Are dogs' eyes really that "blind"? What does the world look like in their eyes?

Dogs are indeed short-sighted

Dog owners must have encountered this situation, that is, when you are far away from your dog, the dog will stay in place. If you call him, he will run to you wagging his tail.

That’s because dogs are short-sighted, and things that are too far away are blurry. But a dog’s hearing is very sensitive. If you call him, the dog will be able to tell it’s you based on your voice!

Scientific research shows that dogs’ vision ranks among the average among all animals, and they cannot see objects that are close to themselves.

At the same time, because the lens of the dog's eyeball is large, it cannot adjust the sense of distance, and it cannot see distant objects clearly. He can clearly see objects twenty or thirty centimeters away from him.

If you don’t believe it, you can pay attention. If you feed your dog a snack and accidentally drop it on the ground, your dog will first reach the place where the snack fell, and then rely on his sensitive dog nose to smell around, and finally find the snack.

Dogs are still color blind

Dogs' eyes are undoubtedly different from ours. Naturally, the effect of dog observation is also very different from our observation effect.

Color vision may be due to special types of photoreceptor cells in the retina that are stimulated and send signals to the brain. Researchers found that humans have three types of cone cells, while dogs only have two types of cones.

Therefore, dogs cannot distinguish various colors like us. They can only distinguish different shades of yellow, blue, indigo and purple, but they cannot distinguish high-saturation colors such as red and green in the visible spectrum.

​The left side is a parrot in the eyes of a human and the right side is a parrot in the eyes of a dog

To make an analogy, when a dog sees red, he will think it is a dark color; when he looks at green grass, he will think it is a piece of white grass.

Therefore, dogs cannot actually tell the difference between traffic lights. Although they cannot tell the difference between traffic lights, dogs have very keen hearing. Dogs who have been trained can distinguish the sounds when the traffic lights change.

There is an old saying that if God closes the door for you, he will definitely open a window for you. Although dogs are color blind, their vision at night is surprisingly good.

This is because the dog's retina has fewer cone cells but more rod cells. Cones deal with light intensity and color vision, while rod cells deal with low-light vision. Abundant rod cells allow dogs to see clearly in dim light.

The forest at night as seen by a person on the left. The forest at night as seen by a dog on the right

So dogs have very good vision at night.