Transcript: Destructive Forces

The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 is one of the worst natural disasters in human history.

More then a quarter of a million people are killed.

As the world takes stock of the staggering human death toll, new and mysterious stories begin to emerge.

Amazing accounts of survival – in the animal kingdom.

According to rangers, flamingoes along India’s southern coast suddenly and inexplicably flee for safer forests hours before the tsunami strikes.

Sri Lankan dogs refuse their customary early morning walks.

Buffalo in a Thai village stampede up a hill... saving the lives of villagers who follow them, with just minutes to spare

Across the ravaged area, stories kept coming in... amid the human carnage, animals somehow surviving, baffling residents and scientists.

(Sinhalese with English translation)

“K” David, Wildlife Tracker:

All the elephants and wild boars and other animals were all running away from the sea. Not a single animal would stop.

Gehan de Silva Wijeterathe, Ecotourism Guide There were search teams in excess of 50 people there, combing the area for bodies and traces of any survivors. I think it was very clear that there were no dead animals.

Were all these stories a coincidence, or was there something behind them? For centuries, survivors of natural disasters have told similar tales, of both wild and domesticated animals who seemed to have premonitions of looming disaster – minutes, hours or even days ahead of time.

In the fourth century B.C., a historian reported a mass exodus of animals, including rats, worms and beetles from the Greek city of Helike some five days before it sank into the sea in a violent earthquake.

Witnesses of a ferocious earthquake that devastated Lisbon in the mid-18th century noted panicked birds in flight, and rats and mice leaving their holes in the hours before the quake.

More recent disasters have been no exception.

Wherever natural disasters strike, accounts of animal omens emerge.

The tsunami of 2004 has thrown a new, scientific spotlight onto these stories.

Why did seemingly so few animals perish in the disaster? Did they pick up on warnings we somehow missed? Researchers are divided.

Dr. Pruthu Fernando, Conservation Biologist:

“It makes a nice story if the animals run away. If they didn’t run away, it’s not news.”