Are dogs colourblind? Believe it or not, there is no simple answer to this question. Although they are capable of seeing colours beyond grey, black and white, the number of other colours they see in comparison to what we see is very limited. Dogs mainly see yellows, blues and violets and struggle to see oranges, greens and reds. Instead they seem to appear somewhere in the spectrum of colours that sit between yellow and blue.

So what is the reason that dogs can only see certain colours and not others? In both our eyes and dogs eyes there are two kinds of photoreceptors found in the retina known as rods and cones. In our retina there are far more cones, whilst a dogs retina has more rods. They also have no fovea, which is what provides us with much sharper vision.

Despite this and their inability to see objects in great details, dogs have excellent night vision and a superior ability to track movement.

Determining what colours dogs are able to see has been a subject of scientific experiment for over 100 years. During the late 18th Century, tests were performed to determine this but only proved that being unable to see colours did not have a vital impact in the life of a dog.

90 years after the first experiments were performed, researchers Neitz, Geist and Jacobs carried out scientific tests on domestic dogs and determined that 1 Dogs are dichromatic they have two separate kinds of colour receptors within the eyes, and 2 One colour receptor is responsible for peaking in colours blue to violet and the other in colours yellow to green. Four years later further research was carried out to support these results.

The type of colourblindness dogs suffer from is similar to that suffered by some humans in that it applies to a specific series of colours and is not exclusive to all colours outside of black, grey and white. It is most often called deuteranopia.

Though we talk about dogs being ‘colourblind’, it does not mean that they cannot see any kind of colour at all. Rather it proposes they are not able to see the same range of colours as we can. Though dogs are capable of seeing a variety of colours, they also suffer from a type of colourblindness as well.

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