Dogs Defecate In Alignment With Earth's Magnetic Field

Daniel_Stuckey writes "But for whatever its worth, all that spinning is far from arbitrary. What dog owners witness is a small and furry version of the aurora borealis and a link between species and environment that's as holistic and beautiful as a dog pooping can be. A team of Czech and German researchers found that dogs actually align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field when they poop. Proving at least that they're really devoted to their work, the researchers measured the direction of the body axis of 70 dogs from 37 breeds during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years, and found that dogs "prefer to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm magnetic field conditions." They fittingly published their results [abstract] in the journal Frontiers in Zoology ."

Comments

dogs deficate not staring into the sun

[goombah99]

I suspect the dogs just don't like staring into the sun then they poo. I'd also speculate that since streets and walls tend to be aligned with the cardinal directions there's an overall alignment augmentation due to their surroundings. finally if they like to poo in a shadow of a tree then likely they may face back to the tree and thus have a bias to north or south alignments.

Re:wow

[bob_super]

But they have secured next year's igNobel...

Re:My dog is broken...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Why do we insist on speculating that animals have all of these magical abilities, like the ability to tell which way is north, ability to tell when an earthquake is coming, ability to tell when a person has cancer, etc. Humans are animals too, and yet we can't do any of these things (without tools). Frankly, I think the people who say animals can do these things are just full of crap.

Different species have different senses, and levels of senses. Your eyesight is much, much keener than a dog's, although not as good as an eagle's; your sense of smell is much better than the eagle's, but nowhere near as good as the dog's. And the way brains with very different structures process the information is different too. Is that really so difficult to believe?