Don’t be fooled thinking this is a loving pet showing playful affection (Picture: iStockphoto)

Chilling new research has discovered that your lovingly playful cat is in fact waiting for you to drop dead so it can eat your flesh.

Scientists in the US made the shocking finding after two cats broke into their centre and ate bodies donated for forensic research.

In a recent paper, researchers at the Colorado Mesa University’s Forensic Investigation Research Station described how two different human corpses were eaten by two different cats.

Researchers said both animals had a ‘taste for arm tissue’.


The bodies were left decomposing on land within the facility’s two acres for students and scientists to document what happens to decaying human flesh.



Their study was aimed at helping police, coroners and medical examiners determine ‘what is natural that happens to a body and what is not natural’.

The station is surrounded by a 10-foot-high, wire-topped fence that extends two feet underground to keep out large animals and most burrowing ones.

Another killer simply waiting to devour your corpse (Picture: Getty)

Melissa Connor, a forensic anthropology professor and director of the station, told the Washington Post that cats, skunks and snakes would slip in through gaps in and under a front gate.

Then in late 2017, CCTV captured the feral cats eating the bodies that had been left out – both eating all the way to the bone.

The centre’s paper, which was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, highlighted one finding that confirms popular knowledge – cats are picky eaters.

Despite having more than 40 bodies to choose from each one returned to the corpse it had selected again and again and one returned nightly for 35 days in a row.

But Melissa and her co-authors said their findings didn’t change how they felt about cats, adding: ‘If you were hungry, wouldn’t you eat them?’

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