Can Animals Predict Natural Disasters? London Society for Psychical Research

For more see Rupert’s Substack article on this topic
👉 https://rupertsheldrake.substack.com/p/animal-warnings-of-earthquakes

Recorded on November 4, 2017 at the Society for Psychical Research in London. 

When disasters strike, it is often animals who seem to know first. Long before seismographs were invented, people noticed that snakes, rats, dogs, and birds behaved strangely in the days leading up to earthquakes. Similar reports come before tsunamis, avalanches, air raids, and even medical crises like seizures. Are these simply heightened senses—an ability to detect tremors, gases, or subtle vibrations—or do they point to something deeper, an anticipatory awareness we do not yet understand?

In this talk, I share some of the evidence I’ve gathered over the years: from ancient Greek accounts to modern field studies, from the Chinese earthquake networks under Mao to the toads of central Italy abandoning their mating grounds days before a quake. The pattern repeats across cultures and circumstances, yet mainstream science has largely dismissed it as superstition.

Why is that? What are we overlooking when we ignore such a consistent body of observations? Could systematic study of animal behavior, especially with today’s global communications, provide early warnings and even save lives?

I don’t claim to have the answers. But I invite you to explore these questions with me, and to consider what they reveal not only about animals, but about our shared sensitivity to the unseen.

Transcript

(0:00:00) Now, there are many ways in which animals show premonitions, and they may or may not be mediated by the normal senses. I'll discuss that later. But the most striking kind that's been known since ancient tomes is the ability of animals to somehow to sense in advance when an earthquake is coming.
(0:00:23) There were records from the ancient Greek literature. In 373 BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote about a famous earthquake in Helice in Greece. Five days before the earthquake, he said rats were coming out of the towns, snakes were leaving their burrows. There were many signs of unusual animal activity.
(0:00:50) Well, that was written down over 2,000 years ago, but people had been noticing this, I'm sure, for long before. It was one of the earlier historical records. And these have gone on over the centuries. Before earthquakes, there are many, many reports of animals behaving strangely, sometimes days in advance.
(0:01:14) When I got interested in this in the 1990s when I was doing research on unexplained animal abilities, I decided I'd look up the literature on this and I found it had been almost completely ignored by zoologists and by psychical researchers and of course by seismologists.
(0:01:37) When I talk to people about it, they say, oh, it's just superstition, it's folk belief, and people make these stories up afterwards. And so, nevertheless, there's a much sounder and more curious instinct among the public as a whole.
(0:01:53) And journalists know that people are interested in these things. So whenever there are earthquakes and there are unusual animal behavior, you get little snippets in newspapers. You know, dogs howling days before and so on. So because nobody else seemed to be doing it, I thought I'd try collecting this information. And I also tried to take a proactive approach.
(0:02:17) For example, in 1997, the Assisi earthquake, which occurred in 1997, at that time I had an Italian research assistant. And so I asked her to go over to Assisi a couple of days after the earthquake to go around collecting information about what people had noticed.
(0:02:38) She did this partly from the local newspapers, partly from a series of interviews with the mayor and local vets and other people in the area. And it became very clear from these cases she collected that there'd been unusual animal behavior for at least five days before. Five days before at Foligno near Assisi,
(0:02:59) The restauranteurs had complained to the mayor because the rats had come out of the sewers and were swarming over the riverside and the terraces where there were these restaurants. They were losing business because no one wanted to go and have dinner with rats running around. So there were official complaints and no one knew why. Dogs were howling mysteriously in the night.
(0:03:21) The vets were giving, she interviewed vets, and they'd had people complaining their animals were showing signs of restlessness, and they couldn't find what was wrong with them. And then the earthquake struck. In the 1999 Turkish earthquake, I had a research institute, a researcher on the spot. And again, many stories of unusual animal behavior. And
(0:03:52) There was an earthquake in Greece shortly after that. And again, I had a Greek researcher on the spot who was collecting information about this. And again, the same kinds of things, unusual animal behavior, animals showing signs of anxiety or fear days in advance.
