New research has found canines from a wide variety of breeds align their body axis with Earth's magnetic field (MF) when relieving themselves.

The findings, published online Dec. 27 in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Zoology, explained 70 dogs out of 37 different were observed defecating 1,893 times and urinating 5,582 times over the course of a two-year period.

"After complete sampling, we sorted the data according to the geomagnetic conditions prevailing during the respective sampling periods ... Directional preferences of dogs under different MF conditions were analyzed and tested by means of circular statistics," the researchers wrote.

"Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis under calm MF conditions. This directional behavior was abolished under unstable MF ... The best predictor of the behavioral switch was the rate of change in declination, i.e., polar orientation of the MF," the paper said.

The researchers explained their work marked the first time a measurable, predictable behavioral reaction upon natural MF fluctuations could be unambiguously proven in a mammal, and high sensitivity to small changes in polarity, rather than in the intensity of the magnetic field, was identified as biologically meaningful.

"Our findings open new horizons in magnetoreception research," the team said. "Since the MF is calm in only about 20 percent of the daylight period, our findings might provide an explanation why many magnetoreception experiments were hardly replicable and why directional values of records in diverse observations are frequently compromised by scatter.

Put another way, out of all the analysis of pooping and peeing, scientists determined dogs prefer excreting when their bodies are aligned along the planet's north-south electromagnetic axis under calm magnetic field conditions.

Additionally, dogs also seemed to avoid east-west orientations, the study continued.

The north-south favoring behavior was not detectable under unstable conditions magnetic conditions, according to the paper -- which baffled the research team.

"It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it 'consciously,'" or whether what they do is instinctive, on an automatic level, wrote 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. Do dogs, the teams wondered, "feel better, more comfortable, or worse, less comfortable, in a certain direction?"

The report noted the research marks the first time canine magnetic sensitivity has been proven, though theat perceptual state has been previously determined in other species, including foxes, cattle and deer.

The researchers involved in the dog research wrote they had been "inspired by our hitherto observations in other animals."