"Not even a dead hare or rabbit"

"I think animals can sense disaster.  They have a sixth sense.  They know when things are happening," a Sri Lankan Wildlife Department official told Reuters:

Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned -- the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast,but they can't find any dead animals.

Giant waves washed floodwaters up to 3km (2 miles) inland at Yala National Park in the ravaged southeast, Sri Lanka's biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild elephants and several leopards.

"The strange thing is we haven't recorded any dead animals. No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit."

Mummy always said "Look to the animals," and it's particularly true in the sense we blogged about here yesterday, with reference to contemporary development on floodplains and barrier beaches and other places the ancients had learned to avoid. As we said then, unless you're prepared --like the indomitable Dutch -- to engineer walls against the sea or otherwise construct your edifices for the "100-year storm," you build at your own risk in such places. We Americans have had our own experience and stubborn refusal to listen to Mother Nature's lessons.  We seem to keep building dream cottages on hurricane-prone barrier beaches along the eastern seaboard, for example, and then looking to the Government to bail us out every few years when the inevitable happens.

Big-time bloggers like Tim Blair and Hindrocket of Powerline -- whose wise and witty take on things are daily food for the soul -- snickered the other day at a World Conservation Union scientist's assertion that "What has made this a disaster is that people have started to occupy part of the landscape that they shouldn't have occupied." Admittedly the WCU has a short-sighted, anti-growth agenda, and the rhetoric is overblown, but even so, there is more than a grain of truth in the idea that we should listen to both history and natural history in weighing the risks of where we build and -- another topic all over the blogosphere these last few days -- what kind of warning systems we should fashion to alert us to impending doom in time to do something about it.

Via Lucianne, whose reader Seniorstud commented "Most of them [wild animals] also live outside, are in better shape and run faster."

Comments

[Walter E. Wallis]

The WCU does not believe people belong anywhere.

[Sissy Willis]

Loony tunes, huh?

[Doyle]

Mummy always said "Look to the animals,"

Very wise words.

Here in Florida the weather can get a bit wild. (polite cough) Several years ago, one night we had the mother-of-all storms. I had NEVER seen non-stop lightning or heard constant thunder like that before, and even after all of the hurricanes this year STILL haven't.

All of a sudden that night, even over the thunder I heard the horses start squeeling and the sound of their hooves as they ran.

By the time I threw on some clothes and got out there through the downpour with a flashlight (the power had been out for hours), they were quiet again. Panting hard, but quiet.

It wasn't until the next morning when the power came back and I turned on one of the radios, that I learned about the twister that had come through, part of its path only about a mile away.

Since then, when the weather's bad I have the weather-alert radio on, but it's any sound from the horses that I really listen for.

(The dogs are useless. One sees even a cloud in the sky and he hides under the bed shaking. The other one isn't much better.)