Researches show that the elephants, leopards and monkeys populating the park were able to sense the danger well in advance and flee to safety.
There will always be those who believe that animals can detect signs of an impending natural disaster and those who shrug it off as pure hogwash.
Yet we cannot discount that when the earthquake and tsunami of Dec 26, 2004 hit Sri Lanka, no report of mass animal deaths was recorded by wildlife officials at the Yala National Park there.
Researchers believe that the elephants, leopards and monkeys populating the park were able to sense the danger well in advance and flee to safety.
Conservationist Debbie Martyr when speaking to BBC News about this said, “Wild animals in particular are extremely sensitive. They’ve got extremely good hearing and they [probably] heard this flood coming in from a distance. There would have been vibration, and there may also have been changes in the air pressure [that would] have alerted them and made them move to wherever they felt safer.”
This does make sense. For an animal to survive in the wild and avoid being killed by predators or drowned in a flood, its senses must be acute enough to pick out minute changes in sound, vibration and smell. Wild cats have a very keen sense of sight allowing them to hunt even in the dead of night.
