The great mystery of carrier pigeon navigation was solved a few years ago by  ornithologists, who discovered that the birds have iron filings in their heads, and use them to sense the earth’s magnetic field. OK. But a new biological application for magnetic field sensitivity among the lower animals has now been recognized.

The journal Frontiers in Zoology (2013, 10:80) has published a study which demonstrates conclusively that dogs are also magnetic field direction sensitive.

Dogs, it turns out, poop and pee parallel to the Earth’s magnetic field.

The study was carried out over two years, and covered 70 dogs, 37 breeds, 1,893 poops, and 5,582 pees. This exactitude gives new meaning to the term OCD.

You may well ask: who the hell would spend his time sniffing around dog poop and pee for two years? Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek,Tomáš Kušta, Veronika Němcová, Jana Adámková, Kateřina Benediktová, Jaroslav Červený and Hynek Burda, that’s who. These worthies work at the Czech University of Life Sciences and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. (This suggests that, for a change, your tax dollars were not expended on this particular bit of shitty (literally) research.)

I am willing to bet the farm that a large fraction of these authors are grad students. I can see it now: full professors swinging whips, driving the students to keep their noses to the ground and plot those piles of festering excreta on polar graph paper.

We must ask: what is the application of this research? Is it pure science, or can it bring greater happiness to mankind? I vote for the latter.

Enlightened by this research, hunters with hunting dogs need no longer carry compasses.