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Can animals sense when an earthquake is about to happen
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Can animals sense when an earthquake is about to happen
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Can animals sense when an earthquake is aboutto happen?
theconversation.com/can-animals-sense-when-an-earthquake-is-about-to-happen-168483
Anne Quain
Within minutes of Melbourne being rattled by yesterday’s earthquake, my Victorian
friends reported changes in the behaviour of their animals.
One friend wrote on social media that her dog Harvey stood in the hallway howling for
five full minutes before the earth moved. A colleague reported his television reception
went fuzzy, but when he walked outside to check the aerial, he noted an “unusual and
striking absence of birdsong” before he felt the quake.
My friend’s cat Henry inexplicably disappeared before the quake, but returned home safe
after a few hours. Conversely, her rough collie Angie — who is terrified of storms — was
reportedly “totally chilled” before, during and after the seismic event.
Earthquakes are unsettling, terrifying and potentially fatal. The 1989 Newcastle
earthquake killed 13 people and injured 160. If our animal companions can give us a
heads-up when an event like this is about to happen, it could be truly lifesaving. But can
they really? Let’s have a look at the evidence.
The scholarly literature provides dozens of anecdotal reports of companion animals,
livestock, wildlife and even insects behaving strangely before earthquakes.
But a review of 180 publications reporting 700 records of abnormal or unusual animal
behaviours prior to 160 earthquakes found the evidence correlating these behaviours with
subsequent earthquakes was weak.
The majority of reports were anecdotal, and were made after the earthquake, making
them vulnerable to “recall bias”. Put simply, people may be more likely to interpret their
animal’s behaviour as strange in the light of a particularly memorable or traumatic event.
To establish that unusual animal behaviours can predict earthquakes, scientists would
need to observe animals under controlled environmental conditions for extended periods
of time — long enough to be able to observe their behaviour before, during and after
earthquakes. To be confident animals do indeed behave strangely before an earthquake,
we would need to also see them not behaving strangely when there isn’t an impending
quake.
Sadly, the evidence doesn’t come close to satisfying this. But the authors of the review did
find the supposed “predictive” behaviour in animals occurred around the same time as
“foreshocks” — smaller earthquakes that precede the main seismic event.
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