Caitlin Doughty is in the news at the moment. She is an American mortician and author. She has written a book which you may have heard of entitled Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
The book is about questions asked by children during question-and-answer sessions after giving talks all over the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In her presentations she shares her knowledge and views on the topic of our death.
She says that her favourite part of these events is the Q & A session at the end. She gets to hear the views of people and they are fascinated with bones, embalming, funeral parlours and decaying bodies, she writes in her book.
The most direct questions, unsurprisingly, are asked by children and they aren’t shy about asking them. They are very pointed questions and all of the topics in her book “come from 100 percent ethically sourced, free-range, organic children”.
One child asked whether their cat would eat them when they died. It’s quite a good question actually if not a little bit macabre. It’s a question which Caitlin Doughty discussed with Bill Radke on the Kuow.org website. This is the website of a radio station and it presents an interview of about sixteen minutes between Bill and Caitlin.
CLICK ON THIS LINK TO HEAR TO INTERVIEW (TAKES YOU TO THE KUOW.ORG WEBPAGE)
Caitlin says that under certain circumstances if a dead body was in a home and there were domestic cats in that home who were sufficiently hungry they would quite probably eat the carcass of the human lying there on the floor starting at the soft tissue. And they both agreed that there was nothing wrong with that.
In other words the interview Caitlin Doughty answered the question in the title to her book and the answer is in the affirmative…YES.
Of course, I don’t think it has ever happened but how do we know? What we do know has happened is that in cat hoarding homes where there has been acute neglect of the cat because, perhaps, they have been left uncared for for a long time, cats have eaten the dead bodies of other cats which kind of proves the point. There’s nothing clever about that as it is just about survival. Humans have been known to do the same thing under the same circumstances. We call it cannibalism. Domestic cats would just call it common sense.
I’m a grown up Asperger’s child. Although it produces some rigidity, in the mild version that is Asperger’s and not full-blown autism, it sharpens the mind. If all cats have Asperger’s syndrome, perhaps it’s why I’ve always identified with cats. Regarding cats eating our corpses: I’ve only heard one case involving cats, but two involving dogs. One took place in 1947 in the country outside the town I live in. A woman died alone in her house. Apparently after she’d brought her dogs in for the night. I’ve seen the ruins of her small house and there were no close neighbors. Any animal will eventually a dead body rather than starve, if it comes to that, they’re not burdened by human repugnance about germs or rot. They know if their owner is dead, that her/his personality or soul is gone. I can’t blame them, unlike humans, they couldn’t let themselves out of that house. I don’t know how long it took before the coroner was alerted. By the way, KUOW-FM is the local Seattle “educational” station affiliate of NPR, National Public Radio in the US, but these days it is really National “Politically-Correct” Radio and despite getting a lot of government funding, the whole network unabashedly pursues an overbearing looney-leftist agenda, they don’t allow dissenting views to get on the air. Forgive the editoralizing, but it is only too true, and when I saw the call letter of the station that broadcasts that woman’s stuff my pent up frustration with them had to come out.