Part of the problem is that we aren't in tune with animals anymore. We used to use them to predict the weather (short term, not this groundhog crap) because they can smell rain before we can. They have better hearing in different ranges than us, so they'd be able to hear things like the tsunami and earthquakes earlier.
It isn't magic or a sixth sense, it's the fact that animals' senses are more finely tuned than our own.