How Do Dogs Use Their Senses Every Day

Since dogs' senses are generally much more heightened than ours they have been able to help us for centuries.

Sight
Dogs see far better than humans can. Their heightened peripheral vision and excellent night vision are far better than ours.
1. Dogs see in much dimmer light than humans.
2. Dogs can detect motion better than humans can.
3. Dogs can see flickering light better than humans. The do may see t.v. as a series
of moving frames rather than as a continuous scene.
4. Dogs do not have the ability to focus as well on the shape of objects (their visual
Ability is lower). What we may see clearly may appear to be blurred to a dog
Looking at it at the same distance. A rough estimate is that dogs have about 20/75 vision. They can see at 20 feet what a normal human could see clearly at
At 75 feet.

How Dogs See Color
Dogs see color in a more limited way than we do. We see the rainbow of colors. They; see Violet, Indigo, Blue,Yellow, Yellow, Yellow and Red. The colors green, yellow and orange are alike to dogs. This conclusion comes from the Dept of Biology At the University of Wisconsin by Dana K Vaughan, Ph.D. e-mail Vaughan@uwosh.edu

Motion - think of a green lizard motionless on a leaf. You and your dog would have a hard time seeing it. A green ball on green grass not moving it would be the same.
Contrast - An object on different color background and very different shape is easier to spot.

Remember dogs have their eyes about 12 inches off the ground and see the world in a different way than a human with eyes about 48 inches off the ground like many 5th graders.

Dogs sight is not inferior to ours. It is different but suits their needs better than possessing accurate color vision would.

Hearing - Dogs hear 35,000 - 45,000 KHZ and some even 50,000 KHZ but humans hear 20,000 KHZ. Some dogs hear at a higher frequency that humans cannot even hear at all. Cat's hearing is even at a higher pitch than dogs up to 100,000 cycles/second that's two octaves higher than humans.

Smell - The olfactory or smell receptors are located within special sniffing cells called ethmoidal cells. These are found deep in a dog's snout in structures called turbinates.
Dogs have about 25 times more olfactory (smell) receptors than humans do. These receptors occur in special sniffing cells deep in a god's snut and are what allow a dog to "out smell" humans.

Sniffing the bare sidewalk may seem crazy, but it yields a wealth of information to your dog. Whether it's the scent of the dog next door or a whiff of the bacon sandwich someone dropped last week. Dogs can decode scent messages left by other animals.
A dog can sniff out all sorts of smells that human noses can't. That is why dogs can be trained in so many ways to detect drugs, lost people and much more.

Let's never forget the keen senses the dog has at his disposal (and we do not). What a team humans and dogs can make helping each other in so many great ways.

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