[a_bonobo]

>they've convincingly excluded obvious things like that they're actually aligning with the sun.

I don't know - for my taste, to exclude alignment to the sun they would have had to keep the dogs in a closed environment with an artificial light source. After all, even with clouds present you know where the sun is (and you can still get sunburned etc.)

It also rings my "skeptical" alarm bells when they cite the "original" evidence that cattle aligns along the N-S axis, but they don't cite the paper that fails to replicate the "original" findings in cattle: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00359-011-0628-7

[sp332]

They've excluded it by showing that dogs line up with local magnetic fields even when the sun is in various positions.

[herbig]

Yeah, but does the sun's position have any effect on the magnetic field?