WASHINGTON — Across Southeast Asia, as the terrifying tsunami carried tens of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting human beings to their deaths, something strange happened as well. The animals seem to have had advance warning of the impending tragedy — not from technical warning stations, but from their own senses.

Elephants screamed, sometimes broke their constraints, and ran for higher ground. Flamingos abandoned their low-lying breeding areas. In a southern Sri Lankan town, one man recalls bats flying away just before the tsunami struck, while another wondered why his own two dogs refused to go for their daily run on the beach. At the Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, hundreds of elephants, leopards, tigers, wild boar, deer, water buffalo, monkeys and smaller mammals and even reptiles escaped safely.

Distraught rescuers found few animal bodies in the midst of the horrible detritus of human life and property. The animals seemed to know. Historians in China recalled that, when a strong earthquake struck a densely populated area of northeast China in 1975, parades of snakes strangely came out of hibernation, giving the local people a full week’s notice to flee before the earthquake struck.

Meanwhile, in Florida, scientists paused to recall how, a full 12 hours before Hurricane Charley struck the Gulf Coast last year, 14 electronically tagged blacktip sharks off Sarasota bolted into deeper, safer waters. They stayed there for two weeks, then safely returned. According to scientists at Mote Marine Laboratory there, none had ever left its home in four years of monitoring.

Is it possible? Are we really trying to say that many animals have some inner knowledge of Earth that we humans do not have? That they have perhaps that hoary old “sixth sense” that mankind might once have had — but which we lost to evolution, as we moved from living along the riverbanks to the 50-story buildings of the modern city?

My answer is yes. And here is why. For the past 10 years, I have been researching a book unusual for me, the recently released “When Cats Reigned Like Kings: On the Trail of the Sacred Cats.” My research took me to Egypt, Thailand, Burma, Japan and Turkey, all countries where cats were regarded as sacred and royal in the pre-Judeo- Christian eras.

The ancients were, I found, far more open to understanding animals; they tried not to see them as we do today, looking for qualities of theirs that mimic ours, but to see their own intrinsic, natural strengths and to learn from them. The cat, in particular, they worshiped, first because they found it so beautiful, but also because it could do and sense things humans could not. It could leap beautifully high, it could fall without hurting itself (or so they thought); it held the moon safely in its eyes overnight and, above all, it could see in a far broader span than humans. In short, they recognized a treasured otherness in animals — and they were smart enough to prize it.

I found in my research that animals, cats in particular, have barely evolved physiologically from their early days millennia ago and are able to pass down memories. On St. James Island in the Galapagos, where I have visited three times, the fur sea lions are terrified of man. They run and dive into the ocean at the first sight of us. On no other island of the archipelago does this happen. Why? Because, the scientists from the Darwin Station there told me, only on St. James were the animals hunted. But that was in the 1890s, I said in amazement. “Yes,” he said. And together we understood something wondrous about the animal consciousness: They can pass down learned fear through the generations.

Would my little Japanese bobtail cat, Nikko, know if an earthquake were coming? Probably not, since he lives in a 10-story building. But from his supposedly protected aerie, he knows when a storm is way out on the horizon — and he runs under the bed and hides well before my poor, limited human self can even see it.

My stories, of course, are simply loving and curious historical ruminations, informed by legend. But there ARE scientific reasons behind these senses of animals. Elephants lay their trunks on the ground to determine from what direction the stimulus is coming. Some animals are able to detect “infrasound” frequencies in the range of 1 to 3 hertz, compared with humans’ 100 to 200 hertz range. Canines’ sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times superior to that of humans, say scientists, and it is said that dogs can smell fear. Cats’ eyes have a tremendously wide range of sight.

Scientists don’t know whether these animal senses can be put to practical use in detecting oncoming tragedies; but I believe the place to start is to show more respect and curiosity about our furred and feathered friends — and to seek to know them in a new way, so that the next time, we might understand.