(0:04:11) I also had a research assistant in California, and he did a lot of interviews with people in Santa Cruz, where there was the big Loma Prater earthquake in 1989, and then again in Los Angeles after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
(0:04:32) There were many stories from people. He did random telephone interviews and asked people who kept pets if they'd noticed any unusual behavior in their animals. Many had signs of fear and anxiety. Some had noticed unusual behavior in wild animals.
(0:04:51) And the Chinese took this up under Chairman Mao. There is a lot of folklore in China. There are popular verses that people know about unusual behavior of animals before earthquakes.
(0:05:07) And Chairman Mao thought that there ought to be people's signs, that the seismologists weren't doing a very good job at predicting earthquakes. In fact, most pastors, well, they've given up. They say it's impossible. All they can do is give statistical risk assessments, but they can't predict specific earthquakes. They long ago gave up trying to do this on the grounds that it's not possible. Chairman Mao didn't believe them and thought that these folk stories about animals should be taken seriously.
(0:05:37) And he set up networks where hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants were told what to look out for, unusual behavior, snakes coming out of their burrows, rats coming out into the open, fearful behavior by animals. And then they had to report them to the local party headquarters or the police.
(0:05:58) And sure enough, soon after the system was set up, in Haicheng in February 1974, there were escalating reports of unusual behavior by animals. And they made a decision, the authorities made a decision to evacuate the city of Haicheng. On the morning of a day, in the evening of which, there was a devastating earthquake that destroyed most of the buildings in the city.
(0:06:27) So it actually worked. They then had, over the years, quite a few more successes with this method. There were one or two false alarms, and there were one or two earthquakes they didn't issue warnings for. But the Chinese actually put this into practice and were very effective, much more so than anyone in the West who wasn't even trying. And
(0:06:51) When the Chinese became more free to travel and they started going to Congress as seismologists and talked about this, they were met not with excited greeting, you know, that's amazing, let's try and do this, but with scorn and derision. You know, they were victims of superstition, you know, folk beliefs, this couldn't possibly happen because animals couldn't possibly do that.
(0:07:16) So they've now backtracked on this, and there's much less of it going on in China, owing to international influence, which is a great shame, because they were in the lead for years. Now there's virtually no research going on in this subject. I'd been collecting these stories, but I don't know anyone else who's systematically doing that. I continue to do it. It's planted my database.
(0:07:42) But I think this would be one of the areas in which there could be a systematic and useful research programme. Practically everyone nowadays has mobile phones, practically everywhere in the world. They have access to the internet. And if people were told what to look out for, and just given a number, a hotline they could ring, or a website they could report animal behaviour to...
(0:08:09) There could be systematic monitoring of this. In all the earthquake-prone areas, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, India, China, California, Washington State, there are many places that are earthquake-prone where this system could work. Modern telecommunications would make it extremely easy to set this up.
(0:08:31) You'd have to do a research thing first of course because you can't just issue warnings and create panics without being fairly sure of what's going on. I actually tried to get something like this set up in California.
(0:08:46) And it would have required some funding, because it would require somebody to look after the system and to monitor it. And I tried to get funding from the insurance industry. I thought they'd be interested, but they weren't. Because the buildings insurance industry, who I approached first, said, well, look, if there's an earthquake, even if there's a warning, nothing we can do about it, the buildings will just fall down anyway, so we're not going to waste money. I was asking for $20,000. And...
(0:09:16) Then the life insurance industry said, well, because we've got fairly strict building codes, there's not more than five or six deaths in Californian earthquakes usually, so it's not really worth our while. So they took this incredibly narrow, blinkered view, and the seismologists took the view. This is a folk story. There was a brief period in the late 70s when a few people in the U.S. Geological Service did actually monitor earthquakes and did find signs of animal awareness before them
(0:09:46) Then people say, oh, well, this hasn't been observed by zoologists. It's just folk reports. But actually, the situation changed in... Where are we?
(0:10:00) This was in 19...
(0:10:06) Oh, this was very recently. This was only about seven or eight years ago. An Oxford research student called Rachel Grant was working on amphibia in central Italy at a place called San Rufino, the lake of San Rufino. And she was studying the mating of toads. And they mate in the spring. And her project was on mating behavior by toads.
