I know many of you have seen the stories about animals sensing the recent Indian Ocean tsunami and heading for safety:
At the Khao Lak Elephant Trekking Centre, elephants Poker and Thandung started to panic — trumpeting and breaking free from their chains. It was something their owner Jong Kit had never seen them do before.
“We couldn’t stop the elephants,” says Kit.
They ignored his commands to stop and ran for higher ground, just five minutes before the resort where they’d been standing was destroyed by the tsunami.
Well this one is really interesting:
The five aboriginal tribes inhabiting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, our last missing link with early civilisation, have emerged unscathed from the tsunamis because of their age old “warning systems”.
“The tribals get wind of impending danger from biological warning signals like the cry of birds and change in the behavioural patterns of marine animals. They must have run to the forests for safety. No casualties have been reported among these five tribes,” ASI Director Dr V R Rao told PTI today. [read the whole story]
It seems that we ‘civilized’ humans have not only lost such ‘intuition’ but even common sense as I’ve heard stories of people rushing to the beach to see the water that was sucked out to sea just before the first tsunami wave rushed in.