What Colours Do Dogs See?
Are dogs colourblind? Believe it or not, there is no simple answer to this question. Although they are capable of seeing colours beyond grey, black and white, the number of other colours they see in comparison to what we see is very limited. Dogs mainly see yellows, blues and violets and struggle to see oranges, greens and reds. Instead they seem to appear somewhere in the spectrum of colours that sit between yellow and blue.
So what is the reason that dogs can only see certain colours and not others? In both our eyes and dogs eyes there are two kinds of photoreceptors found in the retina known as rods and cones. In our retina there are far more cones, whilst a dogs retina has more rods. They also have no fovea, which is what provides us with much sharper 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.
The type of colourblindness dogs suffer from is similar to that suffered by some humans in that it applies to a specific series of colours and is not exclusive to all colours outside of black, grey and white. It is most often called deuteranopia.
To attach the colourblind label to dogs is understandable, but not entirely the truth. A true explanation of their visual capabilities would state that, whereas they see in more colours than black, white and grey, they do not experience the full spectrum of colours that humans do.
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