Do your pets know an earthquake is about to happen?

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 reports that his television reception has become ambiguous. However, when he went out to check on the air, he noticed an “unusual and astounding absence of sparrows” before he felt the earthquake.

My friend Henry’s cat inexplicably disappeared before the earthquake but returned home safely a few hours later. On the contrary, it was reported that the raw coléa Angie – which fears storms – was “totally cold” before, during and after the seismic event.

Earthquakes are alarming, frightening, and possibly fatal. Thirteen people lost their lives and another 160 were injured in the 1989 Newcastle earthquake. 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? 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.

Most of the reports were anecdotal and were prepared after the earthquake, making them vulnerable to “invocation of bias”. For example, 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 need to monitor animals under controlled environmental conditions for long periods — long enough to maintain their behavior before, during and after earthquakes. To be sure, the animals are already behaving strangely before the earthquake; We’ll also need to see them not act weird 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” — more small earthquakes that preceded a major seismic event.

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

This would not be surprising, given that animals often outperform us in terms of sensory perception, such as smell. This makes sense, given that nearly 60 percent of the unusual animal behaviors associated with earthquakes occurred in the five minutes before an earthquake.

Fear of animals and their escape

Do dogs know when an earthquake occurs?

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

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.

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 and 185 people died 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.

This article was originally published in The Conversation by Anne Quain at the University of Sydney. Read the original article here.

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