Can Dog See Colors Just As We Do?

by Ransi Plick Website Owner

A life in ‘black and white’, without those fluorescent colors is highly unimaginable for and by the human beings. This is even so for the animals. Till now, the world was obsessed with the belief that their pets such as dogs and cats are totally colorblind. But in contrast to this, scientists and researchers have come out with the experimental proofs that dogs could also view a wide range of colors with their eyes, and their vision is not limited to blacks and whites.

Obviously, the range of vision in dogs is not comparable to humans in terms of colors but just as normal human eyes could differentiate between two distinct colored objects, similarly the dogs too have the same capability.

Can Dogs View All The Colors?

If you talk about the vision of dogs, their natural ability to distinguish between shades is highly limited. The color field of dogs consists mainly of shades ranging from violets, blue and yellow. Every other color that humans could decipher well, would lie in the same range for the dogs. For example, the red, green and orange spectrum of the human would probably not be understood by the dogs and would lie somewhere in between the blue and yellow spectrum for them.

The reason for this is that similar to the humans, dogs eyes too contain the rods and cone cells, which are responsible for providing vision and distinguish objects based on their color, shape and size. While the eyes of human consist more of cone cells, dogs consist of more rods and they also lack fovea. Fovea is a small part of the eyes that consist of closely packed cone cells.

Due to this differentiation between the eyes of dogs and humans, the human could see a lot more colors as compared to the canines they rear, while the color viewing capability of dogs may be limited. Their vision could also be considered limited while viewing shapes of objects as they could not find accurate details for the same. But this does not make the humans superior, as presence of more of rod cells denote an extra vision in their eyes. Dogs have an exceptional night vision and this is even helpful in tracking movements of objects, even when it a slight one.

Does Limited Color Tracking Affect Dogs?

Absolutely not! Dogs need not note every distinct color that is recognized by the eyes of humans. Though a red ball if lying on green grass could not be deciphered distinct and would appear yellow on yellow, dogs could very accurately pick the ball you throw. How? Well, instead of distinguishing the color of objects, the eyes of dogs do track their movements and based on this, they could bring back a thrown ball.

Many of the pet owners who follow proper pet grooming tips may be unaware of the fact. They tend to mix some kind of food coloring such as red or orange in the dog kibbles they prepare and hope that the dogs would find this interesting to eat. This probably would not turn out to be an effective measure, as red or orange colored cookies and other food items would only appear to be yellow in the eyes. Similarly, the fluorescent clothes that you bring for your dogs are highly undistinguished and could be limited to a particular spectrum.

Colors could play a big role for humans, but for pets they hardly make any difference. Therefore, it is not important for a dog to identify every color. Instead, the owners should try to maintain proper eye hygiene for their pets, so that their vision remains superb, especially at night and their eyes are not subjected to any disorders.