Several months ago, one of the largest natural disasters in recent history killed a few hundred thousand people in Asia. Strangely enough, the tsunami killed very few animals.

Now, some seek nothing behind this. Others say animals can just feel the vibrations in the earth and that just tells them to run. But I think there's more. Now, I'm usually very skeptical about paranormal stuff - I believe very little and I belong to no known religion, but animals seem to have something we don't or we don't realise that we have it.

Elephants in Thailand broke loose from their chains with people on their backs and ran for the hills (the people can thank the elephants for taking them to higher grounds). They did this several minutes before the tsunami hit. Now, if they responded to the actual earthquake they'd have ran much earlier, afteral, the wave hit Thailand a considerable amount after the earthquake. Perhaps they heard the wave coming? Possible, but not just animals ran. A man on TV said his dog, who loved playing in the ocean, refused to go anywhere near the beach that day.

Now, in the tsunami case - many people just say that certain animals can hear a lot better (which is true) and when they started running the rest followed. But this tsunami isn't the first time such a thing has happened. In recent years people that are very epileptic have been given dogs. Why? Because the dogs can sense when the person is about to have a seizure up to an hour in advance. Without connecting someone to a brainscan it is impossible to detect if a person is about to have a seizure. Usuaully the patient can't feel it's gonna happen and neither can the people around him - but the dog can. The dogs will usually start barking or something like that and this tells the patient he needs to find a place where his seizure won't do him any harm. The dog can also be trained to push a button in case of a seizure for medical help or get the attention of other people.

Before regular earthquakes hit a lot of animals also start to freak out, even fish. Now, you could blame this on vibration again. However, if there are already significant tremors before the big one hits it should show up on seismographs and that means scientists should also be able to predict the earthquake. Not just that, a large truck passing by can sometimes produce quite a shake without upsetting any animals.

So what's going on?

Over the years I have had several of my companions warn me of danger.
One that would let me know if there was a bear around. She could tell the difference between a black bear and and a grizzly bear.
I have also had several cats, that once I learned to read the body language, would let me know that a storm was on its way.
Watch the animals, they have senses that us lowly humans cannot even begin to comprehend.

It's called instinct (spelling?) all animals possess this ability but we animals have evolved to the point that we rely on other means of warning and don't even know we posess this ability. A few people do however and they are thought of as being some kind of quack.
When I was a boy growing up on the farm we had no radio or tv, Ocasionaly got a newspaper. But my parents would always go outside and look at the sky before going to bed, By doing this they could predict the weather very acurately. We always knew what time of day or nite it was without the aid of a clock. People in the fields would often ask me what time it was and then look at their pocket watch to see that I was always within 5min. of the correct time.
I use these skills still today in many ways, Hunting, fishing, predicting weather and even in evaluateing wheather or not a person is honarable and trust worthy, This happens imediately upon meeting a stranger. a few times I have use this ability to predict wheather I would be lucky and when I got this feeling I would go to the casino to gamble, Always won 800 to 1,000 dollars. sadley I don't have this feeling often enough.
Have you not ever had the feeling that you had seen or did something before eventhough it was the first time. It comes to like, Oh I must of dreamed that. then you just brush it aside and forget about it. This was somethin that your subconcious had seen in the future but you didn't realise it.

Yes animals have this ability to sence thing's are going to happen because this is one of their means of survival. Maybe the reason I reconise these abilities, However slight is because I am part American Indian and am very in tune with nature.

deerhunter

yup -that's it in a nutshell - how tune one is with nature...

I am in awe of those who are capable of tapping into these abilities -unfortunately I feel like most of the time I have been -ummm what is the word I'm looking for :thinking: CONDITIONED to the ways of modern life -and I don't often find myself in touch with nature -and I think at least for me it has a lot to do with enviroment -I am a big city boy -lest -nature is not always so close at hand...

I do my best to "get away" which is sometimes just a few steps from my front door to the ocean -maybe it's not enuff to put me in touch with all my possibilities -but it does tend to get me back to center ground... maybe that's as much as I can expect in one of the busiest cities in the world...

Predicting the weather by looking at the sky is simply making an observation. The various types of clouds for example can tell you a lot about the weather if you know what to look for. Winning in the casino - I'm not really believing that. The thing is you have to be objective about that. Most people will gamble because they feel lucky (after all, if you expected to lose money you wouldn't do it) and when they win they'll say "see, I was right" and when they lose they forget about it.

I've had plenty of deja-vu experiences, but I can't say they ever predicted anything. It was usually more like "I've done this before" or "I've been here before" while I know that's not possible.

It seems the deja-vu experience can apparantly be explained in a more rational matter and that's a neurological problem. It has to do with information not reaching parts of the brain at the same time. So while the concious part of your brain is still waiting to process the information other parts of the brain have already received it. This may include memory - so when the concious part of your brain finally gets to process the information, just a couple of milliseconds later, the information is already stored in memory. Needless to say, this gives your conciousness a problem: how can the current event already be stored in memory?

It's said to be something like that - I'm no neurologist though and I bet the final ruling on it isn't in yet. The fact that anxiety and certain neurological disorders increase the amount of deja-vu experiences seems to hint that this is mainly a neurological problem.

Now I'm attacking a theory that could explain why animals can seemingly predict the impossible though. I realise something of this nature would explain the behavior of animals in certain situations. Because of that, I'm not throwing true precognition out the window. I'd say there's evidence that this might be happening but I'm not buying into it too quickly.

See what I ment about others thinking that people who posess thes abilitys and reconiseing them are quaks.
Now what you are saying is that these people are mentaly abnormal when in all reality they are more normal than the sientest that have all this book learning and think that they are superior to everyone else by trying to prove that they have a brain disorder. This is exactly why people who have these abilitys don't discuss it.

