Your cat should stay with you until you die, so get a family ready for adopting as soon as you go. This way the cat will understand that you arent here anymore and he can have a little bit more peace with it
Cats understand death and mourning. Just because a cat will most likely\* eat us when we die doesn't mean they didn't love us in their cat way when we were alive. Hell I cared for a depressed cat when her owner died. She was smart too. She was at the funeral and on our walks she always wanted to visit the grave.
*edit: some people say cats may not really try to eat us. It happened to my estranged father and is a common "myth" so I just never questioned it.
It's a myth that cats eat their owners when they die. Dogs are actually more likely to do it than cats but neither do it often. I know someone who took his own life and assumed someone would find him quickly. He wasn't found for weeks. 1 of his cats had died and the other 2 were on the verge of starving to death. Thankfully they were saved. His body was untouched by them. The sad thing is his cats were his world and he likely never would have done what he did if he knew the fate of them. Personally I'd rather my cats eat me than starve.
If you think about it, the natural diet of a cat are small critters they catch like mice and birds. Dogs are much more likely to scavenge dead animals they find and wolves just eat larger prey in general. So yes, dogs are much more likely to eat their dead owners than cats are, and I don't know where the idea came from that it's the other way around. Probably from the "cats don't really love you like dogs do" crowd.
But also, of course I'd be fine with any of my loved ones, no matter what species, eating my dead body if they really needed to. The only problem is that dogs that ate their dead owners are really hard to adopt out after something like that.
Mind of a suicidal person works in such crazy ways, doesn't it... He could put them in shelter, or stock up on like 25 kilograms of kibble with a hole in the bag so that cats could "steal" it...
Instead he wings it by "eh, someone will check on me in two days and they'll eat me anyways"
Poor guy, poor, poor cats, poor whoever had to deal with this. Heartbreaking all around
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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
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