Doggyvision
How Dogs See
By Wendy Darr
Copyright 2014 Wendy Darr
Smashwords Edition
Contents
Why does my dog like to watch the sun set?
What is color?
How do we know what dogs see?
Do dogs think in colors, or smells?
Sharing the same rainbow
Sources
Why does my dog like to watch the sun set?
I love sharing the world with my dogs, watching them explore it, and seeing it
through their eyes. When your dog smiles, you smile, everybody around you
smiles, and before you know it, it’s a great day. One of my dogs likes to sit in the
grass and watch the sun set. I wondered what it looks like to him, so I decided to
find out.
He isn’t just watching the light and colors change. When you’re under a real
sunset, you can turn all the way around and see your whole wide world - you can
smell green things growing, and something tasty cooking somewhere. You can
hear birds, and frogs, and other people, and other dogs. Some nights, sunset is
Doggy News Hour, when all the dogs in the neighborhood seem to have a story to
tell. Sometimes my dog just listens. Other times he has to get the last bark.
My dog Odin is in the middle, the Akita-German Shepherd. He looks scary, but he
really is not; he’s just a huggable teddy bear.
One day my dog and I went for a walk, and I could see deer in the tall grass. My
dog would chase deer if I let him, but I won’t let him because the deer have lived
in our woods for years, and their babies are cute. So, when he couldn’t see brown
deer in green grass, I was surprised. He could smell them, and he knew they were
there, but since they didn’t move, he couldn’t see them.
Dogs do not see as many colors as we do. That’s because we use our sense of sight
more than any of the other senses - smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Dogs have all
of the same senses, but they use their sense of SMELL more than any of the others.
They can smell hundreds of times better than we can, but we’ll come back to that.
As for TASTE, I haven’t figured that out yet, and they won’t explain it to me.
Sometimes they just act like dogs, and eat whatever they find on the ground, no
matter how many times I tell them that duck poop is not a food group.
What is color?
When humans see a rainbow, we see the colors we call red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, and purple. Rainbows are a reflection of the sun, and raindrops act as a mirror
and a prism at the same time, reflecting the light and bending it. The scientist Isaac
Newton did experiments to understand the nature of color. He bent white light by
shining it through a prism. The light separated into the colors of the rainbow, and
then he bent it again, through another prism, and brought the colors back together
into white light.
Isaac Newton is the same scientist who discovered gravity. His life’s work was to
make sense of the universe, so when he chose the colors for his color wheel, he
chose 7 colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and purple - to match the 7
notes of the musical scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, and la. He did that because of an
ancient idea that there could be a relationship between colors, musical notes, days
of the week, and the planets.
Newton was right about a lot of things, like gravity and calculus - he also made
improvements to early telescopes - but his pattern of sevens didn’t work out (7 is
still a very cool number; if you like patterns, and want to see numbers do fun
things, read about Fibonacci numbers). Since Newton’s time, we’ve found more
than 7 planets. Our musical scale is really 8 notes, although “do” is both the end of
one scale, and the beginning of the next. Einstein discovered relativity, explaining
how gravity acts in space. Although we don’t use the color indigo (the dark blue of
blue jeans) as a primary color or a secondary color in the color wheel any more, we
do still use color wheels to represent and agree on colors. Using different
combinations of red, green and blue, computers can make millions, even trillions
of colors.
Most humans see colors in the ranges of red, green, and blue. Not all people can
tell red from green, and a very few people see extra purples. Scientific tests with
dogs have found that they see yellow and blue, but not red. Birds, bees and reptiles
see more purple than we can imagine, in the ultraviolet range. Some birds have
markings that other birds can see, but humans can’t see the same markings without
special light. Some flowers have target zones visible to bees, but not to humans.
We try to imagine this, because, like Isaac Newton, we want to make sense of the
world.
How do we know what dogs see?
How did scientists know what colors the dogs could see? A good scientific test is
carefully planned. Notes are taken at every step. The steps must be clear enough to
be used over and over, by other people, to prove that the results are always the
same.
