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But a funny thing happened April 17 — the night before a 5.2-magnitude earthquake in Illinois rumbled all the way to Kansas City. Both dogs retreated to their crates and didn’t come out.
“I wondered if he could sense that coming,” Jane McDowell of Prairie Village said of her dog, Kip.
Kathleen Stull of Merriam wondered the same thing about her dog, Cinder Bear.
“Two dogs staying in crates all night was very unusual,” Stull said.
Other people also reported odd behavior of their pets before the earthquake, reviving longstanding questions about whether animals can sense natural disasters before they occur.
In addition to the behavior of the Stull and McDowell dogs, Stull learned that the normally perky dog at her sister’s house in Lone Jack was listless and looking ill the night before the quake.
In Farmington, Mo., south of St. Louis, Kansas City native Paul Grindstaff said his dog paced nervously around the house shortly after 4 a.m., which he called “atypical behavior.” He made the dog go outside.
“She sprinted back in the house,” Grindstaff said. “It wasn’t 10 minutes later we felt the earthquake. It was weird.”
Stories of dogs and other animals predicting earthquakes are familiar to the U.S. Geological Survey, which studies and monitors seismic activity.
“It’s reasonably common, and there is a lot of information on this if you look at the literature,” said Don Blakeman, a seismologist in the agency’s National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.
The U.S. Geological Survey did some studies in the early 1980s, said Andy Michael, a geophysicist for the agency. One observed the behavior of captive rats before earthquakes, and another asked people to contact the agency if pet behavior changed before earthquakes, he said.
The studies showed nothing, Michael said.
“The main thing you are looking at is anecdotal evidence,” Michael said. “You don’t know if dogs are going in their crates for other reasons. Think of how many dogs there are. Shouldn’t there be thousands of reports of strange behavior?”
Unusual animal behavior has been widely reported before thunderstorms, hurricanes and notably before the Asian tsunami in 2004. Animals were reported to have taken refuge in advance.
Michael said storms create a change in air pressure ahead of their paths, which animals may detect. In a tsunami, the build-up of the wave under the ocean surface creates a shaking of the ground before it reaches land, he said.
An earthquake, on the other hand, doesn’t give signals that it will occur, Michael said. Rarely there are foreshocks, but seismologists did not report any prior to the Illinois quake this month.
Nevertheless, some evidence may suggest that animals have a sixth sense about earthquakes.
A National Geographic News report five years ago said a doctor in Japan conducted a study indicating that excessive barking or biting by dogs could be used to forecast earthquakes.
The National Geographic report also said that strange animal behavior prompted Chinese officials in 1975 to order the evacuation of Haicheng in central China just days before a 7.3-magnitude quake struck. However, foreshocks preceded that quake, Michael said.
Dogs aren’t the only pets that got out of sorts before the earthquake last week. Nathalie Scharf of Overland Park said her cockatiel, Bella, became agitated and made a lot of noise, waking Scharf up. Scharf said she felt the earthquake and thought it came seconds after the bird acted up.
Scharf said people she queried at work the next day had no reports of unusual pet behavior prior to the quake. But Scharf is inclined to think that animals know something people do not.
“They probably sense light or movement we can’t,” said. “I think they are just more attuned.”
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