Animal Magnetism = Clean Energy

According to Yahoo News, this may be why my garden hasn't had any animal pests; those huge powerlines in the easement behind the house is screwing them up:

High-voltage power lines mess with animal magnetism. Researchers, who reported last year that most cows and deer tend to orient themselves in a north-south alignment, have now found that power lines can disorient the animals.

When the power lines run east-west, that's the way grazing cattle tend to line up, researchers led by Hynek Burda and Sabine Begall of the faculty of biology at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They also found that cows and deer grazing under northeast-southwest or northwest-southeast power lines faced in random directions.

The research team studied cows and deer using satellite and aerial images.

In their report last August, Burda and colleagues suggested the north-south orientation was in response to the Earth's magnetic field.

The new study adds weight to the animals responding to magnetic effects, since power lines also produce a magnetic field. And the effect was most noticeable close to the power lines, declining as the magnetic field of the electric lines was reduced by distance.

Wind and weather can also affect which ways cows choose to face, but without such factors about two-thirds of them tended to align north-south when away from power lines.

The Earth's magnetic field is thought to be a factor in how birds navigate, and other animals also are believed to respond to it.

My garden runs east-west, as do the giant power lines. Rabbits hop around in my garden all the time, but don't touch my vegetables in any appreciable manner. They usually hang out with me when I am weeding and eat the weeds. They are completely happy and companionable. It could be that the power lines have created demented rabbits? I will take it.

I sent this article to my husband, and he had another wild idea. Leave it to the engineer.

I see a buttered cat array topper in this story.

(This was a psuedo science idea that tickled me in Omni Magazine in the 80s. The theory goes, all cats land on their feet. Buttered bread always lands butter side down. If you strap buttered toast to the backs of cats butter side up and drop them, they will not land but instead hover and rotate, and we can harness the power they expend like turbines. Back to the husband:

I'd call it the Lazy Susan Cow Grid. Put a bunch of cows on giant lazy susans under power lines that run both north-south and east west. Alternate the power to
the two sets of lines, causing the cows to turn to realign, causing the
lazy susans to turn, powering generators, which power the overhead
lines. I'd also put in a Dizzy Cow Station next door, where the cows
would go after an hour on the grid. That would just contain the lazy
susans with no overhead lines, where the dizzy cows would keep spinning
in circles for about an hour until their brains readjust.

Perhaps he has something there. We should go for some grant money. That guy is full of ideas.