EAST LONDON, ENGLAND – A visually impaired woman is now saying she has trained her pet to help her around the house to become Britain’s first and only guide cat.
Kim Ward has taught Pickles to do some tasks such as finding her phone and the cat can even detect when her owner is about to have a seizure.
Kim, 50, now relies on a wheelchair following a bus crash back in 1999. She occasionally suffers from seizures which Pickles has learned to predict and warn his owner by scratching and purring.
Kim who is from Blackheath, south east London, also began to lose her eyesight back in 2011.
“We trained him to sit, stay, wait, and lay down. We taught him like you would a dog.”
“When my phone rings he will go and stand next to it so I can find it – I don’t have peripheral vision but I can see him against certain surfaces from certain angles. He’s a bit like a guide dog”, Kim said.
When Kim and her husband Keith, who is 55, started teaching Pickles a few token tricks they never expected their remarkable feline would develop such an extensive and important skill set.
“Pickles will do his utmost to warn me that a seizure is due and will stay with me all the time until I’m safe.”
“He will claw the furniture or run around to make noise when he knows I’m going to have a seizure”, said Kim.
What an amazing cat indeed!
