You’re driving to work when you pass a furry mass on the side of the road. It’s small and still. Your stomach sinks, and you continue to your destination, more than likely trying to avoid thinking about what you just saw.
There are others who make it their life’s mission to understand what happened.
The University of Florida’s Veterinary Forensic Sciences Laboratory identifies causes of death in free-roaming cats and investigates animal cruelty. In short: They fight crimes against cats.
The program, called A Cat Has No Name, is a bastion of scientific beneficence and for good reason: Adam Stern, a professor of forensic pathology and veterinarian, has spent years investigating cat deaths, identifying patterns and building a repository not only of data points, but how best to collect them.
The College of Veterinary Medicine program receives deceased-cat specimens from around the country.
This instinct to care for animals even in death is echoed around the world. In South Korea, a hub for culture, commerce and cats, that interest led to a collaboration between countries.
Jon Kim, D.V.M., Ph.D., a South Korean native, came to UF as an assistant professor through its Artificial Intelligence initiative in 2022. He develops diagnostic and clinical applications in the field of comparative oncology and translational medicine by way of AI and machine learning.
Stern’s program conducts autopsies on free-roaming cats and determines a cause of death. The lab estimates the time of death and tests for ecotoxicology artifacts, like lead. It also tries to answer a question that sometimes lands him in the witness box: Is this an instance of human-caused animal cruelty?
“We look at everything,” Stern said. “We’ll always take a history. Someone might say they saw a person put food down, and then the cat died, but we always do our own exams and look for everything. Is there blunt trauma? Is there natural disease? We look at everything, because if you go in with tunnel vision, there’s a big chance you’re going to be wrong.”
South Korea has many roaming cats — about 700,000 in 2022, according to government data. People care about them, Kim said. But officials, without extensive forensic pathology training, struggled when caseloads bulged. They looked to Stern to help make their process more efficient.
“I realized that AI could be very helpful here, in its application to forensic science as well,” Kim recalls. “They are dealing with a lot of data; they are writing reports, analyzing pieces of DNA, incorporating pathology imaging. This would help them advance their scientific work.”
He believes AI can help identify patterns that determine whether a human was involved in a cat’s death. For example, AI might help differentiate between a cat hit by a car versus an object.
Stern and Kim have established a research collaboration with the Animal Disease Diagnostic Division of the Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency, in South Korea. Each spring, the team sends two pathologists to visit the UF Veterinary Forensic Sciences Laboratory. Stern visited South Korea in 2025 and plans to return this year.
As the South Korean program grows, the Stern lab’s acts as a benchmark. Kim and his team standardize the dataset.
“Different people from different places tend to do science a little bit differently,” Kim said. “Creating a standard scoring system becomes important for validating the data.”
While nothing beats a forensic pathologist’s expertise and hands-on examination, case details can be added to an algorithm to pare many possible causes of death to a few.
“The data that comes from populations with cancer is very large, but so is the data that comes from even one individual,” Kim said. “The data is very complex, and something like AI can make it more manageable to synthesize it and discover patterns.”
In the future, Stern says, even those who don’t have time to spend on a single animal autopsy case could use AI to flag suspicious cases.
Stern’s own cats, Olive and Ivy, are gray domestic shorthairs who have no idea their owner conducts investigations one might describe as kitty CSI.
Ultimately, though, the work pays respect to companion animals that live alongside us. For Kim and Stern, death is not the end of the story.
Republished courtesy of University of Florida