Tuesday is my day off. And this afternoon found me in the office catching up on emails, and as usual my cat was asleep in his cat bed tucked just under our bookshelves. The room was quiet abet for the hum of my laptop. For the moment, all was right with the world.
From his deep sleep my cat suddenly leapt up, a dramatic shift from the lounging feline a moment ago. He sat rigid, eyes focused on space. It was as if he was straining to hear something out of my hearing range; his senses locked on something I could not fathom. Moments passed and he remained statue-like. What could it be?
Before I could approach him and break his frightening trance, he suddenly went wild-eyed and dashed from his cat bed under the bookshelf and fled the room. I was left confused in his wake.
Then it hit. The earthquake sent the overhead light fixtures swaying and cups falling in the kitchen. I ran to the doorway; a reflex left over from a childhood on the west coast. I stood there waiting for the shaking to stop. It wasn’t lost on my that the bookshelf that had existed bolted to my wall for longer then I could remember smashed to the ground with the weight of the books smashing my cat’s bed.
As always its over before you realize. I went on the hunt for my cat and found him huddled under my bed. He was safe. There is always something amazing in the way cats seem to sense earthquakes just before they start. His reaction isn’t a new phenomena but one that is shared by a number of animals.
While no study has determined exactly how animals are able to react in these ways, scientists suspect that animals aren’t actually endowed with mystical powers or extra senses that allow them to detect earthquakes. Instead they feel that animals probably using the same senses we share with them. Their advantage comes with the possession of these senses at a high sensitivity. Just as we accept that dog’s have an increased ability to detect olfactory sensations and cat’s have better night vision then us, these highly tuned senses allow them to detect the precursory vibrations of the earthquake to come.
It is this advantage of highly tuned senses that allowed my own east coast born and bred cat to know an earthquake was en route and he’d better retreat. So, despite my possession of an increased earthquake experience, it was his senses that let him know about the earthquake before me. And I suppose that’s a good thing, otherwise I would have been digging him out of a pile of books afterwards. I suppose I better relocate his cat bed somewhere safer.