Brought to You in Pappyvision

Since we got Pappy, I've been interested in all the readings I have seen describing dog vision. My own sense of smell is so dulled I can't even conceive what Pappy is getting from all those phone poles, and though my hearing isn't as good I can't imagine that his is qualitatively different. But vision is a whole different ball of wax.

When I was little everyone used to say that dogs saw in black and white. More recent research indicates that their color vision is different than ours. Rather than being trichromatic, theirs is only dichromatic-- they see yellow-blue, but are red-green color blind. The picture above provides some idea of how all those brightly colored toys appear in Spectacular Dichromascope. In Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation", she talks about a problem at a farm where their pigs would mysteriously startle, and the cause was a hanging yellow raincoat fluttering in a breeze. Yellow really stands out like a searchlight in a dog's otherwise muted world.