The great mystery of carrier pigeon navigation was solved a few years ago by\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The journal Frontiers in Zoology (2013, 10:80)<\/em> has published a study which demonstrates conclusively that dogs are also magnetic field direction sensitive.<\/p>\n Dogs, it turns out, poop and pee parallel to the Earth’s magnetic field.<\/p>\n The study was carried out\u00a0over two years, and\u00a0covered 70 dogs,\u00a037 breeds, 1,893 poops, and 5,582 pees. This exactitude\u00a0gives new meaning to the term OCD.<\/p>\n You may well ask: who the hell would spend his time sniffing around dog poop and pee for two years? Vlastimil Hart<\/span><\/span>, Petra Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1<\/span><\/span>, Erich Pascal Malkemper<\/span><\/span>, Sabine Begall<\/span><\/span>, Vladim\u00edr Hanzal<\/span><\/span>, Milo<\/span><\/span>\u0161 <\/span><\/span>Je<\/span><\/span>\u017e<\/span><\/span>ek<\/span><\/span>,<\/span><\/span>Tom\u00e1<\/span><\/span>\u0161 <\/span><\/span>Ku<\/span><\/span>\u0161<\/span><\/span>ta<\/span><\/span>, Veronika N<\/span><\/span>\u011b<\/span><\/span>mcov\u00e1<\/span><\/span>, Jana Ad\u00e1mkov\u00e1<\/span><\/span>, Kate<\/span><\/span>\u0159<\/span><\/span>ina Benediktov\u00e1<\/span><\/span>, Jaroslav <\/span><\/span>\u010c<\/span><\/span>erven\u00fd <\/span><\/span>and Hynek Burda, that’s who. These worthies work at the <\/span><\/span>Czech University of Life Sciences and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. (This suggests that, for a change,\u00a0your tax dollars were not expended on this particular bit of shitty (literally)\u00a0research.)<\/p>\n 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\u00a0and plot those piles of festering excreta on polar graph paper.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Enlightened by this research, hunters with hunting dogs need no longer carry compasses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The great mystery of carrier pigeon navigation was solved a few years ago by\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p38V5o-hI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1098"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1103,"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithdoom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}