Thousands of years of folklore support the thesis that animals' senses are so well developed and so attuned to nature that the animals can forecast earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters. Isn't it strange that when the Indian Ocean tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of humans last December, so few animals died?

''Can Animals Predict Disaster?'' airing Sunday at 7 on KUED Channel 7, passes along anecdotal evidence (before the tsunami, it is reported, buffaloes stampeded in Thailand and dogs in Sri Lanka refused to go for their regular walks), repeats the folk stories and follows scientists seeking to prove some truth behind them. Unfortunately, many of the scientific experiments appear to point in the other direction.

That makes for frustrating television viewing, but that may be a result of the program's organization. The success stories are shown first.

James Berkland, an American geologist, appears to have predicted the San Francisco earthquake in 1989 by tracking the number of pets who ran away shortly before the fateful date. Another geologist, Motoji Ikeya, who has experimented with small fish and simulated electromagnetic changes like those that would precede a natural cataclysm, has had one hopeful finding.

But Elizabeth Von Muggen-

thaler, a bioacoustics researcher, experiments with tigers and rhinoceroses and shock waves and finds little or no reaction. Pruthu Fernando, a conservation biologist observing elephants with global-positioning transponders, and Bill Barklow, a biologist working with hippopotamuses and low-frequency infrasonic blasts, have similarly disappointing results.

In an age, though, of sensationalistic and short-attention-span reporting, let's just call this program responsible science and applaud it.