(0:10:30) And there were about 90 mating toads in males there waiting for females in this lake. And she was monitoring their behavior. And then suddenly one day on March the 30th, there were no toads. And this was very unusual. Her supervisor who'd worked there before had never seen this phenomenon. And so she went every day and she found there were no toads.
(0:10:56) And six days later, on April 6th, there was a massive earthquake in that area, and the toads didn't return until April 16th, ten days later, and then they resumed their interrupted mating. Um...
(0:11:11) So here's a case where we do actually have a professional zoologist observing animal behavior before and after an earthquake. So I think that this kind of thing could easily be set up. The reason it hasn't been set up is because of a deep taboo. It's not as if there's a popular taboo. Most people love this stuff. Most ordinary people are fascinated by it. Journalists love it. TV people love it.
(0:11:37) It's people in the academic and scientific world who have decided it's impossible, who have blocked this happening. But the Chinese did it, and it could be done again, and it would cost very little. So I think this would be an excellent project for someone to take up. Now, very similar principles apply to tsunamis.
(0:11:58) Many of you will remember on December 26, 2004, there was a massive tsunami in Asia, which affected Sumatra, South India, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. Huge tidal waves all around that region.
(0:12:14) Before the tsunami, people were observing unusual animal behavior, elephants going from near the shore up into the hills, flamingos moving from their coastal nesting site in South India, flying inland, dogs behaving strangely, not wanting to be taken for walks on the beach in Gaul Ceylon.
(0:12:36) There were many, many cases of this. Some was reported in the newspapers. Some I had correspondents in those parts of the world who I asked to look into it for me, and I collected many more stories from this. And...
(0:12:53) So I think it's pretty clear that animals do it with tsunamis as well as earthquakes. And there was, at that time, the British government set up a tsunami that contributed to an international tsunami warning system. The chief advisor for the government was our representative on it. So I wrote to him and said, you know, why not include a very small part of this budget
(0:13:18) To look into animal behavior, go to these countries, have people on the ground interviewing people. How long in advance what did they notice? Do it while memories are fresh, you know, within a few weeks after the earthquake. And he wrote back saying, earthquakes are a physics problem, it has nothing to do with biology. That was it. It's just such a blinkered attitude.
(0:13:42) So anyway, I think that this could work too with mobile phones. There could be a tsunami warning system. So this is more than a merely academic interest. It's a very practical interest. It would interest millions of people, and it would save lives. Now, how do they do it? Given the fact that many of these earthquakes are preceded by unusual animal behavior,
(0:14:07) What could be the reasons? Well, the usual reason people come up with is they say, well, they must be very sensitive to tremors and feel unusual tremors and respond to these tremors. Well, if so, why don't seismologists give us warnings of earthquakes? They've got very sensitive apparatus that measures tremors. How come animals can do better than lavishly equipped seismology laboratories? I don't think it's just tremors. Otherwise, seismologists could do it.
(0:14:38) Then there are theories that it may be changes in electrical, static electricity on the Earth's surface. I think there's some reason to think that there are changes. Guy Lian Clefair, a member of the Society, who most many of you know, has observed earthquakes where he's noticed electrical anomalies beforehand. And it could well be that that's part of it as well.
(0:15:05) And there may be, other people have suggested, there may be unusual gases escaping from the earth before earthquakes. There's various speculative hypotheses. I personally think it's much more likely that it involves an element of precognition or presentiment. And the reason I think that is that these kinds of warnings happen in advance, not just in relation to earthquakes, but in relation to many other potential natural disasters.
(0:15:36) On February 13th 1999, there was a massive avalanche of Galtur and the Tyrol, which killed a lot of people. It swept away part of a village. And people who lived locally noticed that before the earthquake, the chamois, these small mountain goats, came down from the hillsides. And it's a folklore there that when they come down from the hillsides, which they don't normally, there's going to be an avalanche. These animals live up in the mountains.
(0:16:05) If they didn't sense an avalanche in advance, they'd rapidly be wiped out. So there'd obviously be natural selection for earthquake protection. And I then asked a Swiss friend of mine to go around Switzerland and Austria interviewing people in villages where there had been avalanches recently.
