Let's talk sh*t

According to an article I read recently, when dogs go out and are doing their business, they prefer to align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field.

By "doing their business", I mean going potty

Yes, someone actually did a scientific study of this, and published it in a scientific zoology journal.

And I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they got a government grant to do the study.

The study suggests that dogs are sensitive to small variations in Earth’s magnetic field. After examining 70 dogs — made up of 37 breeds — over two years, 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations, researchers found that under “calm magnetic field conditions,” dogs preferred to “excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis,” avoiding east-west altogether. Dogs were observed in a free-roaming environment, meaning they were not leashed and not influenced by walls or roads that would influence linear movement. 

It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it “consciously” (i.e., whether the magnetic field is sensorial perceived (the dogs “see”, “hear” or “smell” the compass direction or perceive it as a haptic stimulus) or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they “feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable” in a certain direction).



So I got curious. I take my dogs out on a regular basis so the can "do business" and decided to see if my dogs aligned themselves with magnetic north. They didn't.

My dogs do not appear to have a compass.

Despite an elaborate ritual of sniffing, selecting just the right spot (which, I believe, is a dog-fengshui thing), circling, squatting, and finally defecating, my dogs did not align with the magnetic field.

I guess they didn't read the article.

Every time they went out, the aligned in a slightly different direction. But what I did notice was that all four aligned in the same direction as each other. At first I thought it was a "pack thing," but after a few weeks of observation, the answer became apparent:

They were facing into the wind.

And it made sense. By facing into the wind, the stink was blown away from their noses when they "did business."

How cleaver!

I'm thinking of doing up a paper, and submitting it to some scientific journal.

I wonder if I could get a government grant?