Many traditional weather forecasts are based on the behaviour of animals: cows sitting down, sheep putting their heads into hedges, hogs running around with straw in their mouths… There are hundreds of them.
Even if you assume that our ancestors were a superstitious lot, who saw disaster in every twitch of a lamb’s tail, so many of these old proverbs have common elements that it’s hard to discount them entirely.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been trying to think up ways of testing out some of these sayings.
So writes Howie Watkins. His early study on the topic, tilted “Cats and Weather Prediction,” appeared in the July/August 1996 issue (vol. 2, no. 4) of the Annals of Improbable Research