Abstract: This paper deals with the characteristic of the distribution of appearing time of unusual animal behavior prior to earthquakes and its relations to some other presumably short-term earthquake precursors and to the different development stages of the earthquakes. The results of analysis are as follows:1. The analysis of data collected after many earthquakes shows that most of the anomalous animal behaviors occur within one day before the earthquakes.2. The analysis of 201 cases of abnormal animal behavior shows that most of them occur within 11 hours and increase sharply 2—3 hours before the earthquake. The mean appearing time of the anomaly and standard deviation respectively equal to 2.7 and 2.5 hours. So we suppose that the unusual behavior of animals is possibly a short-term macroscopic premonitory phenomenon of the earthquakes.3. The analysis of the characteristic of time-space distribution show that most of the unusual animal behavior appear within the breaking stage of the process of development of the earthquakes and associate with some short-term anomalies of other phenomena occurring suddenly within this stage.