Animals Can't Detect Quakes

A devastating quake has brought Nepal to its knees. 4400 people are confirmed death by now and Nepali administration fears that the toll may well exceed 10,000. Over 8 million people are affected or about a third of the total population. Being a developing state, Nepal’s infrastructure is strained almost to breaking point under the impact of this natural calamity of a scale unseen In the Himalayan state. As of now, every hand is engaged in extricating people trapped under the debris, before it’s too late. Soon, the effort will shift to reconstruct the damaged buildings. A huge amount of money will be required to put the economy back on track. The impact on tourism industry, which was one of the mainstays of Nepal, would naturally be huge as well. All reservations for the next two years might be cancelled. The country may have to start from scratch again, since it is reported that almost 80% of the ancient temples are either destroyed or heavily damaged.

As we know, Himalayas is a seismic zone inherently prone to devastating quakes like what we saw a few days back. The Indian tectonic plate pushing under the Eurasian plate is a scary reminder for people in this region. There have been no warnings this time too. Soon, hordes of astrologers and charlatans would come out to claim that they had predicted about the tremor. Unfortunately such warnings appear in media, only after the events. No human being has so far been able to forewarn his fellows about an imminent quake. Even technology is helpless as of now to make a prediction applicable to a specific period of time. How long will it take for mankind to device deep probes that sense the heart throb of the Earth?

There is another group of people who claim that they got wind of the impending disaster by the behavioral peculiarities exhibited by domestic animals. This argument is also false, but cloaked under the veneer of scientific probability. It is quite probable that a fault zone about to cause a tremor might release noise in the longer wavelengths, and hence lesser frequency. Man cannot detect sounds less than 20 Hz frequency, so he can’t hear them. But dogs and cats have the faculty to hear low frequency sounds as well. Then, isn’t it possible that the animals may be used to detect earth quakes before they actually occur?

Here, we are in a dilemma. We can’t simply reject the argument as baseless. Charlatans have an uncanny ability to exploit doubts in others to their own nefarious ends. A useful strategy to adopt here is to appeal to practical considerations. Even if we accept for argument’s sake that animals could sense tremors that are on the way, it is equally true that nobody escaped a quake by deducing it from the strange behaviour of an animal. After the event, many people ‘remember’ that their pets acted strangely, but never before it. What is the morale here? Even if the animals detect tremor signals, their behaviour is not altered or at least not changed in such a way as to attract the attention of people around them. Their masters could not detect anything extraordinary in their behavior. Isn’t it clear proof that animals can’t be used to sense earth quakes in a sensible way?