Sorry, nothing personal.
They either went to higher ground, or were swept out to sea and swam back, or were swept out to sea and neither swam nor floated back, or larger ones were not easily moved from their places, or smaller ones are already buried in sand and debris, or the reports are wrong, or some combination. I think that exhausts the cases, and if so, the preceding statement must be true, tautologically.
It's inaccurate to claim I misunderstand the dynamic. I just suggested an additional case. I DON'T understand what dynamic would result in other creatures being disposed differently. That's a different thing.
I speculate that anything we have heard so far is speculative, not that there is the least thing wrong with that. ;-)
The fact is, nobody knows at this time what became of the animals, and local authorities are only just learning about what became of the human inhabitants -- although this is becoming horribly clearer by the hour. It's just hard to fathom a catastrophe of this magnitude in this day and age.
My point was about animals being able to "sense" disaster before humans could. IMO, this could in fact be true, for whatever reasons.
In this case, if all of the animals were drowned or washed out to sea, this should in time become evident and would reinforce the argument (in either direction).