Directional preferences of dogs’ changes in the presence of a bar magnet: educational experiments in Israel

Abstract A lot of animals detect and then align their body axis with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field lines (MF). This behavior was also presented for territory marking dogs. We collected data on directional preferences of dogs under different MF conditions and analyzed the data using circular statistics. Dogs excreted with the body aligned along the North–South axis, but when exposed to small bar magnets, significantly changed their directional positions. The study suggests that dogs are able to recognize MF. Additional value of this research is that the data was collected by local high school students, which required collaboration with teachers and their parents. We think that this idea has great potential and can be developed at a global scale and to become a citizen-science project involving other high school pupils and their families.