Is it true that dogs are color blind?
Often, when thinking about how animals see the world, a person relies on his own perception of the world.
There is no longer any doubt that dogs perceive it differently than people, but their owners still cannot clearly say what the difference is.
There is still a misconception that their pets are so limited in colors that they can only distinguish black, gray and white, and that their fine sense of smell replaces the variety of colors for them. However, according to recent studies, this opinion is still wrong.
It is a fact that dogs distinguish shades of gray better than humans, but their vision is not limited to them. However, they may indeed have difficulties with some colors.
Their color field consists of black, white, gray, as well as yellow and blue-violet, but red will seem more like dark brown to them, and they will perceive green and orange as shades of yellow. People also have a similar defect, but less often: colorblind people have problems trying to distinguish between red and green shades.
The fact is that the retina of a dog's eye has only two types of cells responsible for color perception - two-color cones and rods. For humans, the presence of three types is typical: rods, ganglia, and three types of cones.
Nevertheless, nature compensated for this deficiency in dogs. As is known, they see much better than humans in the dark, which is influenced by the presence of two additional ones in addition to the layer of the above-mentioned rods and cones on the retina. But, as already mentioned, their color spectrum is already human.
However, is it correct to call this congenital color blindness? Some scientists express the opinion that not everything is so clear: they consider color vision to be a concept more psychological than physiological.
The brain colors the picture visible to the eye, relying on the existing visual experience. It is quite possible that dogs do not have such a concept as "color" at all, since they do not consider it to be decisive in understanding the world around them.
So some people argue that it is not entirely correct to look at their worldview from a human point of view and attribute human defects to it.
