the dog's eyes

Elsewhere, we’ve dealt with the myth that dogs age seven years for every human year, but there’s another popular misconception floating around. This is the belief that dogs only see in black and white.

While their color vision is somewhat limited and different than ours, they do see color, and a look at the world through a dog’s eyes can provide insight into how they perceive the world.

For dogs, their color vision is most similar to a human with red-green color blindness, although there are other differences. Dogs are less sensitive to variations in gray shades than humans are, as well as only about half as sensitive to changes in brightness.

Dogs also tend to be nearsighted to varying degrees. A poodle, for example, is estimated to have what we would call 20/75 vision in the US (about 6/24 elsewhere in the world).

However, dogs do outperform humans in some visual abilities. Dogs are much more sensitive to motion at a distance — anywhere from 10 to 20 times more sensitive than humans. Their vision is also well-suited to hunting during dawn and dusk.

-- via facebook