I have this friend who once saved my life about 40 years ago and were it not for him I wouldn't be here today, In fact the doctors said that it was medicly impossible for me to have lived for 2 1/2 hours with a severed main artery. But I did. Because of this I feel that I owe my entire life to this person.
He at the time was detitute and just before looseing his home because of his inability to pay. I had a long talk with him and his wife explaning what would happen if they listened to what I said. Well they knew me not to be mentaly unstable and have continued to listen and belive me, and now are each a multi milionare in their own right. No I'm not a welthy person monitarly and don't want to be. My riches come from helping others. They are not the only ones that I have advised, but the only ones that I have discussed this with. Othes just simply say "How did you know that" but I never elaborate.
We, the people who posess these abilitys are not the only ones that do, It just that we reconise it. We never know if what we predict will come true or not untill it happens. We never know everything that's going to happen, Just some things we get a realy strong feeling about. I have even tried to realy concentrate on some things to see if I could predict the outcome but can't. The things that I do predict come to me in an instant, seemingly out of nowhere.
Did you ever watch a program called "court tv" and a series on there called "cicek detectides"? Try it sometime. It just might change your mind about daja-vu. These are real life stories and have changed the minds of a lot of law inforcement people both in explaning the past and predicting the future.

Yes absolutely and unaquiveckly animals do have the ability to predict danger among other things.

Cetatean, I was one who freaked about the welfare of the animals, especially Sumatran and Bengal tigers, after the quake, then the tsumani, hit. Then, I found out that most of the animals had made it ok, and despite the terrible human toll, I felt a wee bit better. I read about the elephants who ran for it, even picking up children and putting the kids on their big backs on the way to higher ground. As you said, a lot of people who paid attention to their animals lived. I chose to donate to the Humane Society's relief efforts, because people in that part of the world really depend on their animals, and even the domestic animals who lived were scattered and need/needed help.

I live in earthquake country, and know of a guy in the San Francisco area who "predicts" earthquakes by the spike in lost pets in the newspaper, and he's almost never wrong. I've had cats for the last 16 years or so in CA, and two of three were good earthquake warners. My current cat hasn't been through a big enough quake with me to be able to tell if he has the ability, but I suspect he does. (My dearly departed first cat would yowl if there was an earthquake imminent!)

Deerhunter, I absolutely agree that we have become too civilized and domesticated as humans to have the special abilities that animals possess. I am happy for you that you still have these instincts pretty strongly. I grew up in the countryside, and even cattle were fairly good about realizing tornado weather; horses were even better at it, as were some dogs. I have no idea how much of it is sharpened senses, for an in-tune human or for an animal, and how much is something more. Either way, I believe in that "sixth sense," and have had many occasions to be thankful for it, either in myself or in an animal companion.

One last thing: my cat is my judge of character when I meet people and bring them to my place. If he does not trust them, I am wary as well. If my cat takes to someone immediately, I am much more at ease. Of course, if anyone is disrespectful to my cat in ANY way, that person does not stay long nor get invited back!

Fascinating topic, Cetacean! Thanks for bringing this up, and giving us reason to think about our connection to Mother Nature, the specially refined hearing and sense of smell (among many other things!) of our animal brothers and sisters, and whether there is more to it than just biology. I, personally, think that animals, especially in the wild, do have the sixth sense, and that a pet or domesticated horse, cow, goat, etc., does have the same special abilities, although sometimes muted, as they are in many if not most humans.

To add to an example above, I've read that scientists are testing the ability of dogs to smell out cancer in humans, which will rock (and save lives) if it is proven true; initial studies look promising. It's also non-invasive to be sniffed by a dog, so the diagnosis isn't part of the pain and problems if one does have cancer.

Back to my cat for a second: he can read my moods very well. Some of it is body language, I'm sure, but it seems to go beyond that. I do love the little fellow!

Peace,
DreadTigress

I'm not calling you a quak deerhunter - I'm sorry if that's how you intepreted my reply. As I said at the end, I'm not saying that it's not possible - but I am sceptical.

But if I didn't believe that something is going on then I wouldn't have started this thread. But I'm sceptical about seeing the future. I think it has more to do with the animal senses. Some animals can sense minute voltage changes in their invironment, others can sense pressure changes or have sonar. Many animals see the world in a different color spectrum (some flowers have colors we cannot see but bees can), hear lower/higher pitched sounds, smell better. Not only that, there's a differance in how much effort is put into processing the information received from the senses.

Now, there's always stuff we don't know so I can't say for sure that I know, but here's my theory: People appear to have an 'aura'. Many say aura's are purely fantasy, but you can actually show a person's aura with expensive photographic tools. The results do indeed differ from person to person, so we do all have a unique and changing aura. Because of all the voltage changes in our body and the electrical activity going on we have a weak electro-magnetic field around us. VERY weak. Auro photography does nothing more but capture this energy and amplify it, making is visible. Big changes in the body (and mind) would create a change in this field. If you haven't got such a camera (they're really expensive) a natural EM meter can do the same without making a picture of it. These meters are so sensitive they can be used as burglar alarms: they can actually detect the voltage change caused by a person entering the room (although not always) and even detect people standing at the other side of a wall. I would consider it possible for animals to perhaps sense this field, if only faint. Events like earthquakes also have an effect on the earth's magnetic field, but studies have shown that a often sudden change in magnetic field happens BEFORE the actual earthquake hits. If animals are sensitive to this, it would make sense that they would completely freak out just before an earthquake since they can sense something has changed - a disturbance in "the force" in Star Wars terms ;). It is believed that some animals, such as pigeons and sharks, can even use the earth's magnetic field to navigate. It would make sense, since the shark for example can navigate through the ocean without any visual guides to go on.