(0:16:27) And again, he found over and over again stories of the chamois coming down from the mountains and unusual behavior by ibexes and dogs. Those were the three species that seemed to be most involved. And traditionally, people have used this behavior as a way of getting avalanche warnings. Well, in the case of avalanches, it's unlikely to be electrical events or earth tremors and could be sensing changes in temperature or something. But
(0:16:55) Again, the pre-sentiment explanation might be more appropriate.
(0:17:03) We then come to man-made disasters like air raids. In the Second World War, hundreds of people in Britain had the experience of knowing when there was going to be an air raid because their dog or cat would become very anxious and in some cases lead them to the air raid shelter and try and herd the family to the air raid shelter. And the families where this happened soon grew to trust it because they were always, always right.
(0:17:32) And again, the conventional explanation is, oh, well, they must have heard the enemy planes coming. But the fact is, there were lots of planes in the era of the Second World War, including British planes and fighter planes trying to fend off German bombers. And...
(0:17:49) I looked into the time lag. The time lag was in some cases 30 to 45 minutes before the raid. Well, I went to the Imperial War Museum to look up how fast German bombers flew, and it was about 300 miles an hour. So they must have been at least 150 miles away when this happened.
(0:18:10) And to hear the sound of a bomber plane from 150 miles away would only work when the wind's blowing in the right direction. Those planes were coming from the east. The prevailing winds here are from the southwest. So it's extremely unlikely that it was done just by hearing these planes.
(0:18:27) But the clinching perfect experiment occurred, from the point of view of science, not from the point of view of the victims, with the V-2 rockets. Towards the end of the war, the Germans developed supersonic ballistic rockets, which went up about, they went up, I've forgotten how many thousand feet. The engine then cut out.
(0:18:50) And they then plummeted down and they hit the Earth at about 2,000 miles an hour. The speed of sound is about 700 miles an hour. So no one could hear them coming. The V-1 rockets were called buzz bombs and they had made a buzzing sound. But the supersonic V-2 bombs were inaudible. That's why they were the ultimate terror weapon.
(0:19:10) They weren't very accurate, and people had no way of knowing where they'd land. You could be just sitting at home anywhere in the south of England, and suddenly you'd be blasted into non-existence from this bomb just falling on with no warning whatever. And yet, there are many cases, I've collected about 10 so far, of people who were alive at the time who noticed their dog behave strangely, go to the window looking fearful, pointing in the direction...
(0:19:38) where there would later be a blast of a V2 bomb going off. So it seemed that some dogs could detect even these before there was any sensory information. Then there are cases of dogs responding before terrorist bombs. In 1992, there was an IRA report.
(0:20:00) bomb attack at Staples Corner in North London and there was a woman who lived near there about half a mile away who described how for about 10 minutes beforehand her Alsatian dog was behaving in the most uncharacteristic way fearful it was didn't know what to do she didn't know what was wrong with it and then the bomb went off and so there are other cases too and of course these things have gone on in the NATO bombing raids on Serbia and
(0:20:28) In 1999, there were many reports from Belgrade Zoo. The director of the zoo was interviewed in the newspapers saying he always knew when the bombing raids were going to happen because of the strange behavior by the animals.
(0:20:41) So I think there's a great deal of circumstantial evidence that animals have these abilities and they also have survival value. The animals that were able to get to higher ground were not wiped out by the tsunami, whereas humans who didn't have this sense, many of them were wiped out by the tsunami.
(0:21:01) Now, these kinds of abilities seem to extend also to giving warnings of medical conditions in humans. Many of you will have read about seizure alert dogs. Many people who suffer from epileptic seizures have dogs that warn them sometimes after half an hour in advance when they're going to have a seizure.
(0:21:25) And many people who've got dogs who are epileptic just noticed this spontaneously and were very grateful for it. But there are now charities that actually train seizure alert dogs. It's a known kind of service dog. And they have service dog status. People can take them with them like guide dogs for the blind.
