According to the study carried out by researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, dogs can sense the earth’s magnetic field and they can even use it to adapt their bodies to it when they relieve themselves in nature.
Since then, we studied hunting behavior in the red fox and found that they have a preference for N-E during their mousing jumps, and from there it was just a small step to study dogs.
First, we looked also at other behaviors but the results were less promising than the pooping direction,” said researcher Sabine Begall.
They observed 70 dogs of 37 different breeds for two years and they measured their orientation during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations. In order to hinder any influence of humans in the experiment, the researchers were kept unaware of the exact magnetic orientation at the time.
The scientists discovered that unleashed dogs naturally oriented themselves toward magnetic north or south while defecating or urinating and completely avoided east or west. This pattern was consistent regardless of dog breed, sex, time of day, or weather conditions.
They found that the Sun played an unexpected role in their behavior. Solar flares and geomagnetic storms produced temporary disruptions in the Earth’s magnetic field, causing the dogs to face in random directions while relieving themselves.
“The dogs are very precisely oriented on the north-south axis while pooping, but only if the magnetic field is stable,” researcher Petra Kovakova stated. “On January 6 the magnetic field was very stable, which means that the dogs were very well oriented during pooping. On January 2 the magnetic field was very restless and the dogs were pooping in a random fashion.”
However, the scientists are still not sure exactly why dogs orient themselves toward the poles while relieving themselves.
“It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it ‘consciously’, or whether their reception is controlled on the vegetative level,” the researchers concluded in their report.
It would appear there is more to their marking of the territory than meets the eye.