A cat has no concept of its own death and so it cannot anticipate it, no matter how ill it feels. – Dr Desmond Morris
If an old domestic cat left to their own devices falls ill, they don’t think that they are dying. They feel pain and discomfort and what it means to them is that something unpleasant is threatening them.
They feel under attack, under threat by an unseen hostile force. They can’t distinguish one sort of pain from another to try and work out what’s going wrong.
When the pain becomes acute, they know they are in real danger. They cannot see the source of the danger. They can’t turn and face it and defend themselves against it.
This leaves two ways to deal with their acute pain.
- To hide against the unseen attacker
- To flee
For the indoor/outdoor cat, when they find a place to hide it might be underneath the neighbour’s shed or under a bush some distance from their owner’s home.
They will stay there in a safe place and wait to see how things develop. They won’t come out in case the source of the pain is there waiting for them.
The pain does not dissipate and they die instead. They do not know that they are dying. They have not foreseen that moment. They are free of the fear of death. One issue here behind their perception of dying is that the consensus is that cats are not self-aware. They can’t stand outside themselves metaphorically speaking and look at themselves objectively. This may be the barrier to understanding dying.
The owner should not feel bad about the fact that their cat decided to walk away from their home and find a quiet spot to die somewhere else. This is not a cat spurning a caring owner. This is simply instinctive behaviour born out of a lack of comprehension that they are going to die one day.
Domestic cats have a great advantage over humans in this regard. Humans have to live with death all their lives. Although normally they don’t think about it until they are elderly.
But when they are elderly, they might think about it every day. The beginning of the process of dying through chronic illness an ever-present possibility. Where once death was so far away it was almost unimaginable, the horizon has come towards them and they’ve arrived at that distant place, the end of the road.
The elderly person has to live with this and it can create a background low level sense of anxiety, waiting for a major illness to take them over the rainbow bridge to the cat that they lost years earlier.
Some authors from the 18th-century believed that domestic cats left their home to die because they wanted to return to the wild. Even as recently as about 80 years ago, the author Alan Devoe wrote:
A cat does not want to die with the smell of humanity in his nostrils and the noise of humanity in his delicate peaked ears. Unless death strikes very quickly and suddenly, he creeps away to where it is proper that a proud wild beast should die – not on one of man’s rags or cushions, but in a lonely quiet place, with his muzzle pressed against the cold earth.
The quote heading the page is from Catlore, the sequel to CatWatching by the same author who is a renowned zoologist, author and surrealist painter.
After our Cats Cross the Feline Rainbow Bridge: One Day we will be reunited
For just one example of the many cats I have had over the years, my cat Sophie got progressive kidney failure. She was suffering a fair bit and mostly sat still in the garden, but in her last week she tried to jump on my lap ten times in a row (and she was a cat that rarely sat on laps.) It was clear at the time that even jumping would cause her some pain, so having had her for 11 years, I instinctively new this was her loving way of saying goodbye. A few days later, she could barely move and had to be taken to the vet to be put down. I couldn’t bear to watch this.
Once again, I disagree with Desmond Morris. I have had cats that clearly knew they were dying.
Fine, thanks for commenting. For me, it isn’t just what Desmond Morris says but the fact that the general consensus is that cats are not self-aware. They are not self-conscious. I mention this in the article. They can’t step outside of themselves psychologically and observe themselves objectively.
This, I believe, as a barrier or at least one barrier to being able to understand death and dying. But this is a big topic of conversation because we don’t know exactly what is happening inside a cat’s head.
If you would like to elucidate your statement and tell me why you think your cat knew they were dying then please do so in another comment. I would find it useful and perhaps educational. And if the comment is long enough, I might turn it into an article.
I have posted a further reply elsewhere in the comments thread. “Self-aware”? Of course, they are. “Self-conscious”? Probably not, if you mean in the sense of embarrassment. Humans have always downplayed and dehumanised animals.
It mostly originates from the barbaric tradition of hunting animals; also, claiming they do not have souls (which is nonsense anyway, as soul just means life.)
I didn’t notice the video was almost 2 years old. I went looking for a update but only found 2 that said they were still looking for “Hennessy” His owner and a group of people went looking for him but he was still missing.
Mike have you seen the video of the black cat who jumped 5 stories out of a burning building? She/He bounced and walk away. I don’t know if someone went looking for the baby or not but the cats jump fits with your article title for sure. The cat did fear the fire but not the fall. I am amazed by this cat self-preservation leap.
Yes, I saw this. Cats are aware of the possibility of injury and of their abilities but the word ‘death’ is not in their vocabularly.
Who says? I disagree
I say and you are perfectly entitled to disagree. Indeed, I welcome it and a discussion.