(0:21:49) And they change the lives of people who are epileptic. Many forms of epilepsy can be controlled with drugs, but some can't. And for people who have seizures that come on unpredictably, their lives are completely constrained. They can't go out shopping, for example, because what happens if they have a seizure in a supermarket and fall down frothing at the mouth? I mean, incredibly embarrassing for everybody.
(0:22:14) So when they have dogs that give them warnings, usually what the dogs do is come up to them and kind of herd them to safety, try to get them sitting down and stay beside them, sometimes licking them to comfort them, and stay with them during the seizure, and then are there with them when they recover.
(0:22:33) So this is a medical application which is already going on here in Britain. And there are also dogs now being trained by... There's a charity in Northamptonshire called Medical Support Dogs that are training dogs to give warnings to diabetics of hypoglycemic attacks. There are now many diabetics who have dogs that warn them
(0:23:02) especially in the night when they're hypoglycemic and they need to have their blood sugars getting dangerously low. And again, these are now widely used and people are actually training them with proven results. How do they do it?
(0:23:18) Well, again, people say, oh, well, it must be the epileptic dog's just noticed, small tremors, etc. If that's true, you could develop modern devices that detect these tremors, and it would be worth investigating because you could make a gadget on a smartphone, for example, that could do what a dog could do if it is a physical thing.
(0:23:41) No one's done that yet. It may be possible. It may not. I don't know. I have an open mind. But everyone backs off research on these areas. Apart from these small charities, people within universities just don't want to get involved because it's too controversial, too dangerous. It might damage their careers, which is such a shame because these are fascinating subjects. Do the hyperglycemic detection dogs do it by a sense of smell? Again,
(0:24:11) Nobody knows, but they can do it from different rooms. I've talked to people who have these dogs. Do they have to be close to the person? No. Some of these seizure alert dogs and the diabetic warning dogs can do it from another room. So it doesn't necessarily depend on electrical or smell changes that rely on close proximity.
(0:24:36) There are also many cases of dogs that have given people warnings of heart attacks and in some cases of impending disasters. There's a case here
(0:24:52) There's a case here with a woman called Elizabeth Powell. She had a dog called Toby. And one morning, her dog, normally very docile, just was determined to stop her leaving the house, stood in her way.
(0:25:07) obstructed her and even snarled at her and threatened her in a way that was completely uncharacteristic she was terrified and she had to lock the dog in the house and she went off on her journey in her car an hour and a half later had a nearly fatal car crash I have a whole series of stories of that kind on my database too
(0:25:29) What's going on? Well, the fact is nobody knows. But if pre-sentiment occurs and if premonitions occur in humans, it seems to be very likely that they occur in animals as well and that these cases all may be examples of them.
(0:25:45) So I have to end so much in this meeting, we just don't know. But it's frustrating to find these fields which could be so interesting from a research point of view and would so engage the public because people love this stuff.
(0:26:02) which, I would say, are simply suppressed because of the taboos with which we're all very familiar against investigating what's unknown or unexplained or not on the current scientific math. But I think the potential is enormous, and I'm sure that sooner or later there'll be systematic investigations that will greatly enlarge our understanding of animal nature. Thank you. Thank you.
(0:26:32) Thank you, Rukhul. We've got to 5.2. We could be starting late. There are a few minutes for questions. There's a lot of questions. Gentlemen with glasses. Sorry.
(0:26:47) I was wondering, you mentioned about animals predicting disasters. Do they... Is there any evidence that they might predict, say, if they're a meat animal, whether they're going to go to the abattoir in a few days' time? And it was just to sort of generalise on that. How does that affect the collective psyche if there are large amounts of animals? You've obviously already stressed. You create a larger side effect. Do you see that?
(0:27:18) I don't know. There are various stories about animals seem to anticipate when they're going to be collected for slaughter. This certainly applies to cats. I talk to people who run a cat rescue service, and many of the cats that they collect, you know, is like collecting feral cats.
(0:27:40) they find that when they arrive to collect these cats, they vanish. I mean, they just seem to know when they're coming because many of these cats are destroyed. They can't always re-home them. So I think it's perfectly possible, and I think systematic observations, which are now very easy because video cameras are so cheap. You could video cars in a field or sheep in a field before some of them are captured and taken off to be slaughtered.
