Are these examples of cats saving people’s lives? This is quite a tricky subject because people who disagree will say that these are not true examples of cats saving lives. They say it is about people anthropomorphizing cats (turning cats into people).
Example 1
The flue from a wood burning stove breaks loose causing fumes to fill the home. The person is asleep. The cats jump onto the person and wake her up. The cats could have run out of the room and house. Was this a deliberate act of concern for a human companion?
Example 2
A diabetic woman has a very close relationship with her cat, Charley. Charley does not have the same sort of relationship with the woman’s husband. The woman goes to the bed and gets up to go to the toilet. She has a hypoglycemic attack in the bathroom, collapses and falls unconscious. Charley spots this and spends a lot of time trying to wake up the woman’s husband who pushes her off a few times. Charley persists in tapping his face and licking him until finally he sits up. He sees that his wife is not in bed and goes to the bathroom to give her an injection. If he had not given that injection the woman could have fallen into a coma and possibly died. Charley figured out a way to help her and it wasn’t direct help. She appears to have the good sense to find someone who could help; her husband.
Example 3
This is a variation on example 2. Pudding, a 21 pound orange tabby, had just been adopted from a rescue center. The owner was diabetic. She had a “diabetic seizure” in her sleep the day she adopted Pudding. In this instance, Pudding did manage to wake up his companion and when awake she called out to her son who helped her to recover.
Example 4
See picture — Buddy, Esther’s cat starts to constantly sniff under Esthers’ left arm and even bit the area. This prompted Esther to see her doctor for a checkup and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and radiotherapy. Buddy stopped sniffing that area. Conclusion: cat diagnoses a health problem.
Example 5
There are many examples in which a cat, as a close companion, adds enjoyment to a person’s life which over the long term makes life bearable. That is not saving a life in a dramatic moment but in some cases it quite possible does mean a lengthening of life. A true cat companion can make life worth living.
Example 6
This is an example of a cat preventing suicide. A woman has clinical depression. She did not know she had clinical depression. She begins to feel suicidal. Years earlier she had taken in a feral cat. They were great buddies and her husband, a good man, was not as friendly towards her cat and vice versa.
The woman contemplates suicide. She does this for quite a long time. She makes plans. Then suddenly she thinks of her cat. She asks herself what will happen to her cat when she is gone. She thinks there is no one to really care for her cat when she is gone. She decides she can’t commit suicide. She seeks help instead and so she lives and so does her cat.
I have a feeling that this last example is typical of a decent number of people. Their cat saved their lives.
Please search using the search box at the top of the site. You are bound to find what you are looking for.
Without my cats and parakeet my life at home would be definitely lonely since my office is also my home ! As a blogger/Traveller my pets have instilled some form of discipline in my household and they have also benefited my house-caretaker Sabina in her personal life.Cats have definitely enriched my life and the household despite being a maintenance handicap at times, especially owning two cats in a household.Ultimately, the positive benefits of caring for my pets outweighs the negative qualities.
I am the same. Is your house-caretaker full-time?
Michael, my housekeeper Sabina.Dias is full-time but she does go home everyday as her house is close to mine.Beneficial for both of us as she can look after her home while working at my residence.She is an excellent care-taker of the cats and they literally await her daily arrival in the evening when she returns to my house.Both the cats are very attached to her as she feeds them and bizarrely on her arrival in the house they go to the bathroom for their toilet routines.Normally, the cats are always sleeping throughout the day while i occasionally pat them in-between my computer or other work.
The cats don’t make a big deal out of it.
I’d say in some sense my first cat Gigi in Canada saved my life in some long term sense whereby I took better care of myself when close to the edge because I could see how perturbed she was when I was in a bad state. I also made sure to always be around to love her and care for her. Without her I would have been able to be more irresponsible with my health and life.
And to this day, all the cats I have cared for and lived with have given me direction and happiness in my life. I’d be very lonely without cats and my life would be quite different. People can’t fill the space cats fill for me personally. Most people would say it the other way around – ‘cat’s can’t fill the space people fill’ and although technically that may be true, my point is that it’s the former which jumps into my head and not the latter. In other words in my life I need cats.
How do you define ‘save’? In terms of death, my cat Gigi in Canada may have saved my life but I’ll never know. ‘Saved’ in terms of quality of life – well then all my cats have saved me from a kind of loneliness and generally suffering from not being near a cat most of the time 🙂
I understand what you are saying. Cats can be life savers but in a subtle way. When a person is on the edge, and many are, a cat can get you off it. A cat can keep a person balanced and keep their feet on the ground.