WI: Animals bred and domesticated as a living emergency alert system due to their sensitivity to weather changes, would it be plausible?

Neoteros

Neoteros

Suppose you're in the Paleolithic, in a region that is at the same time prosperous enough to be able to support a relatively high number of hunter-gatherers, perhaps even semi-sedentary ones, but where the local weather is trying to kill you, with earthquakes, eruptions, floods and storms being a frighteningly common occurrence. Maybe, it's an area located in the Ring of Fire, perhaps an alternate version of Japan or the Philippines, who knows. The locals have no need to domesticate animals for their meat yet, since they can hunt just fine but, would it make sense for them to breed some small animal species for increased sensitivity to certain changes in the weather, to warn them of impending doom and allow them to get the fuck out before a storm strikes, for example?

Given how often the neighbour's cat tries to enter my home whenever she's out genociding the block's lizard population and she senses rain coming, it's weird how no one seemingly had this idea, historically.
 
Ersatz Sequoyan

Ersatz Sequoyan

For earthquakes (and presumably volcanic activity as well), almost certainly no. Modern scientific analysis seems to indicate that the claims of animals predicting seismic activity are likely incorrect. Animals might be able to sometimes detect foreshocks, but foreshocks are unreliable predictors themselves, so breeding animals specifically for this purpose is functionally impossible.
 
ennobee

ennobee

Cultivating tree frogs to predict rain may be a nice idea, but the problem is that most of the animals behavior, or sensibility is linked to their way of gathering food, or finding shelter, so they tend to loose this in captivity. So you are better off observing the species in the wild.
 
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