I came across some intriguing research recently. It was about why dogs circle before they poop.

There’s been numerous suggestions over the years. Some believe it’s an instinctual behaviour of flattening soil or grass to drive insects away to create a clean space, or as a way or surveying the surroundings to ensure it’s safe before placing themselves in a vulnerable position, or that even spinning helps stimulate their intestines to help bring on a bowel movement.

Perhaps there’s some truth in all of these. They all make sense. But a study done in the Czech Republic and Germany found something else – that dogs tend to poop along the North-South axis.

Yes! They prefer to poop in alignment with the earth’s magnetic field.

This was the study

It was done in 2013, where 70 dogs, 37 breeds, almost 2,000 poops (1,893 poops and 5,582 pees) were studied over a 2-year period.

When the researchers looked at all the directions the dogs pooped in, they found a preference for the north-south axis (either facing north or facing south).

A preference? Why not every time then, as some people have asked in the comments of my video posts. Well, there are a few reasons. 

One is distraction by other things happening around them – us humans, other dogs, strong scents, even the shape of a path they’ve been walking along, etc.

But outside of distractions and magnetically noisy conditions (which I explain at the end), dogs will preferentially poop facing north or south rather than any other directions.

Why?

It doesn’t actually seem to serve a function at all.

Instead, researchers believe it is partly a relic of their ancestral past. Dogs evolved from wolves (Canis lupus), and wolves, like a number of other species, have what’s known as a “magnetic compass” (see section below). It helps them orient and navigate across large distances.

Domesticated dogs, though, have evolved not to use their magnetic compass. This is because it is usually humans who decide on the directions they move in (on walks, for example). They still have a magnetic sensitivity, but it has paled off into the background … only seemingly present when they go to poop.

So why specifically poop north-south if they’re not navigating? Researchers haven’t explicitly offered an answer.

But if I were to offer an educated guess myself, based on book chapters I’ve written in the past, I’d say it could be because dogs possibly feel an instinctual sense of comfort when they align north-south. 

Why?

It’s to do with the dog’s heart. Dogs have the largest heart-to-body-mass ratio of any animal. 

In dogs the heart represents around 0.8% to 1.2% of its body mass. By comparison, the human heart typically takes up around 0.5% to 0.6% of our body mass. This latter percentage is quite standard across the animal kingdom (from large elephants to small mice). Dogs have a high metabolic rate and high cardiovascular demands due to a typically active lifestyle, which is partly why their ratio is higher.

The heart has a magnetic field that extends outwards in a circular fashion that’s in alignment with the spine. The heart has the largest magnetic, and electric, field of any organ; even larger than that of the brain.

If a dog poops along the north-south axis, then this large magnetic field moves exactly into alignment with the earth’s magnetic field.

Maybe there’s a comfort in this that the dogs feel on an instinctual level. I don’t honestly know for sure. This is just a guess. It could even be due to a distribution of magnetite throughout their bodies (see below). No researchers have offered an explanation to the best of my knowledge. But if I were to take an educated guess, this would be it.

Extending the idea, it would also suggest that there’s perhaps something to be gained if humans slept along the north-south axis. Just a thought.

Magnetoreception and the magnetic compass

That dogs are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field has a name. It’s called ‘magnetoreception’.

And it’s not just specific to dogs and wolves. In fact, many mammals (including whales and dolphins), use magnetoreception to help them orient and navigate. Many mollusks and arthropods do too. Some species of fish do too, like salmon, for example. Even honey bees use magnetoreception.

Migratory birds have a magnetically sensitive mineral called magnetite in their upper beaks. Some even have a magnetically sensitive protein called cryptochrome in their retinas that allows them to actually see the earth’s magnetic field.

That so many species of animal use the earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves and to help them navigate, it’s often called their ‘magnetic compass’. In migratory birds it’s so well understood that it’s known as the ‘avian magnetic compass’.

Even we humans are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field. However, our sensitivity is weak. It has paled into the background over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as we learned to rely more heavily on our visual and other systems to get around. But researchers at Caltech demonstrated human magnetoreception in 2019. We just don’t generally use it. 

For info, I wrote quite a bit about animal and plant magnetoreception in my book, ‘Why Woo-Woo Works’ (Hay House, 2021).

Magnetic storms and fine tuning

So I said that dogs have a preference for pooping along the north-south axis. A preference. It doesn’t mean all the time. As I said, sometimes there are distractions. 

But there’s an invisible distraction that throws their magnetoreception off. It’s when the earth’s magnetic field is fluctuating. And this also applies to whales, dolphins, bees, and many other species.

It happens quite a lot so the researchers in the above study cross-referenced dogs’ pooping directions with activity of the earth’s magnetic field at the time of the poop. 

They found dogs only showed a north-south pooping preference when the earth’s magnetic field was calm and stable. Pooping directions were more or less random on magnetically stormy days. In other words, dogs, like many other species, are finely tuned to the earth’s magnetic field.

Our physical weather is a good analogy here to help us understand this. Sometimes when you go outside there’s a gentle breeze or no wind at all, maybe some sunshine. But other times there’s a strong wind, and sometimes it’s even a bit stormy.

So there’s magnetically calm and magnetically stormy days too. We just don’t see them because the earth’s magnetic field is invisible to us. Although, saying this, there are times when we can see the effects of it. It’s what an aurora is.

Auroras occur during a severe ‘geomagnetic storm’. It’s where energetic charged particles from the sun bombard and excite our atmosphere. The green colour we see is from the effect these charged particles have on oxygen.

When magnetic activity is stormy, the earth’s magnetic field gets shaken a bit, and that’s why dogs don’t seem to poop in alignment with it on those days. Their magnetoreception isn’t as clear. I suppose it’s a bit like trying to listen to a conversation in a noisy room.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Dogs have a preference for pooping facing north or south, albeit in the absence of distractions or magnetically stormy conditions.

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