Animals in Turkey and Syria sensed the earthquake before it happened

We sympathise with the massive loss of human and animal lives in Turkey and Syria. Our Malaysian SAR teams are there and we hope the dogs and personnel will be safe.

Did the animals in Turkey and Syria sense the earthquake before it happened? Yes, of course they did.

Here is the story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/02/07/animals-turkey-syria-sense-earthquake/

No surprise there. Before the 2004 tsunami hit Sri Lanka, parts of Thailand and Indonesia, it was reported that animals behaved in anxiety as well. In fact, elephants in Thailand broke loose of their chains and carried humans to safety up the hills.

According to the story above:

Birds flew erratically above snow-capped buildings. Dogs howled loudly. Then, a devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria leveled buildings and killed more than 21,000 people.

Social media users claimed that animals were behaving strangely just before the massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake and significant aftershocks. While The Washington Post could not immediately verify the footage, the idea that animals can detect powerful earthquakes before humans has been a theory around since at least ancient times.

There is scientific research that supports it. Much in the same way that seismological machines can pick up tremors undetectable to the human body, animals are better equipped to sense tiny foreshocks traveling through the Earth seconds before more powerful earthquake waves barrel through, scientists say. They might even be able to sense them before the foreshocks, some researchers say.

Animals tell each other about the dangers:

The reasons animals reacted unusually are not yet clear, he said. “There are indications that they can tell us something. How they do it, we don’t know yet,” he said. He believes that their ability to sense danger may be related to their ability to communicate with each other.

“The cows initially just froze — they didn’t move at all. And then that got the dogs really nervous, and they started to go crazy, barking. And then the sheep went crazy. And that started, altogether, to make the cows really crazy.”

In ancient times:

There are other high-profile examples, though, from history and the present. One of the earliest anecdotal accounts, attributed to the Roman writer Aelian, details how mice, snakes, centipedes and beetles fled the city of Helike before it was razed by an earthquake and destroyed by a tsunami in 373 B.C.

In 2016, 15 minutes before an earthquake struck Oklahoma, birds took flight in such significant numbers that thousands of them could be observed airborne by radar technology.

Animals communicate with each other, inter-species.

For that matter, even grass and plants communicate with each other and with other critters as well. When grass is cut, they cry out to warn other grass and asks critters to help them. That’s the smell of “freshly cut” grass that we know of. It is a cry for help from the grass.

Yups, it’s not such a wonderful world, after all, is it?