Do animals pick up something?

The survey report (on this site) and the accompanying raw data give interesting details of people's accounts of animals and pet behaviour before the Mag7.1 earthquake in Christchurch on September 4, 2010. Some of this material was published in the Journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.

Papers published by Japanese and Turkish scientists show that some reported animal behaviour precursors before large earthquakes in Japan and Turkey were valid. These findings were borne out in precursor reports from about 400 valid respondents to the internet survey conducted after the Christchurch earthquake.

Owners were woken up by unique pet behaviour 12 times more often in the hour before the quake than in the hours before that (statistically highly significant). Lost and Found pet reports were double normal compared with the week before the earthquake, and 4.5 times normal both the day before the quake, and nine days before. (These results were again statistically significant). The anomalous results for lost pets were found to coincide with ionospheric anomalies recorded using the GNSS satellite system and geomagnetic disturbance data. Unique animal behaviour before the quake was often repeated before the numerous aftershocks. These pet owners claimed an approximate 80% prediction reliability. However these pets were in a 25% minority.