Animal Intuition and Human Intuition

What Animals Can Show Us: Animal Intuition and Human Intuition

On December 2004, a massive earthquake at the Indian Ocean which started as an undersea activity triggered a tsunami that reached the coastlines, killing thousands of people and causing enormous damage.

When the waters receded, something nearly incredible was noted: almost no animal was found dead. 

As the reports said at that time, everything happened as if “…animals knew what was about to happen and fled to safety. According to eyewitness accounts, the following events happened: elephants screamed and ran for higher ground; dogs refused to go outdoors; flamingos abandoned their low-lying breeding areas; zoo animals rushed into their shelters and could not be enticed to come back out.” (National Geographic, 2005).

Sometimes it is said that animals might have a “sixth sense”, because they seem to perceive things that we humans just cannot sense. We could be then talking about “animal intuition”. So what about human intuition? What can be said about that?

Tracing our phylogenetic history, we can assume that thousands of years ago, human beings had high levels of intuition necessary to maneuver the dangers they were constantly exposed to whilst trying to survive by hunting or fishing. Then as time went by, with the development of human culture and accompanying technological advancement, we started to lose some of that intuition, perhaps because we no longer needed it to fight or dodge several natural forces to survive and thrive.

But maybe we have not lost our intuition. Instead, that capacity for intuition could be “asleep”, and awakens every now and then in our everyday life. Sometimes it happens that we get manifest feelings about things which happen later. So intuition could be like any other sense; like sight, smelling, hearing, that works as a perception. But let us not forget that, it could also fail, just as any other “perception” sense, like when you see a person from a distance and on getting closer realize that they were not the person you thought you had seen.

It is also interesting to note that we human beings do not find it strange to attribute to animals that possibility of intuition…maybe just because we once had it in a more intense way, so it looks familiar to us…

Intuition and reasoning, emotions and thoughts, we need all of them to live.