Perhaps only God knows

by David Grand
January 13, 2005

That was the only way the director of India's biggest animal welfare organization could explain why there were no reports of animal carcasses among the 2,000 beasts at the southern Indian wildlife sanctuary as a result of the tsunami.       

And likewise in Sri Lanka's Yala National Park, just up the coast from where the destruction was most severe, all the elephants, leopards, deer and other wild animals managed to survive by fleeing to the high ground; and at Malaysia's Taiping Zoo, the animals began behaving in a strange manner the morning of the earthquake, with some, including hippopotamuses, running to their shelters and refusing to come out. And the canine hero of the day was a scruffy, yellow dog in Chinnakalapet, India, who kept nipping and nudging a 7-year-old boy up the hill where his family had fled before the tsunami hit. "He's my God," said the boy's mother. (Come to think of it, dog is God spelled backwards.)       

The question of whether animals have a sixth sense that alerts them to seismic events has been debated by scientists for centuries.  But there's no skepticism in China, where in 1975 the entire population of Haicheng was saved by camping outside the city several days before an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richer scale struck during the depths of winter, after locals reported seeing snakes emerge from hibernation only to freeze to death on the roads. Unfortunately, however, early animal warnings were ignored a year later, when another earthquake 400 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima swallowed up Tangshan City and 750,000 people.      

Now, I became an instant believer in animals uncanny ability to sense an impending earthquake when I lived as the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California in 1987, situated right on the San Andreas fault. A couple of hours before an earthquake measuring 5.9 hit the area my cat and two dogs acted as if they were stepping on hot coals, bouncing around the yard and begging to be let in. Sure as heck, it wasn't long afterwards that pictures and wall decorations began falling and dishes flying out of the kitchen cabinet. See, we warned you, dummy, was the expression I read in their eyes.      

In addition to expanding the tsunami-warning system to cover the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, I'd suggest as a backup that wildlife sanctuaries and national parks be set up along the world's coastal areas, with the animals behavior closely monitored for warning signs of seismic events that could trigger tsunamis. As was shown in India and Sri Lanka animals are reliable sentinels, who don't require any maintenance or replacement, as do the detectors mounted on buoys in the Pacific Ocean, which have a 75 percent rate of false alarms. (Plus, it'd be a good way of saving endangered species.)       

However, any warning system is only as good as the response it receives. And as we saw in the case of Thailand and Indonesia officials failed to react to the bulletin they got 15 minutes after the earthquake (hours before the deadly waves struck) from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu. The explanation offered for the inaction by the supervisor of the Seismic Monitoring Center in Thailand: "We never had a tsunami before, and hesitated to sound the alarm because it would damage tourism." Tell that to the families of the more than 7,000 foreign tourists who, as of Jan. 9, are dead, missing or unaccounted for.         

One thing for sure, I no longer have to wonder why Noah had little difficulty in leading mated pairs of every species up the ramp into the ark, aware as they were that the entire earth would soon be inundated by floods. But I do wish he'd barred cockroaches, mosquitoes, ticks, flies, termites and a few other noxious creatures.