Kind of crazy if you think about it. Before the horrible tsunamis in asia, there were several reports of elephants breaking their chains and moving in land in a hurry. While 100,000s of people died, there were VERY few animal casualties. What do you all think is the reason for this? Is the cost of human intelligence for us not to be able to detect these signals which appear clearly for animals?

Show us the figures on animal casualties then.

Saw a program on national geographic about it, while they did list numbers, I did not attempt to remember them and list them without proof. I will however attempt to find this data.

Heres a few sites....

http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=4299

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,143737,00.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2111608/

another good one

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/tsunami_wildlife_041230.html

Before the horrible tsunamis in asia, there were several reports of elephants breaking their chains and moving in land in a hurry. ….What do you all think is the reason for this?
A variety of animals (such as elephants) are capable of emitting and detecting infrasound for communication purposes. Infrasound is very low frequency vibration that human hearing cannot detect. Many natural phenomena emit infrasound that can travel large distances through the Earth, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Although the article doesn’t mention cats and dogs, I was under the impression that they can also detect infrasound even if they don’t use it for communication.

So the upshot is that it isn’t an urban myth that animals know when an earthquake (or volcanic eruption or tsunami etc) is coming – they can hear it coming long before humans can detect it with their own senses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound


Is the cost of human intelligence for us not to be able to detect these signals which appear clearly for animals?
Yes. It is pretty obvious that the power of the human senses is only a fraction of that of many other animals. Although it might be argued that humans are well-rounded across all the five senses in comparison to other animals – I don’t really know. I think it’s a fairly solid evolutionary argument that the increase in hominid brain size and power (and the survival advantages that this provides) has cancelled out the need for the acute sight, hearing and smell that numerous other predators retain.

I would say that its also an animals ability to detect minor changes in temperature pressure and humidity in their environment.....