The tests for color vision in dogs used 3 colored lights, and followed these steps:
1. Show 2 lights of the same color, and 1 light of a different color
2. Teach the dog to choose the light that is different
3. Give the dog a reward for the correct choice (the researchers used beef and
cheese biscuits).
The dogs did very well with yellows and blues, but had a hard time with red. The
scientists concluded that dogs cannot see red.
This is how I think those experiments would have looked if they’d used my dogs,
and if me, my mom and dad and sisters and brother were the scientists.
I wanted to try this experiment, so I got some colored cups in red, yellow, green,
and blue. The cups all have to be exactly the same shape (I found some in the baby
food section). Use a ping-pong sized ball, and some healthy treats for rewards.
Here’s my test:
1. Start with 2 yellow cups and 1 blue cup
2. Show your dog the ball, and then place it under the blue cup
3. Move the cups around
4. If your dog can find the ball, give her or him the reward (and a hug)
Can your dog tell the blue cup from the yellow cups, after you’ve moved them
around? Be careful not to give clues with your eyes or hands. What if you use 2
blue cups and 1 yellow cup? What about 2 blue cups and a 1 green cup? What
happens when you use a red cup? Maybe you can think of an even better test.
Remember to always treat your dog with kindness and respect.
The dog color vision experiment with the colored lights is how we know what we
THINK we know about how dogs see colors. Dogs also watch our body language when you feel sad, your body is droopy, and your dog sees that. When you are
happy and smiling, your dog sees that and smiles (…then you smile, and
everybody around you smiles, and before you know it, it’s a great day, right? I
know, we already went over that). Dogs’ eyes also let in more light, so they can see
better at night than humans do. Dogs with long noses have a wider field of vision;
their eyes are set more to the side, so they can see what’s beside them better than
we can (and better than dogs with short noses, whose eyes are on the front of their
faces, like cats). Most of all, dogs can see movement, like wagging tails, flapping
wings, or jumping bunnies from a much greater distance than we can. Have you
ever been at the park with your dog and noticed how quickly they spot all the other
dogs?
Do dogs think in colors, or smells?
Dogs can also SMELL all the dogs in the park, and the people, and a lot of things
we can’t smell, because DOG NOSES ARE AMAZING. When you are
sightseeing, your dog is smellseeing. Inside their nose is a maze of curlicues to
collect and analyze scents. The sides of their noses allow air OUT, to swirl around
and bring more smells IN.
As much as dogs enjoy looking out the window of a house or a car, when you open
that window, it becomes Smellavision. That’s why dogs riding in cars look so
happy. What you see through the window may be interesting, but it’s not as
colorful to your dog as it is to you. You dog can smell hundreds of different things,
and just like when you stand under a real sunset, your dog can smell their whole
wide world.
Sharing the same rainbow
Now when I look at the world with my dogs, I think I see more because of them.
When you’re sharing a sunset or rainbow with your dog, and you’re admiring the
colors, your dog may seem more interested in smells in the grass or sounds in the
air, and that’s okay. We are so different, but aren’t we great together?
The End
Thank you for reading this book! If you enjoyed it, please tell a friend.
The author is a software engineer and former Seattle radio announcer living in the
Cascade foothills east of Seattle with 3 humans, 1 horse, 2 dogs, 3 cats, and a
turtle.
On the cover: our Samoyed, Casper. He was rescued from a puppy mill, where he
lived in a small wire cage, inside a large metal container. He had no toys, and no
name, and was identified by the two notches in his ear. We got to love and spoil
him until he was almost 11.
Sources:
Jay Nietz, Timothy Geist, and Gerald H. Jacobs:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2487095
Published on October 20, 2008 by Stanley Coren, Ph.D., F.R.S.C. in Canine
Corner: www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/200810/can-dogs-seecolors
“Animals Make Us Human” by Temple Grandin
“Inside of a Dog” by Alexandra Horowitz
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-sense-of-smell.html