I recently read a newspaper article about the sea lions at the piers in San Francisco. Around Thanksgiving the sea lions started leaving the pier in droves and by Christmas all 1500 sea lions that normally lived in the waters of pier 39 were no where to be seen. The sea lions have been San Francisco fixtures for the 20 years that I have lived in the Bay Area, and probably for long before. They are probably the pier’s biggest tourist attraction and are fed by the tourists in spite of signs asking them not to feed the sea lions. According to the article and interviews with marine mammal scientists in the area, such an exodus has never happened before. At least, not in living memory. The scientist who was being interviewed suggested that the sea lions must have left in search of food, and that this was not an unusual phenomenon that all 1500 sea lions would vacate their territory all at once in search of food. But it appears that no one knows where they went. But then the reporter reminded the scientist that the sea lions were constantly and well fed by all the tourists. So why would they need to go anywhere else in search of food?

As I read the article, I remembered news stories from the 2004 tsunami, reporting that most of the animals had retreated to higher ground before the tsunami and that few or no animals had died during the tsunami, while the toll in human life was very high. I began to wonder about the San Francisco sea lions. Do they perhaps know something we don’t know? Are they moving out of harm’s way in plenty of time for some natural catastrophe? Of course no one wants to be a “Chicken Little”. But at the same time, it is curious that numerous news stories have been written or broadcast about the so-called sixth sense of animals who have escaped disasters before the disasters struck. Even scientists acknowledge the truth of these events but can offer no good scientific explanation for this phenomenon. So they simply write it off as common place. Perhaps we humans can learn something from the animals to save ourselves.

Many people who live and work closely with animals observe that animals become agitated and tend to gather and move in large groups when they feel threatened. I was a teenager living in the Biafran side during the Biafran war . We were subject to constant air raids. One way we could tell an air raid was coming would be by observing the farm animals. The chickens and goats would become agitated and run for cover long before the jets showed up. In fact it was my three-year old sister who pointed it out to us after the first couple of air raids. I must say that this observation saved our lives many times. From that experience, there is no doubt in my mind that animals are able to sense and know where and when a disaster is about to occur, a faculty that we humans have almost completely lost. Since animals cannot speak or shout out at us, it appears to me that we are the ones who need to pay more attention to what they are trying to tell us by their behavior, and so reduce the casualties from many disasters and accidents.