i hear ya E. like i mentioned earlier, i know someone who felt their house vibrating all night (before they read the news), and also a few normally healthy people who have mysteriously puked. makes me wonder.
Of course there's also the minor point that elephants and wildebeest don't spend a lot of time sunbathing at the beach. But, then, why spoil a good story...
One day my dogs were really acting weird. They were jumping up and down and actually got sick. Then I understood what was going on when I felt the earthquake.
Animals' five senses are more finely tuned than humans' in many ways. Maybe it's because they have less other brain-activity "noise" to interfere with their senses than we do.
While I'm using my brain to wonder what I'm going to do tonight, my cat just does. While I'm stewing over whether I remembered to mail the electric bill, my dog is looking for a good spot for a nap.
I think animals literally feel, hear, smell, see impending earthquakes, storms, etc.
Back in the late 80s, when we had a fairly strong earthquake in N.E. Ohio, my cat was acting really weird just beforehand--pacing around, meowing anxiously, looking nervous. Now, if she could have just developed her capacity for speech , she coulda said, "Linda, grab the good china!" Or if I'd been more tuned into my cat (and more open to the possibility of an earthquake here), I might have been able to understand her "kitty warning system." :)-->
Humans can fine-tune their senses, too. Take, for example, the safe cracker who learns to feel the miniscule vibration of moving tumblers in a combination lock (that's my simplistic understanding, anyway), or the heightened sense of hearing that a blind person develops to compensate for lack of sight.
It's really a pretty spiffy system, this body of ours. Maybe we as humans have just dulled our senses over the centuries. Maybe at one time we could feel a coming earthquake, too, but we got too busy doing other things, like driving cars and taking out mortgages and such.
Re:"Of course there's also the minor point that elephants and wildebeest don't spend a lot of time sunbathing at the beach..."
I'd like to hear from someone who knows.. just how far inland does a tsunami go?? A 1/4 mile?? A 1/2 mile?? And was it a one time 30ft. wave or did the water level stay up for a while?
And no.. I don't buy animals being able to sense vibrations that a sensitive seismograph can't even detect. But if the seismographs are going off the charts before a quake... OK.
I dunno about how far inland the tsunami can wreak havoc, but I can think of numerous reasons why animals wouldn't be victimized as severely as humans.
#1 being what I already mentioned. Animals don't spend a lot of time on the beach, PEOPLE do.
2. Animals are not in structures or vehicles that can fail and trap the occupants
3. Animals have few distractions. They aren't listening to the radio, reading the newspaper, thinking about world events, or even talking with their friends. As a result, it would seem that they're very tuned-in to their immediate surroundings.
4. Animals are walking barefoot all the time. They have four feet on the ground to sense movement through. They have no shoes, floors, sidewalks, or furniture between them and what's shaking.
5. Herd animals are naturally wary and very sensitive to the group they're in. Any one member of the group which sensed something wrong would immediately tip off the rest of the herd, or even other animals around, to something going wrong.
6. Rescue workers aren't looking for non-human victims. If there were dead animals laying out in the jungle somewhere, it's going to be a while before anyone gets to them. The places frequented by people are going to be the focus of any searches right now.
And I'm sure there's lots more possible reasons one could come up with, without resorting to some sort of "Gosh, there must be something at work here that we stupid people will just never understand!" type of default setting.
From what I can tell from the video I've seen of this and past tsunamis, being even a few hundred feet from shore would be enough to give one a lot better chance of survival. Given that animals generally are innate swimmers, and not known to frequent the shoreline, I just don't find it very remarkable that lots of animals haven't died.
It's only fair. We get to walk upright and ride roller coasters and eat many of the nonhuman animals. I think it's rather nice that the animals have SOME edge.
I don't know about the rest of the animals, but I do know that elephants hear very very low frequency noises. They communicate with each other via these low frequncies which are beyond that which our hearing is sensitive to. Perhaps they litterally heard it!
Ever heard the deafening silence in nature right before a tornado touches down? Seen a herd of cattle come from miles around on open range and bunch up right before a blizzard hits? Or what about a herd of horses running and frolicking hours before a thunderstorm? My mom had a cat that climbed under the covers way before a cloud could be seen and severe weather always followed.
Is it some spiritual extra sence? Doubt that it is, but they are designed to be able to detect things that they don’t understand. Best explanation I have heard to date is that animals sense of feeling is much more acute than humans. Perhaps they are even able to feel vibrations to warn them of predators coming and even changes in barometric pressure.
If anyone is interested in donating, I found a group called Catholic Rescue Services which gives a lot more money to those that need it than thieving groups like the Red Cross or United Way. Yes, they are an organization run by Catholics and I know that TWI made a lot of people hate them, but that group does help people.
