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Seeing Shadows & an Internet Grab Bag

Episode Summary

Groundhog Shenanigans and Internet Grab Bag

Episode Notes

Is there any more arbitrary experience than Groundhog Day? It’s a day when an entire town lets a rodent predict the future. Or the weather anyway. Several questions:

Is there any other profession besides weatherman insulted by the insinuation that an animal could do it as well or better than them?
Is there any other animal with psycho abilities equal to the groundhog (who, by the way, is wrong like 80% of the time)?
Is there any other tradition that is so meaningless and yet has persisted this long?

The answer to all of these questions is yes. Because humans are not always very smart.

Let’s start with animals who predict the future: before meteorologists we humans needed to know if it would rain and stuff and we relied on the animals’ superior senses (this link):

Cows lie down and dogs eat grass before it rains
Woolly bear caterpillars have less color before a cold spell
Oak leaves reach a certain size (a squirrel’s ear) and that’s when it’s time to plant corn
Migrant birds can hear the undetectable to humans infrasound that indicates a storm on the way
Cows, sheep, and dogs have all been recorded as having hyperactivity before an earthquake.

But it’s not just the weather, animals have senses about other things, too:

Oscar the nursing home cat predicts the imminent death of patients and he’s persistent - he’ll scratch at a door to be let in and stay with the ailing—dying—until they're gone.
Paul the octopus has predicted eight world cup champions from his aquarium in Germany (link) then he died
Sonny Wool the sheep took up where he left off and predicted all of his home team’s matches in the 2011 Rugby World Cup
Jim the dog, though, is even more impressive: identifying hickory trees, identifying cars by color and license plate, predict the sex of unborn children, and pick individuals from a crowd. The Missouri state legislature even tested Jim to prove his abilities and he passed. (link)
Here’s an article of 20 other predictor animals (link)