All dogs do it – which must be significant. They feel the magnetic field and adapt their pooping position to it.My son read this on the internet and told me about it in astonishment. I lost no time in diving into the digital WUR library. I found an article on it but was soon drawn to several other interesting titles. Then began an associative trail through all that knowledge. Surfing, swimming, bathing in knowledge. There are 42,370 journals, 15,476 of them online. One million publications per year! A veritable ocean of knowledge. One of the articles I read said that coal tits can smell when caterpillars are feeding on a fruit tree. The tree emits a signal substance, which the coal tit smells. And the common corncockle, a poisonous weed found in grain fields, stimulates the growth of the grain through allelopathy. How ingenious can it get? A feeling of helplessness comes over me: I want all this knowledge. I am an advisor, I work with farmers and I know farmers want this knowledge, to use it in their business. But it is impossible. I’ll never get to grips with this digital diarrhoea, this academic incontinence. I start to sweat, feel slightly drunk, get a heady sensation: the knowledge is there but how is a farmer to apply it all? Where is the farmer’s scientific counterpart? The scientist who thinks and makes decisions day by day in just as integrated a fashion as a farmer does? Or a manager, or the director of a small-to-medium enterprise, or a doctor? In 2014 let us align our desks and computers east-west and poop a bit less, saving our energy for thinking about how to apply all this knowledge!
Counterpart
Bob does it too! Incredible! When my dog poops his body turns to align north-south as if pulled by a magnet before he does his business.
