Dogs sensing earthquakes

There is a long-held belief about dogs’ abilities to predict earthquakes, although it’s not clear how long this has been a belief. Many websites cite a Greek historian describing dogs fleeing the city of Helice in Greece before it was destroyed by an earthquake in 373 BCE, but there are no reliable sources for this. A later Roman historian wrote in the second century BCE about rodents and insects fleeing the city, but not dogs.

Still, there are many anecdotal references to dogs acting strange in the days or hours leading up to major earthquakes, and some scientists have tried to study the phenomenon. A Japanese researcher, Dr. Kiyoshi Shimamura, looked at records of dog bites and other dog-related complaints before and after earthquakes, and noticed an 18% jump in unusual activity, like excessive barking and biting, before the 1995 Kobe temblor, although he did not make a guess as to how the dogs could predict quakes.

Stanley Coren, writing in Psychology Today, wound up accidentally compiling data on a number of dogs and their behavior before an earthquake, and he concluded that dogs must have been hearing the high frequency sounds made by rocks shifting and cracking underground before a quake.

He based his conclusion on traits of the dogs — those that were deaf showed no reaction beforehand, while those with floppy ears were less likely to show anxiety than dogs with pointy ears. Head size was also a factor. The smaller a dog’s head, the bigger a reaction they showed. Coren concluded that this is because animals with smaller heads are more sensitive to high frequency sound — although seismologists, like Sarada Sarma, say that this is unlikely because rocks underground don’t make these sounds.