For two years, several dozen dog owners in the Czech Republic and Germany took their pets out while equipped with the standard plastic bags and an unusual addition: a compass.<\/p>\n
Whenever a dog paused to relieve itself off the leash, in open areas away from roads, power lines, and metal structures, its owner would take a bearing along the dog’s spine. The findings, published in a 2013 article in Frontiers in Zoology, documented 70 dogs from 37 breeds, with 1,893 instances of defecation recorded from 55 of them and 5,582 urinations from 59. The leaders of the project were Vlastimil Hart and Hynek Burda from the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and the University of Duisburg-Essen, whose team had previously asserted, in a 2008 study in PNAS, that cattle and deer generally align north-south.<\/p>\n
The dog research earned the 2014 Ig Nobel Prize for biology, according to APS News, an accolade for studies that humor people before provoking thought.<\/p>\n
Analyzing the walks by magnetic conditions<\/p>\n
The initial examination of the data yielded disappointing results. When compiled, the headings presented a weak, heavily dispersed pattern that disintegrated when each dog’s data was averaged individually. Only after completing the sampling did the team categorize each walk based on the Earth’s magnetic field activity at that moment, using data from a geomagnetic observatory near Munich.<\/p>\n
When the magnetic declination remained entirely stable, the dogs displayed a distinctly significant preference for a north-south orientation. As the rate of change increased, their headings became scattered, and with declination varying faster than one-fiftieth of a degree per hour, their orientation appeared random. The researchers also noted that the dogs avoided facing east-west, and because the preference was along an axis, pointing south was equivalent to pointing north.<\/p>\n
Changes in the field\u2019s direction predicted the orientation switch more accurately than shifts in its strength.<\/p>\n
How magnetic north migrates<\/p>\n
What causes a compass direction to shift? Magnetic north and true north occupy different positions, and the angle between them, known as declination, fluctuates with both location and time, as detailed by the US National Centers for Environmental Information. Over the years, it drifts. Within a single day, it also wobbles; Hart\u2019s team observed westward shifts in the morning, eastward ones in the afternoon, and erratic movements during magnetic storms.<\/p>\n
These changes are minimal. In one example, declination moved 10 arcminutes, which is one-sixth of a degree, over four hours, approximately twice the rate at which the dogs’ headings became random. Anyone holding a leash would not notice this.<\/p>\n
Sunlight, which transitions across the sky from morning to evening, is a plausible competing explanation. The authors countered by stating that calm-field alignment was maintained at all hours, and that most walks likely occurred under cloudy skies.<\/p>\n
Subsequent dog research shows differing results<\/p>\n
In urban parks in Eilat at Israel\u2019s southern tip, high school students assessed the headings of dogs squatting with mobile compasses, sometimes after placing a small bar magnet in the grass, as reported by Science in Poland. Their study, published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior in 2020, revealed north-south alignment that changed when the magnet was present.<\/p>\n
A year later, a team from the University of St Andrews repeated those techniques in five dog parks in Lyon and found no magnetic alignment. Those dogs aligned more with the layout of each park, and the researchers cautioned that volunteer observers might unconsciously bias their recordings.<\/p>\n
In 2014, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman raised a multiple-comparisons issue in the original paper: when one dataset is sliced into enough different ways, a random occurrence can appear significant. He advocated for a preregistered replication, with the test designed prior to data collection. The authors maintained that the delayed sorting made their study genuinely blind, as there was no prior expectation of declination\u2019s importance. Currently, the canine evidence remains contested, with two reinforcing studies, one unsuccessful replication, and no consensus reached.<\/p>\n
Hunting dogs and the compass run<\/p>\n
\u201cCompass run\u201d is the term the Czech group later assigned to a behavior observed in hunting dogs. In a 2020 publication in eLife, Kate\u0159ina Benediktov\u00e1 and her colleagues equipped 27 hunting dogs with GPS collars and action cameras and tracked over 600 excursions in the forest. Dogs returning to their owners via a new route typically commenced with a sprint of approximately 20 meters along the north-south direction, regardless of the home\u2019s location, and these runs enhanced the overall efficiency of their return trips.<\/p>\n
Hart and Burda are included in both author lists, indicating that this extends the group\u2019s own hypotheses and cannot be considered independent verification. The suggested explanation is that the run aligns a mental map with a magnetic sense of direction, a concept already proposed in the 2013 paper, which likened a squatting dog to a hiker adjusting a map to face north.<\/p>\n
That paper also asserted that such calibration only holds true against a stable reference, which<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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