How well do dogs see?

Question

Joshua Broadwater · Answer

How well do dogs see? This is a great question and there are a lot of misconceptions with dogs vision in general. So one of the biggest is that dogs do not see in color and research suggests that is not true. Dogs do see color. They tend to be similar to people that are considered red-green color blind or deuteranopic. As far as their visual acuity, how well they see, dogs are considered to have vision about 2065 or 2070, which would mean that dogs would see something in focus from 20, let's say 20 feet away, whereas a person with normal vision would see that in focus from about 65 feet away. So their visual acuity is not as good as people, but there are trade-offs because dogs tend to have much better night vision than we have as humans and one of those trade-offs is their visual acuity, but they tend to compensate for that with some of their other abilities such as their good sense of smell whenever they get close to objects, their sense of hearing, their sense of touch. So despite their visual acuity maybe not being as good as what people, the visual acuity of a person is, they compensate for that very well and it also is an interesting side note as a veterinary ophthalmologist, those differences in vision guide what we do for things like cataract surgery. So with people, when they remove a cataract from inside your eye, there are certain artificial lenses that are placed and as a veterinary ophthalmologist, we do cataract surgery in dogs as well, but we have to use different lenses based on the different visual acuities of those animals. So that's one of the big differences that would come into play during our cataract surgeries.

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"How well do dogs see?"