Question

Write an essay on the world as it appears to a dog.

Answer 1

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.



Humans see the world in color because we (usually) have three types of color receptor cells, or cones, in our eyes. These are sensitive individually to red, green, and blue light, and the different intensities and proportions of those three colors as seen by our eyes are put together by the brain to create the full-color world as we know it.

Some humans, however, are colorblind, which is a generic term for various changes in color perception, depending upon which of the receptors are defective. Two of the more common types are red-green and blue-yellow, in which a person cannot distinguish the two colors named.

Human colorblindness is much more common in men than in women, since it is frequently connected to the X chromosome. Men only have one X, so if it is defective, they’re out of luck. Women have an extra X, so they have to have two defective chromosomes, one from each parent, to have the defect in vision. In fact, women (only) are also susceptible to a visual condition in which they have one extra color receptor, and so can actually see a wider range of colors than people with normal vision.

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.

Combining their motion and twilight sensitivity with a wider degree of peripheral vision than humans, a dog’s eyes are perfectly suited for hunting down fast-moving prey — but did their vision evolve this way to make them better hunters?

The answer to that question is a little more complicated than just yes or no. As it turns out, full color vision arose fairly early in the evolutionary development of the eye. Among some fish, reptiles, birds, and insects, four or more different color receptors are not uncommon. Butterflies have five, but the undisputed winner in the color vision category is probably the mantis shrimp, which has an incredible sixteen different color receptors in its eyes.

Along the way, mammals began to lose all the extra receptors until only two remained. Since this didn’t put dogs or other predators at a particular disadvantage for hunting, it didn’t make much of a difference. It was only later on that some primates, including humans, re-evolved and added the additional receptor that gives us full color vision.

Answer 2

Fighting “That” Instinct When I was first assigned to read What the Dog Saw I thought to myself, “Wow this book could be a little dull. This is my first college assignment and I have to read nineteen essays that are written by this Malcolm Gladwell guy of whom I have never heard of. I thought college work was actually going to be interesting, apparently not!” After getting the book and just reading through the different topics Gladwell had written about I began to realize that my assumption was...