A 4.1 magnitude earthquake surprised East Tennessee, raising questions about dogs’ ability to sense seismic activity.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A 4.1 magnitude earthquake shook East Tennessee early Saturday morning, catching many people off guard. But some pet owners said their dogs may have sensed it coming. It begs the question: can dogs actually sense an earthquake before it happens?
The short answer, according to scientists, is no. Not exactly.
Dr. Julia Albright, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Tennessee, said there’s no solid scientific data proving dogs can predict seismic activity.
“I have no data to show that they do, other than a collection of stories, and that is now how scientists work,” Albright said. “We are still in the hypothesis-generating stage.”
Even her own pets, two Irish setters named Sriracha and Chocolate Chip, were completely unaware of what was coming.
“Based on last week, my dogs can’t predict an earthquake,” she said. “They were frightened, but there was no reaction before it.”
Still, Albright and others don’t dismiss the possibility entirely.
Dogs are highly sensitive to their environment. They can detect pressure drops, static electricity and other subtle changes well before humans notice anything.
“Pressure drops, they can smell the rain coming before it starts to come, there’s static electricity in the air,” Leanna Stansal, a dog trainer at The Bark Knoxville, said. “They seem to be telling us that this thing is happening, but in reality, it’s them sensing everything really, really quickly.”
Albright said dogs can sense all kinds of things that humans can’t, including scents from gases and electrical currents.
“The chemoreception, we know that that is just fantastic, especially compared to ours,” Albright said. “Our ability to smell things is so primitive compared to a dog.”
Some researchers believe animals may also pick up on seismic shifts deep within the Earth. Back in 2013, then-NASA scientists Friedemann Freund and Viktor Stolc published a paper on the topic.
“During the build-up of stress, electronic charge carriers are activated deep below, called positive holes,” Freund and Stolc said. “Positive holes have unusual properties: they can travel fast and far into and through the surrounding rocks. As they flow, they generate ultralow-frequency electromagnetic waves. All these physical and chemical processes can have noticeable effects on animals.”
For now, this idea is still just that: a theory.
“I’m not gonna close my mind to the fact that they may be detecting something that is undetectable to us,” Albright said. “Scientists are working hard to see what that might be, because they might be a tool.”
So while there’s no proof yet that your dog can predict the next quake, researchers said, it’s a field worth exploring. Because one day, that strange pacing or whining just might help us prepare for something big.
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