Animal premonition for disaster
Posted by davidkramer on 2008-June-10
Many times have I heard people state that animals can foresee natural disasters like earthquakes. Especially when the tsunami in Asia occurred people afterwards claimed that no animals were killed, since they had a premonition of what was about to happen.
However great that would be, it simply appears to be urban myths.
When I looked into it there were reports of people describing their experience with this terrible disaster. And again and again they talked about how terrible it was to see and hear people and animals drown. Others reported of the stench they had to smell due to corpses of animals and people some days after the tsunami.
On a report on Swedish TV they discussed how children were helped to cope with their dreadful experience. For instance they were asked to draw what they had seen. Interestingly, on the pictures you could clearly see drowning people AND animals.
But the best evidence that all this is a perpetual myths comes from science. In Sri Lanka (an affected area) elephants were regularly monitored. The way they moved before and around the time of the tsunami indicates that they had no clue of what was about to happen. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-7429.2006.00199.x
Sadly I have to say, this one seems to hold no truth. Maybe our wish to have hidden abilities within ourselves causes us to assume such senses in animals. Maybe we feel that if animals had a sixth sense we also might have it burried deep within us?
However, there is no evidence for it, no matter how strongly we wish for it…
