Question: How to animals no when something bad is going to happen before humans?

Drew Rae answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Juliet,
This is a good question, but the idea that animals know about bad things about to happen is only sometimes true. The old idea that “rats desert a sinking ship” wasn’t because they had psychic powers, but because they could see and feel the water rising through the ship.

A few people have done experiments on whether animals really do have psychic powers. The better designed the experiments were, the less chance of them being successful. This is usually a sign that what they were trying to measure wasn’t really there at all. Often people remember stories of animals that seemed to know of something bad, but they don’t remember all the times that the animals did the same thing and something bad didn’t happen, or all the times something bad happened and the animals didn’t know.

This is called “confirmation bias”. In confirmation bias we remember the things that support our theory, but we don’t notice or we forget all the things that don’t. That’s why careful experiments are needed to investigate whether these things are real.

There are a small number of bad things that animals can detect because they have better senses than humans. Fire, dangerous gas, and changes in weather are in this set of things.