The seismographs picked it up all right, the operators just didn't have a pre-set communications plan in place to warn the governments about the quake and the possible tsunami to follow.
quote: If anyone is interested in donating, I found a group called Catholic Rescue Services which gives a lot more money to those that need it than thieving groups like the Red Cross or United Way. Yes, they are an organization run by Catholics and I know that TWI made a lot of people hate them, but that group does help people
Link It and Welcome Back
I have always thought that animals are much more tuned in to what is going on in the environment, but not for any mystical or spertchal reasons. Just logical reasons such as George said. Humans could be too but for the most part lifestyles separate from the rhythms of nature have kept us detached from the subtlties around us.
You just can't say enough about innate animal wisdom. I heard today that crocodiles are eating the bodies of human victims. Maybe that's why there aren't many dead bunnies floating around.
Sure, here's the link: Catholic Relief Services. I accidentally said rescue instead of relief originally.
Also, I was gone because my computer died (my advice is to never buy a Sony, they break too easily) then my wife and I went out of the country for a few weeks.
quote:Originally posted by mstar1:
I have always thought that animals are much more tuned in to what is going on in the environment, but not for any mystical or spertchal reasons. Just logical reasons such as George said. Humans could be too but for the most part lifestyles separate from the rhythms of nature have kept us detached from the subtlties around us.
There are quite a few things people can do to figure some of these things out too. I notice that when I'm camping or hiking, I seem to pick up on things that I wouldn't normally as well. We have constant noise and distractions in our lives, so when we get in nature we see a lot more.
Also, some animals can hear things that we can't, and have senses that we don't. Nothing spiritual or magical, but just things like sonar or being able to hear in high pitched wavelengths. Still amazing though.
Videos of the tsunami in differnt locations, taken by tourists. Some better quality than others, but you get a sense of what an immense quantity of water was pushed ashore. The one of (I think) Thailand shows them really crashing ashore, but others remind me more of a flash flood.
Around 2 pm today, December 31, arrows began flying at the helicopter on a mission to draw up a situation report on the endangered tribals of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The arrow attack was the surest sign yet that the tribe has survived the tsunami.
Spotting a batch of 20 to 30 people on the North Sentinelese Island, the pilot shed altitude to take a closer look. If he had any doubt, it was removed when the tribesmen, known for their hostility towards intruders, fired the arrows.
If a ground count eventually puts the number at 30, it will account for almost all the Sentinelese known to be inhabiting the island.
Officials were upbeat about other tribes, too. “Our helicopters and naval ships have confirmed that the tribes — Sentinelese, the Onges, the Shompens, the Great Andamanese and the Jarawas — are all safe. They have survived nature’s fury,” said Arun Kumar Singh, the vice-admiral and director-general of the coast guard.
The navy and the coast guard have been mounting multiple missions to track the tribes down in the face of growing concern about the fate of some of the world’s most endangered groups.
However, an Onge woman is missing from a batch of 16 on South Bay. The tribal welfare department has mounted a search for the young Onge woman who was last spotted near the beach on South Bay on December 25.
“We have counted only 15 Onges on the settlement. The woman is definitely missing,” said a senior tribal welfare officer.
But inspector-general S.B. Deol said most of the tribes are safe and if anything had gone wrong, the authorities would have known.
“They are very friendly these days. Apart from the Sentinelese, the others ask for medical aid and are even hospitalised, if required. No untoward reports concerning them has reached us,” added Deol.
The rest of the 80 Onges of the 96-member group stay in Dugong Creek, Little Andaman.
Andaman and Nicobar tribes
Andaman and Nicobar Islands are the abode of probably the most primitive tribes of the world. Out of the six aboriginal tribes inhabiting these Islands five, namely, the Shompens, the Onges, the Great Andamanese, the Sentinelese and the Jarawas are primitive tribes. The Shompens belong to the Mongoloid stock and inhabit the Great Nicobar Island whereas the other four primitive tribes belong to the Negrito stock inhabiting the Andaman Islands.
The Great Andamanese are one of the four Negrito tribes of the Andamans. The Andamanese were defeated and killed in the famous ‘Battle of Aberdeen’ fought in 1859. The British conducted many punitive expeditions in which a number of Andamanese were killed. These tribes are now settled at Strait Island, about 60 Kms. north east of Port Blair. They speak the Jeru dialect among themselves and Hindi with outsiders. They no longer wear any distinctive dress that distinguishes them from their neighbours.
The Onges were traditionally spread all over the Little Andaman Islands. In 1976, they were rehabilitated by the government in two settlements at Dugong Creek, in the northeastern corner of the island, and at South Bay in Little Andamans. Onge is a Negrito tribe. Onges survived without dress for centuries. Today Onge men, women and children have started wearing all kinds of modern clothes. Use of traditional items of adornment like necklace made of shell, waist band and head band of bark fibre have been confined to ceremonail occasions and the Onges now like to have modern items.
