What kind of colors do dogs see? What is dogs’ color vision showing them about the world?

Last year Susan Garrett, a world-class agility instructor/competitor posted a video interview discussing what dogs actually see on an agility course – how color and contrast can help or hurt. We found it fascinating – but not particularly useful. We go to competitions in several different venues – all of them differ in lighting, equipment, and flooring. And there’s not much we can do about it.

Change in perspective

Since we’re dog nerds, we filed the information away in the back of our heads. Not particularly useful, but worth remembering.

Then we noticed that Tango, Fran’s 10-year-old Brussels Griffon might not be seeing things all that well. He’s fine. The veterinarian didn’t find anything particular going on with his eyes at this point, just some changes related to his age.

For our little training sessions we added another light to the area. And we try to make sure we’re not standing against the light so he can see better.  Tango flinches if we make sudden moves or a shadow passes over his eyes.

Trying an experiment

Then we remembered about the dogs color vision interview and decided to conduct a little experiment! One of Tango’s favorite games is putting little foam blocks into a bowl. The giant bucket of blocks has lots of colors, so we picked the same blocks in warm colors (yellow and orange) and cool colors (blue and green).

We tried each set individually. Then we put them all together to see if Tango would show a preference. Here’s the video:

Oh, well!

As far as we can tell – Tango didn’t care. He grabbed whatever block he noticed, regardless of color.

It wasn’t scientific, and it doesn’t prove anything. It also doesn’t invalidate the actual findings the experts talked about. But it was interesting and fun!