Dogs' Pooping Position Aligns with Earth's Magnetic Field

I thought this must be an April Fool, but the date is over a year ago. My question is, what prompted anyone to study this?

Dogs' Pooping Position Aligns with Earth's Magnetic Field

Quote :

But dogs don’t head north-to south-all the time. Earth’s magnetic field in any particular location varies slightly during the 24-hour rotation of the planet. But the chance they chose a north-south alignment was highest when Earth’s magnetic field was particularly calm. That tends to be only about 20 percent of the time, and usually at night.

The study was Czech.

And it's not just dogs.

Quote :

Hynek Burda is a sensory biologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Praha. He has been observing for many years that animals have a tendency to align their bodies north to south when they are relaxing. This means their heads might point either south or north, as opposed to east or west. His laboratory has seen this in animals such as as cows and deer.

So, either generally north or generally south (50% of the circle .... or maybe 60-70% if you include "approximate").  That's pretty sterling evidence, yup.... for randomness.

The study itself is even more laughably shoddy science.  Read it and weep (with laughter).
http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/pdf/1742-9994-10-80.pdf

Quote :

Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North–South axis under calm MF [magnetic field] conditions. This directional behavior was abolished under unstable MF.

Since the MF is calm in only about 20% of the daylight period, our findings might provide an explanation why many magnetoreception experiments were hardly replicable and why directional values of records in diverse observations are frequently compromised by scatter.

So.... to summarize:  20% of the time dogs excrete in 70% of a circle (check the graphs, I'm being generous). The reason all previous studies decided it was random was we had a conclusion in mind already.

The spin of the Earth's inner magnetic core MAY be changing... or MAY have just changed... or MAYBE doesn't change at all.  Scientists aren't sure.

It might be a 70-year cycle.  Or a 20-30-year cycle.  Or a 6-year cycle.  Scientists aren't sure.

Does this have anything to do with the periodic reversal of the Earth's poles?  That happens every 200,000 to 300,000 years, though it's been 780,000 years since the last reversal.  Scientists aren't sure.

And the dogs are totally confused.