Photo via https://motherboard.vice.com/
Have you ever wondered if your dog uses the Earth’s magnetic field when he or she decides to poop? Yeah, me neither.
But some scientists from Germany and the Czech Republic decided to test this notion, and the results are actually pretty interesting:
When the field was stable, dogs preferred to squat along the North-South axis and actively avoided the East-West axis. That’s without the influence of leashes, fire hydrants or fences.
The researchers don’t know if the 70 dogs in the study actually “felt” the magnetic pull, according to the paper published in Frontiers in Zoology. But the scientists base their conclusion on the fact that during periods of instability in the Earth’s magnetic field, when the sun’s magnetic field and solar winds vary its orientation, the dogs no longer showed a preference for the North-South axis.
Just when you thought they couldn’t be more amazing animals, right?