Do cows know which way is north?

According to a team of German and Czech researchers the answer is yes. In their report, published in the August 2008 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they detail how they studied over 8,500 satellite images from Google Earth. The images contained cattle and deer herds. Both the cattle and deer tended to face either magnetic north or south. Between 60 and 70 percent of cattle were oriented north-south.

Its long been known that birds and some insects can sense the earth’s magnetic fields. This is the first time that scientist have seen this ability in mammals. Well, except for a human holding a compass.