The Nicobarese belong to the Mongoloid stock in the twelve islands communities, inhabiting different islands in the Nicobar group. The people of Car Nicobar island have totally given up the traditional dress of tassel or coconut leaf petticoat. They now wear modern clothes. They eat fish, mutton, beef, pork and chicken. Ninety eight percent (98%) of Nicobarese population profess Christianity. Only 2% of Nicobarese have adopted Islam. A sizeable number of Nicobarese have jobs, especially white-collar ones, in both government and private offices.
The Shompens are the only primitive tribe of Mongoloid stock. They are semi-nomadic, hunting, gathering and fishing tribes who practise simple horticulture and rear pigs. The Shompens are scattered over the whole of Great Nicobar Islands. The east coast Shompens remain close to the sea-shore or in the valleys while the west coast Shompens prefer the interior and the slopes of hills. The Shompens huts are of a primitive type and are invariably built with wood, cane and leaves.
The Jarawas are one of the four Negrito tribes of Andman Islands. They live on the western part of South and Middle Andamans. The word ‘Jarawa’ is derived from ‘Aka Bea’ dialect of Great Andmanese meaning ‘the other people’, ‘the stranger’. The Jarawas have a base camp which is of comparatively permanent nature and makeshift hunting camps of temporary nature. They are naked people but they adorn bark and shell necklaces, arm bands, waist bands for ornamental purpose. The material culture of Jarawas is confined mainly to making of bows and arrows. They hunt pig, fish, etc. After the Indian Independence, the refugee settlement took place in Andamans and Jarawas were pushed to the western coast of South and Middle Andaman.
The Sentinelese are well built, tall, Negrito tribe inhabiting the North Sentinel Island situated on the west of Port Blair. The Sentinelese are perhaps the only successful people on the earth to retain and defend their pristine life-style and territory till date against the waves of modern civilizations and for the same reason, little is known about their life style and culture. Interior huts of Sentinelese have never been visited. The coastal huts are mere wind breaks of temporary nature. The Sentinelese make and use outrigger parallel canoes driven with long poles. They also possess bows and arrows.
This extremely graphic picture of the tsunami's aftermath gives some inkling of the human cost. Life is fragile. You really shouldn't view this unless or until you're prepared, and that includes having a paper bag nearby. It's bad.
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excathedra
goddamnit humans should be able to do that
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sirguessalot
i hear ya E. like i mentioned earlier, i know someone who felt their house vibrating all night (before they read the news), and also a few normally healthy people who have mysteriously puked. makes me wonder.
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George Aar
Of course there's also the minor point that elephants and wildebeest don't spend a lot of time sunbathing at the beach. But, then, why spoil a good story...
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vickles
One day my dogs were really acting weird. They were jumping up and down and actually got sick. Then I understood what was going on when I felt the earthquake.
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J0nny Ling0
Wow Vickles, that is way cool. I wish I had taken a moment to observe my dog during the 7.9 Alaska quake of 2003...
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Linda Z
Animals' five senses are more finely tuned than humans' in many ways. Maybe it's because they have less other brain-activity "noise" to interfere with their senses than we do.
While I'm using my brain to wonder what I'm going to do tonight, my cat just does. While I'm stewing over whether I remembered to mail the electric bill, my dog is looking for a good spot for a nap.
I think animals literally feel, hear, smell, see impending earthquakes, storms, etc.
Back in the late 80s, when we had a fairly strong earthquake in N.E. Ohio, my cat was acting really weird just beforehand--pacing around, meowing anxiously, looking nervous. Now, if she could have just developed her capacity for speech , she coulda said, "Linda, grab the good china!" Or if I'd been more tuned into my cat (and more open to the possibility of an earthquake here), I might have been able to understand her "kitty warning system."
:)-->
Humans can fine-tune their senses, too. Take, for example, the safe cracker who learns to feel the miniscule vibration of moving tumblers in a combination lock (that's my simplistic understanding, anyway), or the heightened sense of hearing that a blind person develops to compensate for lack of sight.
It's really a pretty spiffy system, this body of ours. Maybe we as humans have just dulled our senses over the centuries. Maybe at one time we could feel a coming earthquake, too, but we got too busy doing other things, like driving cars and taking out mortgages and such.
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Sudo
Geo,
Re:"Of course there's also the minor point that elephants and wildebeest don't spend a lot of time sunbathing at the beach..."
I'd like to hear from someone who knows.. just how far inland does a tsunami go?? A 1/4 mile?? A 1/2 mile?? And was it a one time 30ft. wave or did the water level stay up for a while?
And no.. I don't buy animals being able to sense vibrations that a sensitive seismograph can't even detect. But if the seismographs are going off the charts before a quake... OK.
