Cows are standing north-south.

Hello, everyone,

some news are just too … embarassing. It's so obvious, yet no-one has ever noticed.

Hidden in plain sight.

A new german scientific study says that cows are almost always standing in a north-south direction.

You can read about it here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7575459.stm

The bottoom line is, that this suggests a kind of until now unknown sense which has something to do with magnetism.

I was honestly sursprised as I read this, because … Well, it's one of the cases where I seriously ask myself : "Why didn't we notice this earlier ?"

Alrik

Mabe they just have a tendency to keep their heads out of the sun while grazing?

…OK, nevermind, they seem to have ruled that out. I have a hard time imagining evolutionary advantages of north-south grazing, though…

It's a bunch of crap. Where I grew up in Florida there were hundreds of cow pastures in the area. They stood all different ways, at least the ones down there did.

Originally Posted by JDR13
It's a bunch of crap. Where I grew up in Florida there were hundreds of cow pastures in the area. They stood all different ways, at least the ones down there did.

Thats only because they saw you coming!

Many animals have the magnetic sense: some types of bacteria, pidgeons, some types of fish… there even has been speculation that *all* animals actually have it, some stronger than others, but proof for the MS of several types of animals was discovered only recently. Sprinklings of magnetite in the skull bones, or something…

Or, as someone on Slashdot said: they looked at Google Earth pictures, which are mostly taken around noon (for best view and such), when the sun is… in the south, so it's only natural for cows to face north.

I would be interesting to see if they are facing magnetic north, since this would be fairly easy to determine since there are different degrees of declination depending on latitude. Still it has been shown that many creatures possess the ability to use magnetic lines of force for navigation. Personally I think we, humans, can do it to to some extent, it's just another one of the abilities we have sublimated due to our distancing ourselves from nature. In case you have not noticed, rural people seem to be much more in tune with nature than city folk. Geomancy and FungSheu, are examples of disciplines based on this ability.