Boy, if you’re not careful you’ll learn something new all the time. That happened to me again the other evening. We were at a gathering with some friends and one of the guys (who usually knows what he’s talking about) said he had discovered why dogs, when getting ready to go to the bathroom, seem to make a big ritual out of it — spinning in a circle before finally squatting. Our friend said that dogs spin to get a feel for the Earth’s magnetic pull. Well, of course he got some funny looks but, amazingly, there wasn’t much discussion on the subject. Most people thought that dogs circle before pooping for much the same reason they spin around before lying down — the spinning flattens the grass around and keeps the blades away from their tushes while they poop.
Well, I figured this subject deserved some of my extensive research — and — turns out our friend was probably on to something. A Czech researcher, Hynek Burda, suggested that dogs spin to get a feel for the Earth’s magnetic pull. The Earth has a magnetic field around it protecting it from radiation from space, and some animals seem to use it to get a sense of where the North and South poles are. (It’s how birds know which way to migrate.) In 2013, Burda published a study in the journal Frontiers in Zoology suggesting dogs have a strong internal compass, too. He and his team spent two years watching 70 dogs poop and pee and recording which way they faced and how strong the magnetic field was.
As it turns out, when the magnetic field was calm (which it is about 20% of the time when its light out) dogs preferred to poop facing either north or south. When the magnetic field was less stable, they faced any old way. The pattern couldn’t explain why dogs like facing the Earth’s poles, but the researchers think it might help them remember where they marked their territory.
Here in Deerfield Village we’ve got a lot of dogs that poop — I suppose there is a science to where they poop. If we did a scientific study of their owners, it would probably reveal that only about ten percent of them know they’re supposed to pick up their dog’s poop….
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Lol! Having mowed the lawn for millennials (who were in that percentage of people that don’t know how to pick up poop) that have a beautiful dog. We wondered what made her poop in a perfectly spaced straight line. But, why do cats spin before they poop?