Sight It was once thought that dogs were “color-blind” – only able to see shades of black and white with some grey, but scientific studies have found that’s not true. Dogs can see in color – ranging from blues and greens to greys and crèmes, and of course, black and white. It’s been estimated that humans can distinguish somewhere between 7 and 10 million different colors. (We don’t even have names for that many colors!)

Picture courtesy of Dr. P’s site: http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/dog/dog.htm But dogs have it all over humans in detecting motion – that’s one reason they can detect a cat up a tree at a much greater distance than you can! And their night vision is typically better than ours – dogs have an additional reflective layer in eye called tapetum lucidum, which reflects light back into receptor cells of eye, which not only increases their night vision, but gives them that spooky appearance of eyes glowing in dark.

Hearing When your dog is barking like crazy in middle of night, don’t just assume he’s lonely and wants you to get up and keep him company. He may be listening to something that you can’t hear, that’s extremely upsetting to him – like a burglar breaking in your basement window. Dogs can hear at four times distance humans can – that means you might hear something from a 100 yards away your dog could hear from a quarter of a mile away. Their ears are also better designed to gather more of available sound wave – they have 15 different muscles that move their ears in all directions, plus they can move one ear at a time – and independently of other to absorb even more information!