Dogsey

Domestic dogs can perceive images on television similarly to the way we do, and they are intelligent enough to recognize onscreen images of animals as they would in real life—even animals they've never seen before—and to recognize TV dog sounds, like barking.

A 2013 study published in the journal Animal Cognition showed that dogs could identify images of other dogs among pictures of humans and other animals, using their visual sense alone. (Also see "OCD Dogs, People Have Similar Brains; Is Your Dog OCD?")

However, there are some differences between ourselves and man's best friend—for one, dogs' eyes register images more quickly than do ours. So older television sets, which show fewer frames per second than modern televisions, would appear to a dog to be flickering like a "1920s movie," said Nicholas Dodman, a veterinary behaviorist at Tufts University, in Massachusetts.