Within minutes of Melbourne existence rattled by yesterday's earthquake, my Victorian friends reported changes in the behaviour of their animals.

I friend wrote on social media that her dog Harvey stood in the hallway howling for five full minutes before the globe moved. A colleague reported his television reception went fuzzy, but when he walked exterior to check the aerial, he noted an "unusual and striking absenteeism of birdsong" before he felt the quake.

My friend's cat Henry inexplicably disappeared earlier the quake, but returned home safe after a few hours. Conversely, her crude collie Angie — who is terrified of storms — was reportedly "totally chilled" earlier, during and later the seismic upshot.
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Earthquakes are unsettling, terrifying and potentially fatal. The 1989 Newcastle earthquake killed 13 people and injured 160. If our animal companions tin can requite us a heads-upwardly when an event like this is near to happen, information technology could be truly lifesaving. Merely tin can they really? Let's accept a look at the evidence.

The scholarly literature provides dozens of anecdotal reports of companion animals, livestock, wild animals and even insects behaving strangely before earthquakes.

But a review of 180 publications reporting 700 records of abnormal or unusual brute behaviours prior to 160 earthquakes establish the show correlating these behaviours with subsequent earthquakes was weak.

The majority of reports were anecdotal, and were fabricated after the earthquake, making them vulnerable to "call up bias". Put simply, people may be more likely to interpret their animal's behaviour as foreign in the calorie-free of a particularly memorable or traumatic upshot.

To found that unusual animal behaviours can predict earthquakes, scientists would need to discover animals nether controlled environmental conditions for extended periods of fourth dimension — long enough to be able to notice their behaviour before, during and after earthquakes. To exist confident animals do indeed behave strangely before an earthquake, we would need to likewise see them not behaving strangely when at that place isn't an impending quake.

Sadly, the evidence doesn't come up close to satisfying this. But the authors of the review did detect the supposed "predictive" behaviour in animals occurred around the same time equally "foreshocks" — smaller earthquakes that precede the main seismic result.

Animals may but be much better than us at detecting tiny vibrations or sounds in the ground. Marcus Wallis/Unsplash, CC By-SA
If this is the case, then what people interpret every bit animals' power to "predict" earthquakes may in fact be reactions to the vibrations or sounds from earthquakes that are too faint for us humans to detect.

This wouldn't be surprising, given that animals oftentimes outperform the states when it comes to sensory perception, such as smell. And it makes sense, given virtually 60% of unusual animal behaviours associated with earthquakes occurred in the five minutes preceding the quake.

<b>Fear and flight</b>
Fearfulness, anxiety or distress triggered by foreshocks might explain why animals display behaviours such as vocalising (similar Harvey the howling dog) or fleeing to somewhere they feel safer (like Henry the disappearing cat).

But of form it's possible Harvey and Henry behaved like this for purely not-earthquake-related reasons and the timing was sheer coincidence. At that place are many reasons a dog may howl (a courier opens the front gate) or a cat may go missing (your cat may hear a loud noise and hide under the bed), only we tend to brand the connection only when we're aware of the aforementioned stimuli.

What nosotros do know is that animals can be seriously affected by earthquakes, whether through injury, displacement or compromised access to nutrient and water. Thousands of animals, along with 185 people, died in the 2011 Christchurch convulsion, and many more animals were left homeless past property impairment.

Yesterday's convulse is also an of import reminder for people with companion animals to include them in emergency planning. Dogs and cats should be identified with a collar and be tagged and microchipped. And don't forget to update the contact details if y'all move business firm or change your phone number — that way you'll more than easily be reunited.