Because my wife and I had a wonderful dog for nearly 9 years and since I give a lecture on human waste in our Environment course at McGill, I was most interested to see the article that is making quite a number of headlines around the world with the title “Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field”. It appears canines align themselves for defecation and urination aligned along the North-South axis. This directional positioning seems to be associated most strongly when the magnetic field conditions are said to be “stable”.
There were twelve authors on this paper from universities in the Czech Republic and Germany. Several thousand observations were made detailing the position of a variety of dogs while relieving themselves in an effort to decide if dogs indeed have a capacity to respond to the earth’s magnetic field. The authors justify this remarkable data collection exercise to see if they can prove that dogs indeed have “extraordinary homing ability”. The anecdotal literature is indeed filled with tales of abandoned dogs finding their way home under what seem like impossible climate and landscape conditions. So- what were the results?
I have read a great many scientific papers and some of them are filled with arcane language that one can become familiar with given enough time and effort and study. For me, this publication defies clear understanding. This sub-field is called “magnetobiology”. My field is chemistry and we do indeed have “sub-fields” but this one for me was a novelty. My problem with this research is that I was unable to extract any simple conclusions other than when the magnetic North-South axis was calm, dogs aligned with this direction rather well and if the field was not “stable” they aligned in a more random fashion.
Given that it appears that the earth’s magnetic field seems to be fluctuating in an inconsistent fashion most of the time and given that one needs rather specialized equipment to detect these fluctuations, the practical conclusions that can be extracted from this work seem remote at best.
There are so many variables in such a study that it seems impossible to understand how one can extract sense from the data. The dogs were not leashed during their activity and the age range seemed to matter but the diet, the immediate presence of other animals could not be monitored, the health of the animals (cats were also observed and herding cats comes to mind) the weather, brightness of the sun, time of day, temperature, humidity and season were not indicated all of which could have had an effect of the orientation of the animals doing their “business”.
My conclusion for this very unusual article is to wonder if it might be nominated for the IgNobel prize for (in this case) Zoology. The IgNobel prize is awarded each October for unusual or trivial work in a variety of fields. Since sometimes the prize honours achievements that make people laugh and then sometimes makes them think, I think this paper is an outstanding candidate. It is unfortunate that the language of the article is sufficiently complex so as (for me) to obscure the conclusions. I suppose it is possible that this unusual sensitivity that dogs are reported to have for small changes in the magnetic behavior of the earth to their bowel habits may have some practical considerations in the future. Perhaps fertilizing rows of North-South oriented crops is a possibility. Good luck.
