My Corgi will bark at barking dogs or howling animals on TV.
Oh, I forgot - when there’s golf on TV, or we’re playing a golf video game, Eddles (the fat orange cat) tries to get the ball. Very distracting.
The editing seems to be the key for my pets (dogs and cat). If the shot is a steady look at an animal, they pay attention. When it’s a bunch of different shots stitched together in rapid succession, they don’t follow it.
At a particular point about 1/3 of the way thru the MASH theme music, my mothers’ sheltie will sit up and howl.
Seems to be entirely based on the sound; she will do this even if she was dozing and not even looking at the screen when it comes on.
My dog growls and barks and jumps up at the screen if there’s another dog on, until we change it / ignore her / give her a toy to play with.
My pug normally pays no attention whatsoever to the TV. After we got high-def service, however, we noticed that at times she would stare at the screen for some HDTV programs, in particular shows on Discovery HD about underwater life. She seemed to stare at the fish swimming by very intently.
For the record, my TV is a rear-projection model, not a plasma or LCD flat-panel.
My dod would walk around the TV set, if she heard a bark on the TV show. Never paid much attention to the pictures, but was curious about the sound. This to me, implies some reasoning ability-she obviously knew that some barks coming from a wooden box must have something behind it!
That’s a good point. I’ve seen one of my dogs look at the TV once. She looked like she was stoned, staring wide-eyed at a extended shot on Animal Planet (I’ve forgotten what animals were on). Then it cut to commercial and she lost interest.
Good thing your puggy doesn’t react like this.
Dogs see differently than we do, obviously, if you’ve ever looked at their choices in a mate. The closest that men can simulate dog vision happens late at night in dark bars after consuming large quantities of beer.
More seriously, dogs have a superior sensitivity to motion, which means that they see television as a serious of flickering images. This is better explained here.
You can see movement artifacts in commercials at movie theaters. The commercials are usually shot on video and then converted to film, so the motion isn’t natural. If you’re not aware of it, you may not pick it up, but once you are aware, it will bother you forever. Be warned.
If you were to watch a movie at half speed, it would become obvious that it’s a series of still photos.
Dogs would likely see motion on television the same way, which is another reason, in addition to the smell factor, that they are not processing it the same as we do.
Plus, they have less tolerance for stupid shows.
As was just noted dogs see tv as a series of flickering images most likely. That said most of my dogs totally ignored it but one dog (this goes way back) would watch the TV intently when Miss Piggy was on. Any other time and it was like it wasn’t there. my current dog will take some notice if a dog is on TV and watch a bit with mild interest and otherwise ignore it.
For our cats we bought a kitty video which was nothing more than someone filming a fish tank or box of mice and such. At first the cats totally ignored it and we thought it was wasted money. Then it occurred to me cats as very near sighted so I put a chair right in front of the TV and plopped the cats on it. They were mesmerized and loved it. They’d paw at the screen and run around behind the TV when something swam off the edge of the screen to go looking for it. Dogs are less nearsighted than cats but this may also have something to do with it.
I have also noticed most dogs totally ignore reflections in a mirror. They see stuff in the mirror (i.e. if they see something behind them in the mirror that interests them they’ll turn around to look) but mostly are totally uninterested. My cats too…couldn’t care less. I did know one particularly stupid dog however who would bark at itself in the mirror.
And it should be noted that both cats and dogs are interested in motion in general, as anyone who has had a cat chase string will know. When I was a kid, our cat would sometimes get on top of the TV and bat at various images.
While this is true (I had a cat that enjoyed football in the way described above), observing my cats behavior, they can clearly distinguish between “catlike” and “other moving quadruped” on the TV. They take an interest in those things catlike on the tv – they watch intently and try to “find” the cat as it moves offscreen – but ignore the movements of hoofed mammals and other moving objects.