These Cats Detected Human Cancer and Then Alerted Their Owners.

For some time it has been known that dogs can detect cancers using their remarkable sense of smell. While testing dogs and training them to do this is relatively straightforward, it is clearly more difficult to achieve with cats. However, it turns out that some cats have an instinctive ability to detect cancers. In some cases they have made their owners aware of the problem and saved their lives. Here is a quote from an article in The Nest Cancer Sniffing Cats:

Cats far and wide are being credited with alerting their humans to cancerous tumors — and not simply skin cancer or moles which might be considered the easy-to-detect kind because they exist on the outside of the body. No, these cats are detecting complex cancers buried deep within the body.

A cat in Alberta, Canada, warned his human friend that there was a soda can-sized tumor in his left lung by continuously pawing at the man’s side. And in Tennessee, a woman was prompted to see her doctor about a bruised area on her breast when her cat paid repeated and unusual attention to it, resulting in a breast cancer diagnosis and early treatment.

And this is a story reported in the UK’s Daily Mail:
Wendy Humphreys, 52, was bemused when her black-and-white kitten Fidge leapt up and sat on her right breast every night for two weeks while she lay on the sofa.

She went to her GP and was told she had a cancerous pea-sized lump in her breast – which would have killed her if left undiagnosed.

Here is another story from a couple of years back in England recounted directly by the lady whose life was saved by Bindi her cat:


So how do cats do this?
They have an amazingly sensitive sense of smell which has 200 million scent receptors and is 14 times greater than a human. How do they compare with dogs? According to Understanding Your Dogs for Dummies somewhere between Fox Terrier with 147 million and Beagles with 225 million.

What is even more surprising is that in the cases above the cat not only detects the problem but then finds a way to communicate it to their owner.

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