Crime scene investigator shares horrifying reason why people 'shouldn't trust their cats'

It seems dog lovers might just have won this one, as a professional crime scene investigator has revealed exactly why cats should never be trusted.

The argument over whether dogs make for better pets than cats has been going on for as long as our four-legged friends have been domesticated and stood loyally by our sides.

As someone who's firmly on the cat side of the argument, it pains me to hear what Sheryl ‘Mac’ McCollum has warned about our feline friends.

McCollum is a crime scene investigator for the Metro Atlanta Police Department, and her job is to process crime scenes - anything from 'interim auto all the way to a homicide'. She looks for evidence and tries to connect the dots to prove what happened and who did it.

It's safe to say she's seen it all throughout her career, and while recently appearing in an episode of LADbible's Honesty Box series, McCollum delved into the gruesome scenes she's come across.

Sheryl ‘Mac’ McCollum has lifted the lid on the myth that cats will eat the dead body of their owner (LADbible Stories)

She's no stranger to seeing dead bodies, revealing how one of the most horrific crime scenes she worked was the Adamsville slaying in Atlanta, where 'an entire family was murdered, and there was a young child that survived and played dead until they could go for help'.

She's also seen a severely decomposed body that was chopped up into pieces and placed into a cooler.

But what has this got to do with cats?

'Don't trust your cat'

Well, when asked by LADbible about the myth of cats eating their deceased owners, McCollum had some harsh words.

"Yeah, don't trust your cat," she said. "Your dog will sympathise and lay down beside you, but your cat will not."

And I'm sorry to say, my fellow cat lovers, that there's actually some truth to McCollum's claims.

Lena DeTar, an associate clinical professor at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, told Popular Science that pets will eat our bodies as a survival behavior when there’s no food left.

"The drive is not that all of a sudden your pet doesn’t like you anymore," she said. "The drive is you’re smelling like meat, you’re no longer moving, and I’m really hungry and I need to eat."

However, DeTar didn't specifically name cats as the main culprits.

'Dogs will consume the whole corpse if given a chance and enough time'

To throw a spanner in the works, Carolyn Rando, a forensic anthropologist and bioarcheologist at the University College London Institute of Archaeology, actually thinks dogs are more likely to eat their owners than cats are.

Could something this cute really do something so horrific? (Getty Stock Image)

"Cats are going to maybe chew at the soft tissue of your nose, chew at your face, chew at your fingertips, but dogs will consume the whole corpse if given a chance and enough time," Rando told the outlet.

She also pointed out that dogs are more domesticated and they’re natural scavengers, while cats retain more of their wild instincts and are natural hunters, so they'd be more likely to survive without being fed by their human for longer.

As horrifying as this is to read, it's important to remember that cats and dogs who've resorted to eating their owners after they've passed have done so because they have no other choice - it's simply a survival instinct.

Elsewhere in the Honesty Box episode, McCollum was asked whether or not she's desensitized to the horrific things she's seen at work - because let's face it, seeing someone who has been eaten by their pet must be a pretty horrendous day on the job.

Check out the full Honesty Box episode below:

"No, actually, this job has made me more grateful," she said.

"I think I'm a better wife, I'm a better mom, I'm a better sister, I'm a better friend because of what I've seen.

"If anything, I'm much more sentimental and can cry more than I did before this job."