This afternoon around 2:30 pm when my wife Deborah arrived home
from work, she proceeded to the back doors that opens out on to
our deck to let our 2 Rottweilers (Legend & Sheba) in from
the out side and she noticed that our big male "Legend" was acting very strange, so much so that
she called me at my work to say that she was more than a bit
concerned. She went on to say that he seemed to be in a
heightened state of alert and that he seemed very uneasy as if a
stranger was greeting him at the door instead of his human mom.
He had never acted this way before and it seemed like he did not
want to come in the house, but after a little coxing, he
reluctantly came in and laid down right in front of the French
doors.
At
approximately 3:59 pm, nearly 1.5 hours later, central Virginia
experienced a magnitude 4.5 earthquake. The house began to
shake as well as the office building that I was working in
located about 2.5 miles away from our home. I immediately phoned
home and asked if everyone there was okay and my wife informed
me that yes, we are all fine. At that moment I blurted out,
"That was why Legend was acting so strange!" and my
wife agreed saying "I knew that something unusual was going
on because he never acts this way!"
I had seen a program on the one of the Discovery Channels a
while back that talked about how some animals can actually
predict just such an event by sensing the minuet vibrations in
the earth caused by the tremendous pressure on the tectonic
plates just before they give way. Thankfully everyone is
fine even Legend who at the moment the quake started arose from
a lying position and looked at my wife very concerned as if to
say, "are we going to be okay"? Deborah simply
told him everything was okay and to lay back down and relax.
From that time on he was back to his same ole' happy
self.
We will now look for this strange behavior and hopefully use it
to prevent a possible catastrophe in the future, Thanks Legend,
Good Boy! :-)
Mark Payne - webmaster
