We often assume that everyone else sees things the way we do. However, simple differences in perceptions, mindsets and emotions can cause people to see things from entirely different ways. Now imagine a world through the eyes of your pet dog. The vast difference in height, senses and thought processes would make them see things vastly differently from us, wouldn’t it?
A simple way to test this would be for you to just get down on all 4 limbs and view the world from a knee level height. Suddenly, everything around you looks so different. In addition, visual perspective due to proximity is not the only factor that makes dogs view the world in a different light. Dogs also have vastly different visual abilities with focus, detail, contrast and the like. These attributes are so distinct that they can vary greatly even between different breeds of dogs. For instance, the bloodhound is commonly known to have far less visual abilities than the greyhound.
What About Colour?
Color perception between canine and man also differ to quite some degree. The human eye can perceive a myriad of colours. Red, yellow, pink, green, purple, orange, blue and various other shades of these colours can easily be distinguished by human beings with normal colour vision. On the contrary to this, a dog’s visual perception can only see violet, indigo, blue, yellow and red. Yellow is seen far more than other colours through a dog’s eyes. Additionally, orange, yellow and green all look exactly the same to dogs. Strangely enough, the colour blue-green will actually appear as white to a dog but they can distinctly tell the difference between violet, indigo and blue. In a way, they are colour-blind, but it is not all grey!
Dogs Have Limited Vision Compared To Us
Similar to human beings in their old age, dogs tend to have a very poor ability to focus their vision on objects closer than 1 to 2 feet. In cases like this, a human being would normally just move backwards to get a better focus or simply put on some near-sighted glasses. However, what the dog would do would simply be to rely on its uncanny sense of touch and smell to examine the said object.
Dogs & Motion
Despite the various differences between the visual ability of man and dog, they still do share certain common traits. One of these is our visual ability concerning things in motion. Dog, like humans, do not see a stationary object as well as one that is moving at a moderate speed. For instance, a camouflaged bug hiding in the bushes will not be detected as easily by our eyes as will that same bug when it starts moving. Going by that same logic, it is also far easier to play tennis with a green ball on a green grass court than it is to find a stationary ball in that same location.