Is This A Myth?

Hi everyone

I've been sat wondering about a popular myth?

Dogs cant see objects in 2D!

How's that work then when my puppy max whose 3 months as started to take an intrest in the T.V last night he spent ages sat in front of it watching it and when a animal ran across the screen he tried to get behind the telly to see where it had gone! daft dog..

My grandmas dog used to wait for the neighbours theme tune and then run,bark and sit and wait for bouncer (remember him!) to appear on screen..

anyone got any stories about things dogs can't or arn't supposed to do but clearly can, to tell i'd love to hear them..

My dog loves animal programmes on TV as well and I know he can see the dogs and not just blurry shapes, you can see he recognises them and tries to sniff them and has given a paw to the TV once or twice too lol!

Fudge has a thing about penguins and also sits and listens to Will Young when he appears. She obviuosly likes his voice....and yes, she does go behind tv to find where they have all gone.

My Sammie is the same. He loves animals on the TV, specially programmes with howling wolves . And he can defo see the animals because he reacts even when they are not making a sound

Max likes the TV

He likes to watch football, and his head moves to where the ball is going, so he is always wiggling his head around

He got scared whilst we were watching King Kong though

He also likes vet and animal programs, and responds to cat and dog noises on the tv, and I'm sure he knows when dogs are on, even if they are making no noise

This reminds me of another moment with Sammie. Watching the end of American Idol last week and there was a guy oin called 'Red', he was dressed all in red and had red hair and beard. His singing was awful, I thought Sammie's head was going to turn 360 degrees it was going from side to side sooo much, couldn't stop laughing

Rupert likes to watch things like Dog Borstal and It's Me or the Dog, sits quietly next to me and watches the TV. No interest in Cesar Milan though.
He likes Slipknot and will sit up and watch if one of their videos comes on. No accounting for taste.

Some interesting reading on canine vision [ including how they perceive the TV screen ], and some breed differences in these two links :

http://www.50connect.co.uk/index.asp...s%26aID%3D4184

http://www.workingdogs.com/vision_coile.htm

Agility wise, I was originally taught that dogs see in 2D so depth perception is not as good as 3D, [ which is pretty much borne out in the links ].
When dogs first do the Dog Walk for instance, initially they tend not to realise how far the ground is so often step off the wood thinking they ground is right next to the plank edges. When correctly supported they soon learn that they need to keep their feet on the wood and get the hang of the height distance when going up and down the on and off planks.

I know of a dog who climbed up a bank on to a shed roof then stepped off [ and fell ] from apparently just not realising the ground below was not level with the roof...

A Spread jump can cause problems initially, as the dog see`s the height of the poles but not the depth of one jump in front of another. My Defa, the first time he did a spread, landed on the second pole [ the furthest ], and I found by just letting him see a Spread side-on first and giving him a different arm signal, [ high hand rather than forward hand ], that he learned to recognise the difference.
With a hearing dog, inflection in the voice or a different cue helps let a dog know to jump further.

Example in case anyone does`nt know what a spread jump is and which hopefully demonstrates what I mean :



With the Long jump, its very usual for beginner dogs to try to run along the sections because they look flat and solid from their perspective. Its when the sections move under foot that they recognise that they are not one solid area and that they go upward.

The view of this Long jump shows quite well what I mean of the dogs visual perspective

http://www.agilitywarehouse.com/prod...ail.cfm?id=685

And this one shows the side view and from our much higher up, [ cos we are taller ], 3D perspective it is very different from what the dog see`s

http://www.agilitywarehouse.com/prod...ail.cfm?id=961

Sometimes, a new to agility dog will happily do several jumps on a course or exercise, then there will be one that the dog just wont jump. It can easily be put down to stubborness or even a dog being a bit thick but whenever I have had this happen with students dogs, I crouch down to the dogs eye level and often find the sun is literally blotting out where the pole is, [ again borne out by how they see light on the links ], or sometimes with smaller dogs a clump of grass in the distance can look like its right in front of a jump and their safety instincts kick in because they can`t guage it properly.


Sometimes, if a pole has been knocked down but that jump is used more than once in a sequence, dogs will still jump as if the pole is in place - so the dog is utilising familiarity rather than just sight there.

When dogs first learn on a low height then that height is upped, dogs will often knock down the first couple of poles until they realise they are actually higher up, then familiarity comes in to play for dogs to be able to do different heights in one sequence [ something I use to help dogs learn to `read` ahead ]. .

With practice and familiarity, the dogs are not so much reliant on their own visuals but their learned experience, for pacing, speed, and balance, trust that their handler is not asking them to do something dangerous, and the cues given by the handler to help guide speed and how high / far they need to jump.


Anyone just starting in agility, if your dog does`nt want to do a particular element, get down to look from the dogs eye view and you`ll probably find the answer

[ And I got carried away waffling again, how dogs see is a particular interest of mine for obvious reasons, sorreeeeee ]

.

I heard on TV last week(so it must be true )

That Dogs see the same as a Colour Blind Person

I always remember as a kid that people said if you cut the hair away from and old english sheepdogs eyes - they would be blind.