WASHINGTON (AP) — Talk about animal magnetism, cows seem to have a built-in compass.
No bull: Somehow, cattle seem to know how to find north and south, say researchers who studied satellite photos of thousands of cows around the world.
Most cattle that were grazing or resting tended to align their bodies in a north-south direction, a team of German and Czech researchers reports in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
And the finding held true regardless of what continent the cattle were on, according to the study led by Hynek Burda and Sabine Begall of the faculty of biology at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.
“The magnetic field of the Earth has to be considered as a factor,” the scientists said.
This challenges scientists to find out why and how these animals align to the magnetic field, Begall said in an interview via e-mail.
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