Here’s another excerpt from our new book: Mind-Blowing Synchronicities: The Latest Science, Stories & Research
Animals as Oracles
No surprise! Many synchronicities involve animals. I’ve already used several examples. But quite often they act as oracles, as they have numerous times for natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis.
In late December 2004, an undersea quake erupted in the Indian Ocean. This violent upheaval of the tectonic plates displaced an enormous amount of water and within a few hours, waves as high as a hundred feet radiated outward from the epicenter. A tsunami slammed into the coastline of 11 Indian Ocean countries and killed more than a quarter of a million people.
The wave that spread out across the Bay of Bengal was visible from space and enabled scientists to precisely measure the quake and the resulting tsunami. They weren’t able to predict it but from what we learned in the earliest reports and in the years since then, animals were aware of the eruption in advance – sometimes days in advance, sometimes in just a matter of hours.
On January 11, 2005, an online article in National Geographic featured numerous stories about animals that had survived the tsunami. Giant waves washed floodwaters as far as two miles inland to the Yala National Park in Sri Lanka’s largest wildlife reserve. This place is home to hundreds of elephants, buffalo, leopards, deer, jackals, monkeys. Yet, the deputy director of the National Wildlife Department, R.D. Ratnayake, said there weren’t any reports of dead animals.
“The elephants, wild boar, deer, monkeys and others moved inland to avoid the killer waves.”
Survivors described how, on the morning of the tsunami, elephants screamed and fled to higher ground, how dogs refused to go on their usual morning walks, how monkeys rejected bananas. Even a pair of tethered elephants broke free of their chains and ran to higher ground for safety. Flamingos that breed at that time of year at the Point Calimere wildlife sanctuary in India flew to higher ground beforehand and abandoned their breeding grounds.
Patanangala beach inside the Yala National Park was one of the worst hit areas of the 500-square-mile wildlife preserve, home to a variety of animals that include 130 species of birds. Yet, according to Ravi Corea, president of the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society based in New Jersey, only two water buffalo were found dead. Corea, who was in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck, later walked that beach. He didn’t see any animal carcasses except the pair of water buffalo.
Along India’s Cuddalore coast, thousands of people died. But the Indo-Asian News Service reported that water buffalo, goats and dogs were found unharmed. Anecdotes like this were numerous in the aftermath. “Imagine what would happen…if, instead of ignoring the warnings given by animals, people took them seriously,” wrote British biologist Rupert Sheldrake in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.
Essentially, these anecdotes tell us that before disasters, animals are precognitive.
