Story and video here. Looks like you can teach an old dog new tricks after all, namely to drive a car.
I looked this up after seeing it on BBC. Does New Zealand have a December Fool’s Day by any chance?
Which side of the road do they drive on?
And what about traffic lights? Dogs are color blind.
Actually, they aren’t. They can see color, but it’s not as intense as we see it (since sight is, for them, secondary to their sense of smell). Their vision is just desaturated a bit.
Blackjack said he knew how to drive. But dogs lie. Maybe he could drive an automatic, but he couldn’t work the stick at all.
Gary Larson must be thrilled.
Coming soon after the North Korean unicorn lair story, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between parody and reality.
I want to get that dog to drive for me. He can drive me down the interstate while I stick my head out of the passenger window.
Aw! How cool!
The headline in the Toronto Star about this said, “Next Up, Parallel Barking”. 
And dogs already have licenses. Getting insurance will be a bitch, though.
It is not a matter of intensity or saturation, it is a matter of what you can discriminate. Dogs are dichromats while humans are trichromats. With respect to color, this means that a dog is like a fairly severely color-blind person, and is not able to discriminate certain colors that a normal human being can.
The dog’s sense of smell being more important to them is also not a matter of the intensity of the experience, and has relatively little to do with the receptors. Humans devote a LOT of their available brainpower to analyzing the information that sight makes available, getting a lot out of it. We don’t devote a lot of brainpower to smell. Dogs devote a lot less brainpower to sight, and relatively more to smell, so they can discriminate more by smell than we can, even though what their noses are capable of taking in probably isn’t much different.
I am pretty sure dogs cant be taught to drive, however. Although they can actually be pretty good with a stick, how are they going to reach the pedals?!
Also, they tend to tailgate - even to self-tailgate.
I think this would make a good Doper project. Let’s all get drunk, then see whose dog drives the best.
It took me awhile to catch on that a “rescue dog” was a dog that had been rescued. At first I thought it was doing the rescuing itself and was now expected to drive the victim to the hospital!
From the video I’ve seen, it looks like they’re making modifications to the vehicle that allow this. But I won’t be satisfied until I see a chihuahua behind the wheel.
Merged two threads on the same story.
BBC just showed an update. One dog, name of Monty, apparently today successfully drove unassisted for the first time. There was video.