Are Dogs Color Blind?
How Does Dog Vision Compare to Human Vision?
"Are dogs color blind?" you may wonder. The answer is a little bit complicated, but in a nutshell, canine vision is less distinct than human vision, and they are only able to see a fraction of the colors that we humans are able to see. Their peripheral vision is much better than human vision, though and in darkness, they have great visual advantages over humans.
Let's look at this question with a few examples, and so you can get an idea of how dogs see, we will compare the same picture of a rope toy to show both an approximation of what dog's vision is like and what a person with normal vision would see.
In the image above, Figure 1, you should see the basic color wheel that people with normal vision should be able to identify. It contains the three primary colors: red, blue and yellow, as well as the secondary mixes made from those three primary colors- purple (violet), orange and green. It also shows the tertiary mixes between the primary and secondary colors. Humans can usually see the twelve colors shown on the color wheel above with no problems. Colors are sharp and crisp, and it is easy to see where one color stops and another one in the wheel begins. The toy shown, a basic rope toy, is in full color, showing yellow, white, blues, and bits of orange.
In Figure 2, just above, we have colorized the same rope toy to approximate what a dog sees. Canine vision is less detailed than human vision, and they see less of the color spectrum than we do.
Some people think that dogs see in black and white, but this is not true. They do see colors, but not nearly as much as people see.
Dogs are actually red-green color blind, which is a trait shared with some humans. Red-green blindness is pretty rare, but can be found in about four percent of the male population.
So the answer to the question, Are Dogs Color Blind? is yes, but they are only partially color blind. They do have a form of color blindness that prevents them seeing colors that are in the red-green spectrum, but they are not completely color blind.
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