It’s well known that dogs don’t see as many colors as we do – similar to color blindness in people. Whereas humans have three types of cones in our eyes, allowing us to identify combinations of red, yellow, and green, dogs just have two, and can only see in blue or yellow, or shades of gray – known as dichromatic vision.
But, do they have a favorite color? According to a recent study, dogs might have a preference for yellow. Animal behaviorists at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research found that street dogs in the country prefer eating from yellow bowls the most.
The team, who published their paper in Animal Cognition, wanted to know if yellow being one of the only colors that dogs can see made it more important to them. So, they worked with 458 free-range dogs near the city of Kolkata in the state of West Bengal in experiments that involved the pups choosing between colored bowls.
It’s quite common to see street dogs in India, and they survive in large part through passersby feeding them, so they’re used to being presented with bowls of food.
First, 134 dogs were allowed to choose between three bowls of food all placed a short distance apart. Seventy-two dogs chose the yellow bowl, and when the experiment was repeated with empty bowls, the results were similar again.
In the second experiment, the dogs could choose between an empty yellow bowl and gray bowls filled with food. Even then, they went for the yellow bowl 41 out of 52 times. When the experiment was repeated with more desirable food, the researchers found similar results.
In the final experiment, the researchers covered the bowls so the dogs couldn’t see their colors. This time, they picked randomly, indicating that the dogs didn’t choose the yellow bowls due to their scent earlier in the study.
The researchers have suggested a couple of potential explanations for the dogs’ preference for yellow. There’s the ecological valence theory – that preference for a color is determined by how much someone likes the objects associated with that color – and the species-confidence hypothesis – that animals are more attracted to colors associated with their own species – but neither fully explain the preference dogs seem to have for yellow. Further research is required to work out just why dogs prefer the color.
Dogs might only have two cones in their eyes, but are dogs color blind too? It’s not quite as simple as that, but we can compare a dog only seeing blues, yellows, and grays to the vision of a person with red-green color blindness, even if it’s not exactly the same.
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