Not only birds use magnetic guidance: fish, turtles and mammals can do it too. Li-Qing Wu and David Dickman’s work published in Science demonstrates that pigeons’ brains contain special single cells and a substrate that “encode magnetic field direction, intensity, and polarity”, thus, it seems, conferring their famous “homing” ability. Migratory birds come immediately to mind, and even city birds have that capacity. Other animals are known to work with magnetic north. What difference do you suppose it makes which alignment along which animals poop? Does the magnetic pull facilitate elimination, or is the choice purely aesthetic?Īlthough the pooping news is new, the phenomenon is not. Sometimes the field gets muddied, so it takes your dog longer to find The Spot. New research suggests that the reason dogs take so long to figure out where to poop is that they have an internal compass that they use to search for the optimum location along a north-south axis, thus lining up their intestinal offering with the Earth’s magnetic field. Ever wonder why on earth your dog twists and gyrates around in some area before deciding where to “go?”
