Do dogs poop facing North and South? Turns out they do! Want to learn how to measure this at home using a compass app, Bayesian statistics, and one dog (dog not included)? Jump in!
As many other dog owners, during our walks I noticed that Auri has a very particular ritual when he needs to go to the bathroom. When he finds a perfect spot he starts circling around something like a compass.
At first I was simply amused by this behaviour. After all, who knows what goes through a dog’s mind? But after a while I remembered reading a research paper from 2013 titled “Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field”. The research was conducted on a relatively large sample of dogs and confirmed that “dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis”.
Now that could be an interesting research to try out! I thought to myself. And how lucky that I have a perfect test subject, a lovely canine of my own. I decided to replicate the findings and confirm (or debunk!) the hypothesis with Auri, my N=1 unsuspecting research participant.