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George Aar
Sudo,
I dunno about how far inland the tsunami can wreak havoc, but I can think of numerous reasons why animals wouldn't be victimized as severely as humans.
#1 being what I already mentioned. Animals don't spend a lot of time on the beach, PEOPLE do.
2. Animals are not in structures or vehicles that can fail and trap the occupants
3. Animals have few distractions. They aren't listening to the radio, reading the newspaper, thinking about world events, or even talking with their friends. As a result, it would seem that they're very tuned-in to their immediate surroundings.
4. Animals are walking barefoot all the time. They have four feet on the ground to sense movement through. They have no shoes, floors, sidewalks, or furniture between them and what's shaking.
5. Herd animals are naturally wary and very sensitive to the group they're in. Any one member of the group which sensed something wrong would immediately tip off the rest of the herd, or even other animals around, to something going wrong.
6. Rescue workers aren't looking for non-human victims. If there were dead animals laying out in the jungle somewhere, it's going to be a while before anyone gets to them. The places frequented by people are going to be the focus of any searches right now.
And I'm sure there's lots more possible reasons one could come up with, without resorting to some sort of "Gosh, there must be something at work here that we stupid people will just never understand!" type of default setting.
From what I can tell from the video I've seen of this and past tsunamis, being even a few hundred feet from shore would be enough to give one a lot better chance of survival. Given that animals generally are innate swimmers, and not known to frequent the shoreline, I just don't find it very remarkable that lots of animals haven't died.
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Linda Z
It's only fair. We get to walk upright and ride roller coasters and eat many of the nonhuman animals. I think it's rather nice that the animals have SOME edge.
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krys
I don't know about the rest of the animals, but I do know that elephants hear very very low frequency noises. They communicate with each other via these low frequncies which are beyond that which our hearing is sensitive to. Perhaps they litterally heard it!
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wingnut
Ever heard the deafening silence in nature right before a tornado touches down? Seen a herd of cattle come from miles around on open range and bunch up right before a blizzard hits? Or what about a herd of horses running and frolicking hours before a thunderstorm? My mom had a cat that climbed under the covers way before a cloud could be seen and severe weather always followed.
Is it some spiritual extra sence? Doubt that it is, but they are designed to be able to detect things that they don’t understand. Best explanation I have heard to date is that animals sense of feeling is much more acute than humans. Perhaps they are even able to feel vibrations to warn them of predators coming and even changes in barometric pressure.
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Mister P-Mosh
If anyone is interested in donating, I found a group called Catholic Rescue Services which gives a lot more money to those that need it than thieving groups like the Red Cross or United Way. Yes, they are an organization run by Catholics and I know that TWI made a lot of people hate them, but that group does help people.
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Oakspear
Sudo:
The seismographs picked it up all right, the operators just didn't have a pre-set communications plan in place to warn the governments about the quake and the possible tsunami to follow.
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mstar1
Link It and Welcome Back
I have always thought that animals are much more tuned in to what is going on in the environment, but not for any mystical or spertchal reasons. Just logical reasons such as George said. Humans could be too but for the most part lifestyles separate from the rhythms of nature have kept us detached from the subtlties around us.
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satori001
You just can't say enough about innate animal wisdom. I heard today that crocodiles are eating the bodies of human victims. Maybe that's why there aren't many dead bunnies floating around.
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Mister P-Mosh
Sure, here's the link: Catholic Relief Services. I accidentally said rescue instead of relief originally.
Also, I was gone because my computer died (my advice is to never buy a Sony, they break too easily) then my wife and I went out of the country for a few weeks.
There are quite a few things people can do to figure some of these things out too. I notice that when I'm camping or hiking, I seem to pick up on things that I wouldn't normally as well. We have constant noise and distractions in our lives, so when we get in nature we see a lot more.
Also, some animals can hear things that we can't, and have senses that we don't. Nothing spiritual or magical, but just things like sonar or being able to hear in high pitched wavelengths. Still amazing though.
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ChattyKathy
Mr. P-Mosh, just peeking in to say hi to you. Seems like it's been awhile.
:)-->
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satori001
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Kit Sober
Agreeing with George:
From an intercessor network:
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satori001
This extremely graphic picture of the tsunami's aftermath gives some inkling of the human cost. Life is fragile. You really shouldn't view this unless or until you're prepared, and that includes having a paper bag nearby. It's bad.
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satori001
The next tsunami may hit the east coast of the US. Here is the story.
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satori001
Here's another discussion of the "worst-case" scenario from the Canary Islands.
Link
And a completely different tsunami source threatens the east coast, from much closer by:
Link
The danger of these is they may not be triggered by an earth quake, meaning NO warning until the wave hits.
Beach front property may be cheaper this season.
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excathedra
my heart is in my throat
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vickles
I've heard that was is worse than the actual wave is afterwards of disease and such.
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