[TowerTalk] Magnetic North

[Jack Brindle]

Hmmm. But on east-west streets dogs tend to align themselves with the streets when they fill the fire hydrants. That tends to conflict with the study.
I think Dave has the right answer…

Jack B.

On Jan 3, 2014, at 1:32 PM, Jim Lux <jimlux at earthlink.net> wrote:

> On 1/3/14 12:22 PM, David Robbins wrote:
>> Sounds like some bored researchers with too much government money to
>> waste... my dog doesn't spin around, he just stops, squats, and goes
>> wherever he happens to be!
> 
> Au contraire...
> that's what the study (70 dogs) was all about..
> If you were to carefully measure your dog's position AND measure the local magnetic field, you'd find that they are correlated, with a pretty decent significance.
> 
> It's actually pretty interesting scientifically.
> We know that birds have magnetic sensors.. And it's been theorized that mammals do too, so this is actually a fairly inexpensive way to look at it.. if you find out that there's some magnetic field correlation to behavior, that's a telling sign that there must be some sensing mechanism.
> 
> 
> What would be interesting is to make sure that they're not being cued by some other factor (e.g. sun angles). If you keep dogs in a kennel with Helmholz coils to change the magnetic field, for instance.
> 
> Or Northern vs Southern Hemisphere (sun in the south in Norther, sun in the north in Southern.
> 
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