Your pets may sense the #tremor before you do
Instances of catfish moving violently, chickens that stop laying eggs and bees leaving their hive in a panic have been noted.
As far back as 373 BC, historians recorded that animals, including rats, snakes and weasels, deserted the Greek city of Helice in their numbers just days before a quake devastated it.
Accounts of similar animal anticipation of earthquakes have been noted through the centuries.
Instances of catfish moving violently, chickens that stop laying eggs and bees leaving their hive in a panic have been noted. Countless pet owners claimed to have witness their cats and dogs acting strangely before the ground shook, barking or whining for no apparent reason, while some showed signs of nervousness and restlessness.
Exactly what it is that animals sense, if they feel anything at all, is a mystery. One theory is that both wild and domestic creatures feel the Earth vibrate before humans do. Other ideas suggest they detect electrical changes in the air or gas released from the Earth. Earthquakes and tremors are a sudden phenomenon and seismologists have no way of knowing exactly when or where the next one will hit.
An estimated 500,000 detectable quakes occur in the world each year, of which 100,000 can be felt by humans and 100 cause damage.
The Japanese who live in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, have for a long time studied animals in the hope of discovering what they hear or feel before the Earth shakes, in order to use that sense as a prediction tool. Americans remain sceptical, claiming that animals react to a variety of different things – being hungry, defending territory, mating and preditors.
Also read: #Tremors hit South Africa: what to doÂ
Erratic behaviour in dogs
In September 2003 a medical doctor in Japan made headlines when he sited a study that indicated erratic behaviour in dogs, such as excessive barking or biting, could be used to forecast quakes.
No scientific study has proven that animals reliably predict natural disasters, but if your collie starts losing it for no apparent reason, brace yourself.
There’s enough anecdotal evidence of creatures freaking out and even fleeing areas before earthquakes, to urge people to take head of unusual animal behaviour.
But there’s nothing supernatural or sixth sense about it.
Seismologists think animals sense an electrical signal generated by the movement of underground rocks before an earthquake. Or they might sense early but weak shocks that humans can’t feel. Even the US Geological Survey concedes that animals likely perceive earthquakes sooner than humans:
“Very few humans notice the smaller P wave that travels the fastest from the earthquake source and arrive before the larger S wave. But many animals with keener senses are able to feel the P wave seconds before the S wave arrives.
P or primary waves are seismic waves of energy that precede a tremor. They travel faster than S or secondary waves, which are the ones that cause damage during an earthquake. Some advance warning systems can detect P waves 60 to 90 seconds before shaking starts, kind of the way we see lightning before we hear thunder.”
https://giphy.com/gifs/frightened-Rtfx4Jtq4uHDi
Here’s a quick sampling of pre-earthquake weird animal antic anecdotes:
– Before the devastation in Japan earlier this year, witnesses reported elephants and monkeys moving to higher ground as well as odd behaviour in cattle, dogs and other domestic animals.
– Before China’s devastating 2008 earthquake, zebras in captivity banged their heads against doors of enclosures, elephants swung their trunks wildly, lions and tigers paced when they should have been napping and peacocks screeched simultaneously just five minutes before the tremors struck. Similar stories emerged after the Asian tsunami in 2005.
– In China in 1975, residents of Haicheng reported unusual animal behaviour just before a 7.3 earthquake killed 2,000 people. Similar examples go back as far as 373BC in Greece.
Did you feel the reported tremors that shook the ground on Monday 3 March, if so, did you notice anything strange about the behaviour of your domestic pets prior to the tremor?
DID YOU KNOW?
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