Your cat hates your baby and wants to kill it There can’t be many people who still believe that cats deliberately suffocate babies by sucking the breath out of them, but in case you’re one of them, they don’t. That doesn’t mean a sleeping cat couldn’t accidentally suffocate a newborn baby (there are a few documented cases), so it makes sense to keep the cat out of the baby’s room for the first couple of months. Photograph: Paul Kaye/Corbis