A dogs inability to see colours beyond black and white is in fact purely a fallacy. It is a longstanding myth that dogs are colourblind and whereas to some extent this is true, this is not the full picture. Dogs might not see all the colours of the rainbow the way we do, but neither are they limited to black, white and grey. The colours they are able to focus on tend to be shades of violet, blue and yellow. Dogs find difficulty seeing other more vibrant colours like oranges, greens and reds.
Both dogs eyes and our eyes contain something called rods and cones. These are two kinds of photoreceptors in the retina. Our retinas contain a much higher number of cones while dogs retinas have a greater number of rods. The fovea, which is responsible for enhancing and sharpening vision in human eyes, is not present in dogs eyes, resulting in less detailed vision.
These differences are responsible for giving dogs better vision at night and enabling them to track movement better, but as a result they are not able to see as many colours as we can. Objects and shapes don't appear in as great detail.
Determining what colours dogs are able to see has been a subject of scientific experiment for over 100 years. During the late 18th Century, tests were performed to determine this but only proved that being unable to see colours did not have a vital impact in the life of a dog.
It was another 90 years before further tests were carried out to determine whether dogs are colourblind or not. In 1989 the three researchers Neitz, Geist and Jacobs carried out a number of tests on domestic dogs and were able to determine the following. 1 Dogs have two kinds of colour receptors in their eyes and so are dichromatic. 2 In dog's colour receptors, one peaks for the blue to violet range and the other for the yellow to green range. In 1993 and 1995 further research was carried out that again supported these findings.
Dogs in fact suffer from a form of green colour blindness similar to human red-green colour blindness. This particular illness is more commonly referred to as deuteranopia.
Though we talk about dogs being 'colourblind', it does not mean that they cannot see any kind of colour at all. Rather it proposes they are not able to see the same range of colours as we can. Though dogs are capable of seeing a variety of colours, they also suffer from a type of colourblindness as well.
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Posted under Dogs
This post was written by Martin Davis on January 31, 2010
