What colors do dogs see?

Dogs, like most other mammals, have no color vision. Yesterday in 1909, it was established that dogs do not distinguish colors, but only respond to the degree of brightness, in other words, suffer from color blindness. Later reports appeared that a small percentage of hunting dogs seem to be able to distinguish some colors of the spectrum.

However, at the end of 1969, an explanation was published in a special consultation, from which it follows that dogs have achromatic vision and see the world only in black and white. In other words, they see a color image in gray tones. Only the intensity of the gray color will be different for them: yellow will appear light gray, orange and blue will appear slightly darker, and red, green and purple will appear dark gray, almost black. Dogs can very accurately distinguish squares or a circle and an ellipse with a half-axis ratio of 9: 8, but they cannot distinguish color squares from many white, gray and black ones.

The dog’s vision is generally very different from human vision. In them, like their ancestors – wolves and generally in twilight and nocturnal animals, the retina consists mainly of sticks. In contrast to humans, dogs do not have a yellow spot on the retina, which means that there is no majority of cones that perceive color. This explains why dogs do not distinguish colors.