Why Does Your Dog show Less Interest in Watching TV?

July 28, 2009: I had published a post on color vision of dogs and it attracted thousands of eye balls. This post is on a relevant theme again that may interests you. You may argue that your dog watches TV with you sitting quietly, but the fact is that he can't see television as smooth as you. Yes, researchers have concluded that dogs cannot see the images and movements on the television screen as smooth as humans.  

Why so?

Motions that are seen on the television screens are the result of the changing patterns of light across our retina, which means that the changing pattern happens in a flickering mode. Human eyes fail to perceive flickering above 55 cycle per second. Normal TV screen flickers at 60 Hz which is higher than the perception limit of humans, but lower than than what your dog can perceive. Studies with Beagle dogs have shown that they have the flicker perception rate of 75 cycle per second (75 Hz) which is higher than the flicker rate of any regular TV screens (60 cycles per second). This means with TVs that have screen flickering rate of 60 Hz, your dog can only see motion in a flickered mode - not as smooth as you. This goes a long way to establish that your dog loses interest in watching TV because the motions on the screen are not smoothly perceived by him/her. Just imagine what you would have done if you had a canine visual perception.  

Canine Visual Perception HD TV

So, dogs have better motion perception ability than human. I am sure your dog would prefer HDTV over the traditional television set. Dogs tend to show higher interest in the High Definition TVs, because their perception is better in HD than the non-HD TVs. HD Televisions provide with clearer picture and more visual details because they have high flickering rate. Some of the HD TVs have flickering rate of even 240 cycles per second - 240 Hz which is beyond dog's flicker perception (which is approximately 75 Hz). With higher flickering rate of High definition televisions, your dog can perceive the motions well blended and smooth.

Although for HDTV that provides with images appearing more continuous to dogs as compared to normal TV, yet your dog cannot see colors as prominent as human. However, your dog may now exhibit little restless behavior when they will find another dog or animals running away on the TV screen, because they can now perceive the motions more prominently and understand things more clearly with the advent of HD technology.