Another job for dogs?
Do dogs have a sense for electromagnetic fields?

SEATTLE - After at least two incidents involving faulty wires on light poles, one which caused the death of of a dog on Queen Anne Hill, Seattle City Light is changing the way light poles are inspected and adding more inspections across the city.

On Thanksgiving Day a dog stepped on a cover plate on a Queen Anne sidewalk and was fatally shocked. That plate had come in contact with a frayed wire which was not grounded. A second incident happened this week in West Seattle. That dog did not receive a shock, but acted strangely around the light pole, prompting the dog's owner to call it in. SCL says that pole had the same problem as the one on Queen Anne.

Is this how "seizure dogs" detect the coming of a brainstorm? More interestingly, it it how they read our emotions?

Physically speaking, it's unquestionably possible. A nearby alternating field does affect the flow of charge in any nervous system. Humans can learn to detect the field. After years of working on electronic stuff, I can feel a field when my hand is very close to the object, but not from a distance. Dogs apparently know how to use this sense without any training, and as usual their sense is vastly more efficient than ours.




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Later: An old memory. I learned about ground faults in light poles at an early age. Was playing with neighbor Randy. His parents had one of those ornamental yard lights, wired into the house's 110, with an electric eye that turned it on at dark. Randy decided to find out if the light would turn on when he covered the electric eye. He held the pole and reached up toward the photocell, then he stiffened and yelled, with both hands tight on the pole. He made me understand that the electricity was cramping his muscles, so I got behind him and tried to pull his hands off. Immediately I formed a parallel circuit to ground, and my hands were now helplessly vise-gripped on his wrists.

We both yelled, and luckily Randy's father came out of the house and knew exactly what to do. Using closed fists, he sharply knocked Randy's hands away from the pole, which took both of us out of the circuit.

Since this was 1959, America was ruled by common sense, not lawyers or the Homeland Security Gestapo. Nobody went to the hospital out of an abundance of caution, nobody evacuated the whole neighborhood out of an abundance of caution, nobody locked down the nearby school out of an abundance of caution, and nobody slammed Randy's dad in jail for using necessary force to save our foolish lives.

We simply learned an important lesson in a memorable way.
  ¶ 6:16 AM