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Are dogs really color blind?

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic (by 3 people)   Your rating: 1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic

Ranked #1830 in Animals, #38154 overall

Rated G. (Control what you see)

Does our dog know my shirt is pink?

 

As a mother I get asked a lot of questions every day, most of which I have no solid answer for.

Yesterday, when my daughter asked me this question, I had a squidoo-ers lightbulb moment.
You see, coming up with creative squidoo lenses is the hardest part of squidoo-ing for me. Thus, my lightbulb moment.

Welcome to my first in a potentially long series of "Mom, do you know?" lenses.

Let the learning begin 

Basic Vision and Color Blindness

We all grow up being told that dogs cannot see color. Is it true? Should we believe everything we are told? Let's learn together and see.

To understand best, let's review a very basic summary of how vision works.

When light enters your eye, it passes through the cornea, aqueous humor, lens
and vitreous humor. It's ultimate destination is your retina.
The retina is the light sensing structure of the eye The retina contains two types of cells, the rods and cones.
Rods handle vision in low light, cones hand color vision and detail. Cones are the one we are interested in (if we want to learn the answer to our ultimate question).

Humans have three cones which contain color-responsive chemicals (cone pigments). The three kinds of cone pigments are red-sensitive, green sensitive and blue sensitive.
Each cone contains one of these pigments so that humans can see almost any gradation of color.

Color blindness in humans occurs when one of the cones (either red or green) are missing or are not functioning properly. Called red-green colorblindness.

Why this is important?
Dogs only have two cones (humans have three), so a dog's ability to see is comparable to a human with red-green colorblindness.

The answer then? I must conclude that while dogs see more than just black, white or grey, in a technical sense, dogs are colorblind.

credit to: Mark Plonsky, PhD
How Vision Works by Carl Bianco, MD

Doggy, doggy, what do you see? 

Again, this credit goes to Mark Plonsky PhD. In his article he gives his estimate of the color range your dog probably sees.

More Information 

Can Dogs See Color?
By: Dave the Dogman
How Dogs See Color
By: Dana K. Vaughan, Ph.D., Dept. of Biology, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

So, what is the answer mom?! 

No, honey, the dog most likely cannot tell that your shirt is pink.

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New Guestbook 

richgerman

yeah thats true the dogs has almost the same vision with human. soo thanks for informing us and for everyone info here! keep it up!

just a survey if who does one using the law of attraction in their daily life? i hope you can drop some comment on my lens about this! thanks and 5 stars for you!

Posted July 02, 2008

_HD_brittani_

Awesome Lens! I like the picture, I have always thought dogs were color blind until I heard otherwise from my vet. I never thought that the dogs could see like they do in the picture. By the way, Thanks for commenting and favoriting my lens!

Posted June 17, 2008

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titanium_knights

About titanium_knights

Started on squidoo to promote our titanium ring ebay store - and now I am hooked.
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