eyes have been poked, prodded and scanned in every way possible, I even had a brain scan to see if they could pick up any cause in the brain itself, but nothing has showed up. If modern technology can't work out why i can't see, when i can talk to them and answer questions about what I can see, is it any wonder there is much we don't know about how other animals senses work and just what they can pick up.