Can dogs see colours?

Can dogs see colours? — Answer: Yes
Are dogs colourblind? — Answer: Yes
Let me explain this two answers to you a bit more in detail.

Dogs can see colours
Dogs not only see in shades of grey but also can see distinct colours contrary to what most people belief. About one hundred years ago some scientific tests were made to find out more about the colour vision of dogs. But these tests weren’t that scientific as they thought and the researchers concluded only that colour vision doesn’t play a part in the daily life of a dog.

Only about 90 years later distinct researches have shown that dogs can perceive colors. Neitz, Geist and Jacobs researched in 1989 the color vision of domestic dogs and found the following facts:

Dogs have two different colour receptors in their eyes and therefore are dichromats.
One colour receptor peaks at the blue-violet range, the other at the yellow-green range.
Conclusion: Dogs are green-blind which is one form of red-green color blindness also called deuteranopia.
This results were support by later researches of Jacobs with colleagues in 1993 and Miller and Murphy in 1995.

Dogs are colourblind
This directly leads us to the second question concerning the colour blindness of dogs. Colourblind doesn’t relate to not see any colours but describes the fact that you can’t see the same colour range as somebody with normal vision. Because of that any kind of colour vision deficiency is called colour blindness. Therefore dogs are colourblind because of their dichromatic colour vision.

Colours dogs can’t distinguish
Actually the colour spectrum made up of wavelengths of light is the same to all of us. Only the perception of those colours can be quite different. As dogs only have two different colour receptors in their eyes they have problems to distinguish certain colours:

Red — Orange — Green
Greenish Blue — Grey
Different shades of Purple
The list is not completed and there are a lot of different shades which can’t be differentiated if you are colourblind. And the conclusion is dogs can see colours but are at the same time colourblind.

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