Mr. Fluffums the psychic

Attention pet lovers: do you want a truly unique, unusual pet?  One that will be the talk of the town?  If so, there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy...

... a psychic cat.

Sadly, I am not joking about this.  On the site Avito, which is a sort of Russian version of Craigslist, there's a guy selling his cat, and one of the selling points is that the cat is allegedly psychic.  The seller, Vladimir, says the cat is pretty special:

It possesses an array of magic powers.  Chiefly among them, is that it sees ghosts and spirit and, as such, it can determine their presence in your home, regardless of whether the apparitions are good or evil...  If you buy him, you need to deal with it, you need good hands.

I'm not entirely certain what the last line means.  It could be a problem with Google Translate, which heaven knows has its issues.  However, maybe it's some kind of warning that the cat is potentially dangerous, and needs to be purchased by someone with a "firm hand."

Unfortunately, though, my experience with cats is that the firmness of your hand has absolutely no effect on their behavior.  The last cat I owned, who was named Geronimo and who died two years ago at the ripe old age of 18, had very expressive eyes, which he used to communicate three things:

1. My food bowl is empty.
2. I hate you.
3. Fuck off and die.

Nothing I did had the least impact on his bad habits, which included clawing the hell out of the furniture and peeing on things when he got in a snit, which was pretty much daily.  I'm honestly glad that Geronimo wasn't psychic, because he'd have probably used his powers to stare at me balefully until my skull exploded.

But I digress.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow, you must be wondering why Vladimir is selling this amazing animal, whom he has named "Sibgeo," given that he clearly believes in its powers himself.  He doesn't want to, he says, but he's moving to an apartment where pets aren't allowed, so he's trying to find Sibgeo a new home.  Which I suppose is nice enough.  But I haven't told you how much he's asking for it:

Five million rubles, which comes to about seventy-five thousand dollars.

I don't know about you, but I would not pay seventy-five thousand dollars for a cat, even if I had seventy-five thousand dollars of discretionary income available, which I don't.  Hell, I wouldn't pay seven hundred and fifty dollars.  Actually, toward the end of Geronimo's life I considered paying someone to take him, but my wife would have objected, and given that she was the one person in the universe who Geronimo tolerated, I couldn't exactly argue with her about it.

Initially I scoffed at the idea that anyone would pay that kind of money for a cat, psychic or not, but then I found out that last year, another psychic cat in Russia (I guess they're more common there) sold for eighty-three thousand dollars.  So I guess that's the going rate.  Or maybe Vladimir has a cat he doesn't want, and is trying to cash in on the psychic thing since it worked for the first guy.

But the whole thing brings up a question: how would you tell if a cat is psychic?  It's not like you'd think, "Wow, that cat is really getting fat, I should put him on a diet," and the cat would say, "I heard that, asshole."  Apparently, the way Vladimir knows is just that the cat acts weird sometimes.  For example, Vladimir was considering buying a house, and brought Sibgeo along, and Sibgeo started "behaving oddly."  Vladimir later found out that the house had been owned by a family whose grandmother "led a bad life," and Sibgeo was trying to warn him.

Why the grandmother's behavior had anything to do with it, since (1) she was dead, and (2) the rest of the family was moving out, I have no idea.  Maybe Sibgeo could tell us.

The more global problem is that a pet's odd behavior really doesn't tell you much.  In my experience, pets in general act weird more or less all of the time, and I doubt that any of it means they're psychic.  My guess is that domestication has kind of short-circuited them genetically, and all of them are eccentric, just in different ways.  (Ask your coworkers about "odd pets they've owned" if you doubt me.  You'll be there all day listening to stories.)

For example, another cat I owned, Puck, looked like this sleek, graceful, elegant black cat until she turned and looked at you.  First, I think she had mild strabismus, because her eyes never seemed to quite line up.  Second, she had one missing fang, so most of the time her tongue poked out of her mouth on that side.  Third, she had a creaky, irritable meow that sounded like "mehhhhhffff."  Fourth, she expressed affection by jumping into your lap, digging her claws into your leg, and then ramming the top of her head into your face.  She was actually quite a sweet-natured animal, but even people who loved cats had to admit that Puck looked and acted like she had a screw loose.

So that's today's news from the World of the Weird, Pet Edition.  Seventy-five thousand dollar psychic cats.  Me, I'm gonna stick with my dogs.  I don't have to worry about what they're thinking, because I already know, given that each of them came equipped with only a single thought.  Guinness's is "Let's play ball!"  It's his answer to everything.  Lena's is "Derp?"  She always has this comical perplexed-but-happy look on her face, as if she has no idea what's going on, but is determined to enjoy it anyhow.

I'll take that over a ghost-spotting cat any day.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

Psychic cat energy clearing services

A frequent reader of Skeptophilia complained to me a couple of days ago that he might need to stop reading my blog, because every time he did, his blood pressure spiked out of sheer indignation at the level of idiocy that some humans are capable of.  "You either need to stop making so much sense," he wrote to me, "or you have to start blogging about kittens."

