canine watching...

good morning to each and all of you who are still awake and are reading this post,this is a late post shared by one of paws' yahoo group member and this topic is very interesting..so I won't take much of your time,hope you'll be educated and amazed by this post.


DOES YOUR DOG WATCH TV?

By Melissa Breyer, Senior Editor, Healthy & Green Living

Almost everyone I know with a dog claims that their pooch watches television. I believe them, but I also know that dogs’ eyesight is very different form ours, so what exactly does “watching TV” mean for a dog?

Pet experts say that a lot of dogs will actually follow the movement of objects on the screen–and may even bark. However a dog doesn’t see the screen the same way we do. Although dogs don’t see exclusively in black and white (as many people think), they don’t have the same range of color that humans do.

There are fewer cones (color vision cells) in a dog’s eye than in a human’s eye. Yet, dogs have many more rods (light and motion detectors) than we do, so although they see a limited spectrum, they can see better at night. Dogs can also see flickering light better than we can, which means they might even be able to see individual frames in a television sequence where we would see a continuous scene.

Because of the anatomy of a dog’s eyes, the dog cannot tell what an object on the screen actually is. But the movement and shapes he is able to see can be pretty intriguing! The sounds emitted from the television are attention-grabbers as well. Because dogs can pinpoint the directional origin of sounds they hear, the TV can be quite aurally entertaining.

Although experts say that a dog’s acute hearing can differentiate between a television sound and a live sound, many a dog still seem to be fairly well entertained by the sounds coming from the set. Now if only they had TVs that could emit the smell of a fire hydrant or BBQ–I bet we’d find more dogs watching TV–or at least licking the set…