Poop Science

Here is a “scientific” study that doesn’t pass the smell test.  It seems that twelve researchers at the Czech University of Life Science have determined that dogs generally prefer to defecate and urinate with a North-South orientation … see: CBS Story.  This seemed to me like junk science so, like any good critic I then went to the actual study itself.  If you want to be bored with pages upon pages of arm-waving statistical gobble-de-gook read: Frontiers in Zoology.

As a result of my reading, this seems a perfectly senseless scatological study … particularly since many observations of how dogs did their business were discarded because the earth was not in a “quiet” magnetic field (MF) period. OK, I had never heard of quiet MFs so I Goggled this term and found a study by the British Geological Survey that quantified the magnitude of polar shift that occurs apparently on a daily basis … go to Geomag Article to peruse this study yourself.

From this research I found that clearly these variations are de minimis (a little over 1/10^th of a degree).  Can any animal sense such a tiny variation in our magnetic flux?  I doubt it.  One has to wonder therefore if these rejected Czech study observations were also those in which these tested dogs pooped facing the wrong way … and if these rejected observations, if included, might invalidate this study’s specious conclusions.  (And does this process not begin to resemble how the “climate scientists” at East Anglia University in England dealt with any discrediting data on global warming?)

Therefore, to conclude this matter of dog pooping orientation, let me rightfully quote Hillary Clinton, “After all what difference does it make?”