Can animals sense when an earthquake is about to occur?

Within minutes of yesterday’s earthquake rocking Melbourne, my Victorian friends reported changes in the behavior of their animals.

One of her friends wrote on social media that her dog Harvey stood in the hallway howling for a full five minutes before the ground moved. A colleague reported that his television reception became murky, but when he went out to check on the air, he noticed an “unusual and astounding absence of birdcage” before he could feel the earthquake.

My friend Henry’s cat inexplicably disappeared before the earthquake, but returned home safely a few hours later. Conversely, her rough Collie Angie – who fears storms – was reported to have been “absolutely cold” before, during, and after the seismic event.

Read more: Melbourne earthquake: What exactly happened, and what’s the best way to stay safe from aftershocks?

Earthquakes are alarming, frightening, and potentially fatal. The 1989 Newcastle earthquake killed 13 people and injured 160. If our animal companions could give us an alert when an event like this was about to happen, it could really be a life saver. But can they really? Let’s take a look at the guide.

The scientific literature offers 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 behaviors before 160 earthquakes found that the evidence linking these behaviors to subsequent earthquakes was weak.

The majority of the reports were anecdotal, and were prepared after the earthquake, which makes them subject to “recall bias”. Simply put, people may interpret their animal’s behavior as strange in light of a particularly memorable or traumatic event.

To prove that unusual animal behaviors can predict earthquakes, scientists will need to monitor animals under controlled environmental conditions for extended periods of time — long enough to be able to monitor their behavior before, during, and after earthquakes. To be confident that animals are indeed behaving strangely before an earthquake, we also need to see them not behaving strangely when no earthquake is imminent.

Unfortunately, the evidence is nowhere near satisfying this one. But the review authors found that the animals’ putative “predictive” behavior occurred at roughly the same time as “shocks” — smaller earthquakes that precede the main seismic event.

Animals may simply be much better than us at detecting vibrations or small sounds in the ground. Marcus Wallis/Unsplash, CC BY-SA

If this is the case, what people interpret as animals’ ability to “predict” earthquakes may actually be reactions to vibrations or sounds from earthquakes that are too weak for us humans to detect.

This wouldn’t be surprising, given that animals often outsmart us when it comes to sensory perceptions, such as smell. This makes sense, given that nearly 60% of the unusual animal behaviors associated with earthquakes occurred in the five minutes before an earthquake.

Fear and escape

Fear, anxiety, or distress caused by earthquakes may explain why animals exhibit behaviors such as vocalization (such as Harvey the dog howling) or fleeing to a place where they feel safe (such as Henry the disappearing cat).

But of course it’s possible that Harvey and Henry acted like this for reasons not related to the earthquake, and the timing was purely coincidental. There are many reasons why a dog howl (the courier opens the front gate) or a cat may lose (your cat may hear loud noises and hide under the bed), but we tend to make contact only when we are aware of the same stimuli.

Read more: Earthquakes don’t kill people. do buildings. And those beautiful decorative pieces are the first to fall

What we do know is that animals can be seriously affected by earthquakes, whether through injury, displacement or compromised access to food and water. Thousands of animals died, along with 185 people, in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and many animals were displaced due to property damage.

Yesterday’s earthquake is also an important reminder for people who have companion animals to include them in contingency planning. Dogs and cats must be identified by a collar, tagging and electronic chips. And don’t forget to update your contact details if you move home or change your phone number – that way you’ll be reunited more easily.

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