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And on that farm the cows face north

They could be the world’s smelliest magnets. Grazing cows tend to face the North and South Poles, claims a new study of 308 herds made using Google Earth satellite photos.

The ungulate’s orientation suggests that they, like migratory birds, sea turtles and monarch butterflies, tune into Earth’s magnetic fields, says Hynek Burda, a biologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

Even the greenest of cowboys knows that cattle in a herd tend to align themselves in the same general direction, and researchers have argued that’s because the animals are basking in the sun or clumping together to stay warm. Yet in the 10,000 years since humans domesticated cattle, their geomagnetic orientation has gone unnoticed, or at least unrecorded, Berda says.