A dogs inability to see colours beyond black and white is in fact purely a fallacy. It is a longstanding myth that dogs are colourblind and whereas to some extent this is true, this is not the full picture. Dogs might not see all the colours of the rainbow the way we do, but neither are they limited to black, white and grey. The colours they are able to focus on tend to be shades of violet, blue and yellow. Dogs find difficulty seeing other more vibrant colours like oranges, greens and reds.

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.These differences are responsible for giving dogs better vision at night and enabling them to track movement better, but as a result they are not able to see as many colours as we can. Objects and shapes don’t appear in as great detail.Though tests that were carried out towards the end of the 18th Century did not ascertain what colours dogs were capable of seeing, it did provide evidence that having a limited spectrum of colours has little to no affect on a dog’s daily life.It was another 90 years before further tests were carried out to determine whether dogs are colourblind or not. In 1989 the three researchers Neitz, Geist and Jacobs carried out a number of tests on domestic dogs and were able to determine the following. 1 Dogs have two kinds of colour receptors in their eyes and so are dichromatic. 2 In dog’s colour receptors, one peaks for the blue to violet range and the other for the yellow to green range. In 1993 and 1995 further research was carried out that again supported these findings.To some extent dogs do suffer from a form of colourblindness which is most often referred to as deuteranopia, but it is specific to a particular range of colours and is not entirely dissimilar to the human red-green colourblindness.The term colourblind can often be misleading. It does not automatically suggest an incapability to see colours. It is a specific condition that some humans are also known to suffer from and though dogs are not capable of seeing a similar level of colours as humans, they can see shades that fall between blue, violet and yellow.