The magnetism of pooping

From The Week magazine

Why do dogs tend to circle around before getting down to business? Because they like to be aligned with the earth’s magnetic field before they poop. Researchers finally figured out this great mystery after watching 70 dogs engage in 1,893 defections and 5,582 urinations over a two-year period, and recording the time, place, and body orienta­tion for each one. They found that dogs’ preference for the north-south axis was most pronounced during the roughly 20 percent of the day when the magnetic field was calm and steady. When the field was in flux-due to solar flares, solar wind, and sunspot activity-the canines had real trouble finding a suit­able place to go. “We found that dogs are magnetosensitive, and they are pre­dictably disturbed by even small changes of the magnetic field,” zoologist Sabine Begall of the University of Duisburg-Esser in Germany tells HuffingtonPost.com. Previous studies have shown that cattle and deer graze in a north-south direction, and that birds and fish use the magnetic field to guide their seasonal migrations.