(0:28:10) Obviously, when you get to slaughterhouses, then there's many clues as to what's happening, smells, squeals, and so forth. But it would have to be before they were in range of the slaughterhouse, I suppose. But again, this is one of the fields of research that could easily be done. It wouldn't be very expensive, but it's not being done because of these taboos. Karen Bess.
(0:28:35) Folks, one of the things that I think has got a lot of sort of effect in this and something you hadn't mentioned, Rupert, is perhaps we're going to the vet because, you know, you need to take a cat to the vet.
(0:28:52) The morning that you need to do that, the cat can't be found for some reason, and will immediately try and evade any attempt to put it in the cat basket to the vet. How does the cat know that that's what's going to happen, even before the cat basket has been taken out and so on and so forth? That's one thing.
(0:29:12) The other thing is that you mentioned the Steakhouse Corner IRA bomb and so on and so forth. It's a strange coincidence. Back in those days I could cycle and I was there. On my bicycle I got a butcher and I was actually on the leading road.
(0:29:29) fixing the puncture, and I saw the lady concerned, who told me that the dog had been behaving strangely, and whenever she sort of went in that direction or wanted to go in the direction of where the bomb aided up being, the dog simply wouldn't have it and turned away and would do that, would growl at her and wouldn't take any instruction from her or anything. So I said to her, look, that's what seems to be the problem. If you were to go the other direction...
(0:29:58) I think you'll be all right.
(0:30:00) Now, I then kind of thought, there must be something over, there must be something happening. So I fixed the puncture, said goodbye to the lady, went home, and it took me a while to get home, and then I heard the news on the radio. And, you know, that was one of those things. I thought, that dog...
(0:30:21) Must have known. Well, I don't possibly know, but it must have known. No. Well, exactly. How amazing that I should mention this incident and you were actually there. And that's astonishing. LAUGHTER
(0:30:34) So in relation to cats and vets, I'm going to come back to that because I think it's a telepathic phenomenon rather than a premonition. They pick up the owner's intention to take them to the vet. I'll come back to that in my later talk on telepathy. We are running out of time, but Peter's very anxious to ask the question.
(0:30:53) Thank you. Rupert, if somebody who is epileptic has a dog, how could the dog be trained? In what way would it require training? Be present when the master or the mistress has an epileptic fit or...?
(0:31:12) That's basically what happens. And the thing is that when they have a dog and the dog sees them having fits, many people with these dogs notice that the dog starts behaving unusually before the fit, as if it's trying to warn them. And the training really, you can't exactly...
(0:31:30) get the dog to do it from nothing but if the dog's showing signs of doing it anyway you can encourage it by rewarding it for giving warnings. So some dogs don't do it and you can't train those but what they do do is find dogs that are spontaneously doing it to some degree and magnifying the effect.
(0:31:51) You're not completely excluding the possibility that the dogs that foresee epilepsy and earthquakes are not using some natural mechanism? No, I'm not excluding it. I'm sure that if there is a natural thing like tremors or smells or electrical changes, they can use that.
(0:32:07) But I think the assumption is it must be a natural mechanism when there's so much evidence that suggests it's not. Air raids, IRA bombs, and there's no... You wouldn't expect electrostatic changes in the earth's field before an IRA bomb. So particularly with these man-made disasters, buildings collapsing, air raids, bombs, terrorist attacks...
(0:32:33) I think it's very implausible. So if it's psychic rather than something natural, why are dogs or animals more sensitive than humans?
(0:32:41) I think they're more attentive to these clues. I mean, they live outdoors, it matters more to them. And I think there's been strong natural selection for this. I mean, some humans, during the tsunami, people in the Andaman Islands, tribal people there, were famously supposed to have gone up to higher ground before the tsunami. Whether they felt it themselves or whether they watched the animals, I don't know. But in traditional societies, I think people are much more sensitive to these things.
(0:33:10) Okay, well, thank you, Ruben. I'll have to end your talk there. I'll remind you of the general discussion session at the end.