Be careful what you wish for.

Figure 1:  A kitten.

Prompted by his comment, and with a little bit of research, I discovered the page, "Psychic Cats Are Probably More Common Than Other Psychic Animals," which launches us off onto our topic for today.

The author of the page starts us out with a good question, to wit: How can we know that cats are psychic?  The answer comes in two parts: (1) because we own cats, and they sure seem psychic to us; and (2) the ancient Egyptians liked cats a lot.  Also, we have the inarguable fact that cats are nocturnal:

Then there's the long association of cats with witches as their 'familiars'. Actually, witches had a whole range of 'familiars', but it is only the cats which are remembered.  Cats go out at night and roam around in the moonlight.  In other words, cats are 'different'. They have something which sets them apart.

Actually, I see way more possums out at night than I do cats, and I don't think that anyone is arguing that possums are psychic.  But there were no Ancient Egyptian Possum Gods, so maybe that's the difference.

In any case, these folks are really invested in cats being psychic because they have a business in "geomancy," which is figuring out through ESP if a location has negative or positive Quantum Energy Frequency Vibrations, and then "clearing" it of any bad ones so that the negative energies won't infest your aura.  Or something like that.  It's hard to tell, frankly, because most of their explanations sound like this:

Sometimes saying that we do earth energy healing is a shorthand way of saying that we work with a variety of different energies.  If you have read some of the other pages on this site, you will realize that there are a variety of different energies to be found in any environment. Therefore, to say that geomancy or space clearing is only involved in earth energy healing is somewhat misleading.  Obviously (I hope!), you will recognize the need to keep your environment clear of those energies which can affect you negatively.

Oh!  Sure!  That makes it completely clear!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"

At this point, you may be wondering what the cats have to do with it.  I know I was.  The whole cat angle comes from the fact that you can apparently use your cat to figure out which parts of your house have bad energies:

Energetically speaking, cats tend to be drawn to places noxious to humans. Therefore, they can be useful indicators of such areas, simply by observing them.  However, they also appear, from what we have been discovering with our own cats, that they also act as transformers of negative energy in some fashion.  As we became more and more involved in house clearing, and tackled more and more difficult places, so we found that our cats are of greater help.  For instance, they sit with us, or on the plan of the place we are working on and wander away when we are finished.

I can say with some degree of assurance that from observing my own cats, Puck and Geronimo, "sitting around looking bored" and then "wandering away to be bored elsewhere" are both activities at which they excel.  It also bears mention, however, that my cats are not exactly your textbook Fluffy Kitty:

Figure 2: What neither of my cats looks even remotely like.

Puck's physical appearance makes her look like she's got a screw loose, an impression which is helped out by the fact that she's got one broken fang and frequently walks around with her tongue sticking part way out.  She's really quite a sweet-natured cat, but even people who like cats think she looks slightly demented.  Geronimo, on the other hand, is generally pissed off at the entire world.  Sometimes he just sits there and stares at me, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits.  It's unnerving.  He would have made a good witch's familiar, if he had been able to find a witch who was in his league, evil-wise, which would have been a challenge.

Oh, and did I mention that both of these cats are black?  I'm sure that's relevant, somehow.

The "Psychic Cats" page ends with a question, which certainly seems like a good one:

If cats are attracted to your house, to you and you have many of them, you need to look at why that is. Is it because they are protecting you?

To which I can only answer: if you think that your cats are protecting you, you might want to ask yourself who you would rather have by your side if an armed burglar broke into your house -- Brutus the Rottweiler, or Mr. Fluffums the Persian Cat?

So anyhow, I'm pretty sure that my cats aren't psychic.  For one thing, if they actually were psychic, I doubt they'd let our neurotic border collie, Doolin, push them around.  Plus, I'm guessing that they'd use mind-control to get something better than dry cat food for dinner.  And as far as being "drawn to places that are noxious to humans," Geronimo's favorite spot is on top of our hot tub.  So unless somehow the hot tub has become a Reservoir Of Negative Energy, I'm thinking that he's only sitting there because it's warm.  The upshot of it all is that in my experience, cats are kind of useless.  They're sort of like home decor items that run up vet bills and poop in a box in the corner of the laundry room.

So, that's our in-depth analysis of feline psychics.   And to the reader who wanted a kitten post, I hope you're satisfied at what you've done.  I suspect I've just unleashed a torrent of hate mail from (1) people who love cats and resent my criticizing them, (2) people who believe in psychic abilities and resent my poking fun at them, and (3) people who own psychic cats and simply hate my guts.  But it's a risk I'm willing to take.  As a blogger, you have to be responsive to your readers.  Even given the criticism I sometimes get, they're still an easier audience than Geronimo, who looks like he would happily claw my eyes out even though I feed him every day.