• Question: why are dogs colour blind?

    Asked by anon-15423 to Anna, Craig, Richard, Sue on 24 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Richard Case

      Richard Case answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      I’ve got no idea… but I feel sorry for them as I’d hate not to be able to see any colours like in a rainbow….

      No wonder they always get run over… they can’t tell what colour the traffic lights are 🙂

      But they make up for this with a great sense of smell… thats why they are used by the police to catch criminals and to find drugs or money. If you want to follow a police dog on twitter.. @WMPcsidogsmithy

      They would also make great fingerprint experts as fingerprints are usually shown as black and white 🙂

    • Photo: Anna Williams

      Anna Williams answered on 24 Jun 2011:

      Hi 10mgsok,
      Even though I have a dog myself, I wasn’t sure of the answer to this. I googled it, and came up with this site:
      http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_dogs_colorblind

      This says that dogs are not totally colour blind, but have fewer colour receptors (cones) in their retina than we do. Whereas we see three main primary colours, red, blue and yellow, apparently they only see blue and yellow, so when they look at the world, everythign they see is a shade or mixture of these colours. I have noticed with my own dog that he doesn’t seem to see things very easily unless they are moving. For example, if I ask him to fetch his favourite toy, and it is lying on the carpet, he’s not sure where it is until he’s very close to it, but if I move it with my hand or foot, he sees it immediately!
      Here is a nice experiment you can do with your own dog (or a friend’s, if you don’t have one):
      http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/project1333_150.html

      As Richard said, dogs do make up for their relative lack of accurate eyesight with their extremely acute sense of smell. This is something I want to do some more research into – dogs are very good at sniffing out buried bodies, or people who have died in disasters and are hidden under the rubble. No body really knows how they do it so well, so I want to do some experiments to work out when they are best at doing it, and maybe one day have a sniffer dog training centre!

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