Dogs across a variety of breeds align their body axis with the Earth's magnetic field when relieving themselves, researchers have revealed.
For the study, 70 dogs out of 37 different breeds - beagles and dachshunds and Yorkshire terriers-were observed going number two 1,893 times and number one 5,582 times over the course of a two-year period.
The researchers found that the dogs preferred to excrete when their body was aligned along the north-south axis under calm magnetic field conditions.
According to the study, behavior did not occur under unstable conditions, and why it happens at all is also a mystery.
"It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it 'consciously' or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they 'feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable' ina certain direction)," Fox News quoted researchers from the Department of Game Management and Wildlife Biology at the Czech University of Life Sciences in the Czech Republic and the zoology department at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, as writing.
"Our analysis of the raw data indicates that dogs not only prefer N-S direction, but at the same time they also avoid E-W direction," they wrote.
The study has been published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.