“Intuition is God talking to you between your thoughts.”
—Bob Mandel

By Coach Cary Bayer

This column called “Life 101,” is about what life can teach us when our eyes are open. Well, animals can teach us a lot, too, if we’re receptive to what they can offer.  Below are examples of what their behavior was indicating if we but had eyes to see and ears to hear.

In Greece, in 373 B.C., animals such as rats, weasels, snakes, and centipedes, were observed to display such unusual behavior as leaving their homes for what they perceived to be safer quarters. Several days later a highly destructive earthquake racked the area. Several decades ago, a similar aberration in animal behavior was observed in China, causing some Chinese to vacate their living spaces. Soon after a devastating earthquake caused tremendous destruction. (https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-animals-predict-earthquakes?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products)

A day after Christmas in 2005, a massive tsunami overwhelmed the coasts of a dozen Asian countries, killing more than 150,000 lives. Relatively few animals were killed. Many of the lives of the people who lived there on the coast might have been saved had they observed the following unusual animal behavior as much as 10 days before the tragedy:

• Elephants ran screaming and headed for higher ground
• Dogs stayed inside and would not go out
• Flamingoes strayed from low-lying areas where they typically would reed.
• Even zoo animals refused to be seen, preferring to stay sheltered inside.

In 2009 toads near L’Aquila, Italy high-tailed it out of their mating area (pun intended) shortly before an earthquake hit the area. They returned a few days after the last aftershocks. A number of local researchers believed the creatures felt the presence of changes in the planet’s atmospheric electoral fields. Ionospheric changes preceded the quake, presumably releasing radon gas or gravity waves.

Two years later, an earthquake shook the area of Pasco, Peru, and Yanachanga National Park. As much as three weeks prior to the calamity, birds and mammals in the park significantly curtailed their activities; and further reduced them one week prior to the event, the same time there was an ionospheric change, as well.

In 2012, goats near Mount Etna were observed to be highly nervous and fled the area just hours before the volcano erupted. It’s believed they sensed tremors and gas releasing.

One theory posits the highly keen senses of animals, which can aid them in detecting the presence of predators, also puts them in touch with the vibrations of the earth and perhaps the scent of air and gases released by the earth.

On a less macroscopic scale, there are cats who are able to detect cancers in people, and sense when a dying patient is about to expire. Dogs are being used during the Covid-19 pandemic to sniff out people who are infected with the coronavirus.

Women’s Intuition: Can Men’s Be Far Behind?

For millennia, human beings have believed the female of the species has a more highly developed intuition than the males. Psychologists have studied the matter and have concluded that women are better able to read facial expressions of emotions than men, who pride themselves in being able to keep a poker face. This skill in women is said to extend to the quality of empathy, as well. It’s unclear if this gift is inborn or has been nurtured through the centuries because women have had less social power and have learned how to read those in power (men) better than those who wield such power. The very term “women’s intuition” may very well have been coined by men who were thoroughly unconscious of the very same intuition that exists within them.

The takeaway from animal intuition and women’s intuition is that men, as well, have a deep sense of what’s impending buried within them, ready and able to become available simply by a willingness to explore it.