I encourage everyone to read the paper linked in the article. They've gone through surprising amounts of effort to justify their conclusion, and it includes some surprisingly nice graphs of the 'alignment during defecation' of dogs.
I sincerely hope their works will be recognised by the (Ig)-nobel committee.
I did not understand the 3 bins of 0%, 1%, 2% etc. declination. Does anyone have a simple explanation for that?
Also, the point about the sun is good -- maybe they just don't want sun in their eyes. Clearly the very dedicated and obsessed researcher needs to do a similar study but indoors. Can you imagine who has the personal passion to do this data collection?
I don't have a particularly good explanation for those specific choices, but I did notice that they resulted in somewhat similar sample sizes across all three bins, so it might just have been that.
I sincerely hope their works will be recognised by the (Ig)-nobel committee.