What does a dog see? Color/Black & White? 3 dimensions? My dog doesn’t watch TV - can she? Does she justhave good taste?
An article on the color-blindedness of dogs and cats:
Given proper light, what your dog sees is the world around him, other dogs, grass, Kong toys, etc.
BTW, dogs tends to use their eyes less than we do. It’s amazing how often a dog won’t bother to SEE something in plain sight when the wind is wrong.
county - I’m sorry if my first post sounded mean.
I was responding to other people, not you. From the first “Fun Facts” we read as tots, to TV shows about the mysteries of animal minds, the difference between dog sight and human sight is, I think, sensationalized.
As the link shows, if they are encouraged to, dogs can make out certain color differences and not others. They have to be encouraged because, for dogs, even the colors they can see aren’t particularly important. For instance, a dog will quickly learn the difference between a tracking harness and a merely decorative harness, but will probably never learn the difference between two 6" nylon leashes when the only difference is that one leash is bright yellow and one is black. If you get out the gear that goes with a certain activity, the dog will realize what you are about to do (agility, tracking, going somewhere to play, etc.) If you took all your gear, and dyed it different colors, the dog wouldn’t care.
What I meant about not using their eyes much - as an example, say you are in the field with a group of dogs, and all the owners are standing in a row. One dog owner calls her dog, the dog pops his head up, “looks” in the direction of the sound, and then is confused by the task of picking his owner from the row. Then, suddenly, the wind shifts, catching his owner’s scent, the dog rushes directly toward the owner. Without special training, the average dog is unlikely to learn how to tell the difference between two 5’2" white women using only his eyes.
If you have a dog, you might want to do some experiments.
IMHO, dogs learn to use their eyes more when they look through windows. Friends of my argue that it only seems that way because the front window makes it impossible for a dog to use its nose as well.
My dog’s vision is amazing. She can catch a rubber kong tossed in the dark. She can’t find the damn thing in a flowerbed, though, so I don’t think her sense of smell is very high on the dog scale.
Nasal hair. Lots and lots of nasal hair.
Dogs can see the images on a television set, but they’re not necessarily all that interested in them. The images, after all, have no scent, and they don’t interact with the dog. Also, dogs don’t seem to understand that the 3" image of the bear represents a much larger animal. (The concept of perspective in televised images seems lost on them.)
My dog only shows interest in images of bears and other large mammals (excepting dogs, for some reason. Nor does she show any interest in images of cats or people.) Sometimes, she will tilt her head and perk up her ears as if she hears something not audible to me. (I’ve theorized that perhaps these animals may be making sounds too low for the human ear to catch, like elephants and sub-sonic long distance communication.)