It's All Happening at the Zoo (as Simon and Garfunkel once told us)

This past week you probably heard the stories of animals in the northeast that sensed the earthquake before it arrived. Lemurs sounded an alarm, apes abandoned their food, flamingos rushed into a huddle, and a gorilla let out a shriek before the magnitude 5.8-quake. I also saw on ABC news videos of dogs that before earthquakes rushed to get out of rooms or began barking excitedly.

This fascinates me and apparently fascinates our newscasters. How did these animals know? What is this sixth sense that these animals have?

Maybe why this fascinates us so much is that it points to realities that we cannot see or feel or hear. But those realities definitely exists. There are ways of knowing things that not only can we not use, we don't even understand. There is a dimension to reality that we remain oblivious to.

Two things to note: Apparently, not all animals, maybe even the vast majority of animals noticed anything. I saw interviews with various pet owners that said their pets basically slept through the quake or were just as startled as themselves when it occurred. Evidently, not everyone was paying attention to what they could have known. Second, there was obviously a lag time between the animals alerting and the earthquake that caused them to alert. The reality that was true and real to them was invisible to the rest of us and there was no way that they could "prove" it.

There has to be a lesson here somewhere.