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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 ."
sounds like a shitty job
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So which causes which?
Alternative explanation. Dogs face away from the sun while crapping.
Where is the raw data?
Annoyingly enough some of it is under the sole of my shoe.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
please have him subscribe to /. to get his shit straight...
Alternative explanation. Dogs face away from the sun while crapping.
Where is the raw data?
Annoyingly enough some of it is under the sole of my shoe.
May Dog have mercy on your sole...
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?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
(A draft of) the actual research article is freely available here. Key points not mentioned in the summary:
* the researchers concluded the magnetic field was responsible after observing the dogs lost their directional bias on days with geomagnetic storms, which is pretty cool IMHO
* the researchers did explicitly discuss bias due to the direction of the sun, and the measures they took to eliminate it from their study.
All in all, their findings are not to be taken as gospel (as always with original research), but if confirmed, they could spark a hunt for underlying biochemical mechanism.
But this was perhaps the first time that magnetic sensitivity was proven in dogs, and it was also the first time that a predictable behavioral reaction to the fluctuations in the magnetic field—magnetic storms, often as resulting from solar flares—was proven in a mammal.
I might be off topic here, but...
My house sits almost exactly diagonal to Earth's magnetic field, meaning that - unlike Solomon's Temple - only the corners of the house face North, East, South or West. I noticed that both of my kids wiggle around in their sleep in order to have their head face East. This happens in their beds, as well as on the floor. I told my wife what I thought, and we did some experiments:
Beds:
I moved both of the kids' beds to have the head face East, and both kids slept straight in their beds (they didn't wiggle out of that direction at all - we tested this for a few weeks. When I moved them back, the kids wiggled to have their heads face East again. So I moved the beds back to have the head face East and left them that way.
Floor:
On the weekend we would put a bunch of blankets down in the living room and pass out watching movies. The kids would always wiggle to have their heads facing East. I changed the blankets to have their heads facing West, but the kids would wiggle around to have their heads facing East.
I don't really find that either my wife or I wiggle around to face a certain direction, but I do find it easier to fall asleep if I move my couch to have my head facing East. Not sure if anyone else has ever had a similar experience.
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