Originally posted on DVM 360 by Abi Bautista, Assistant Editor
May 21, 2024
Animal Alerts initiative aimed to notify Lima, Peru, residents of imminent earthquakes, with the use of a health monitoring wearable device, PetPace.
The Animal Alerts project has launched an initiative in Lima, Peru that uses canine health monitoring to detect signs that may precede earthquakes. The multidisciplinary effort—bringing together animal care specialists, technologists, scientists, and media partners—is led by Dr. Rachel Grant, a behavioral ecologist and senior lecturer at London South Bank University. At the heart of the initiative is the PetPace smart collar, a wearable designed to collect real-time physiological data from dogs.
The PetPace collar continuously records metrics such as heart rate, body temperature, and respiration. These readings feed into algorithms that assess each dog’s stress level relative to its baseline. The project monitors large numbers of dogs across neighborhoods; if many animals show simultaneous and unusual increases in stress, that collective signal could indicate imminent seismic activity.
“It’s been shown in many systematic studies that animals often behave differently prior to earthquakes,” Grant said in a news release. “Animal Alerts, with the use of PetPace AI technology, allows us, for the first time, to collect reproducible physiological data in real time which could help with short term earthquake risk forecasting.”
Dogs are particularly useful for this type of monitoring because they live close to people and have acute senses. Their sense of smell is far more sensitive than humans’, and their hearing reaches higher frequencies, allowing them to detect subtle environmental cues that people miss. When dogs consistently change behavior or physiology across a wide area, those changes can provide data points for an early-warning system that distributes alerts through multiple media channels.
Peru is a high-seismicity country situated along the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area responsible for a large proportion of global earthquakes. Lima’s dense population and vulnerable infrastructure make timely warnings especially important. Project partners argue that a reliable short-term alarm, even if not perfectly precise, could give residents enough time to take protective actions and potentially reduce casualties and damage.
“There is an urgent need for innovative approaches to warn the public before an earthquake, especially since Lima’s infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to seismic activity. And so, a timely alert from Animal Alerts could help save countless lives,” said Carlos G. Brown, geographer, urban planner, and disaster risk management expert of TECHO Peru.
Not all experts are convinced that animals can reliably predict earthquakes. Earthquake geologist Wendy Bohon, PhD, has emphasized the difficulty of forecasting seismic events and questioned whether observed animal reactions truly precede earthquakes or instead reflect animals sensing the first tiny ground motions that humans cannot detect. In other words, animals might be responding to faint precursor waves rather than predicting events in advance.
“Sometimes animals might feel the arrival of the waves from far away that are too small for us to feel, and so we don’t notice those first small waves arriving…it may seem like the animals are predicting the earthquake, when in reality they’re reacting to the first arrivals of the waves that we’re just not tuned into,” Bohon said.
Scientific studies offer mixed but intriguing results. A 2020 investigation by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz examined the activity of farm animals during and before a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in central Italy (October 2016). Equipped with bio-loggers and GPS devices, some animals displayed marked behavioral changes hours before stronger seismic activity, particularly when they were close to the epicenter. Such findings suggest that in certain contexts, animal monitoring could provide short-term signals worth investigating further.
Animal Alerts aims to convert these physiological and behavioral signals into structured, reproducible data that can be analyzed automatically. Key challenges include distinguishing earthquake-related stress from changes caused by everyday events, establishing robust baselines for individual animals, and avoiding false alarms. The project therefore pairs continuous monitoring with careful data analysis and cross-references signals across many animals and locations to increase reliability.
If proven effective after thorough testing and validation, an animal-based warning system could complement existing seismic networks rather than replace them. It is most likely to be valuable as part of a layered approach to disaster preparedness: combining instrument-based seismic monitoring, community education, and novel biological indicators could improve short-term risk awareness in seismically active regions.
Animal Alerts is in an early, exploratory stage. Continued research, transparent data sharing, and independent evaluation will be important to assess how well canine-worn sensors contribute to earthquake early warning. Until then, experts recommend relying primarily on established seismic systems while considering animal-monitoring projects as a potentially useful adjunct that merits careful scientific scrutiny.
References
- PetPace news release: Animal Alerts powered by PetPace turns pet health data into earthquake warnings. May 20, 2024.
- Reisen J. The nose knows: Is there anything like a dog’s nose? American Kennel Club. November 2, 2022.
- Jacobo J. Wearable device could aid dogs in helping to predict earthquakes, but more research needed, critics say. ABC News. May 2, 2024.
- Wikelski M, Mueller U, Scocco P, et al. Potential short‐term earthquake forecasting by farm animal monitoring. Ethology. 2020;126(9).