I just read an article in The Daily Mail that says that most people think dogs do not have colour vision. The article then goes on to say that Russian scientists have proved that dogs do have colour vision. It seems to me quite accepted that dogs are dichromats – that is they have two types of light-sensitive cells that contribute to colour vision in their eyes. We – humans – are trichromats because we have three such cells. It turns out that the one that is missing – in dogs – is such that dogs’ colour vision is rather like that of a human who has red-green colour blindness. The image below shows how the spectrum looks to a trichromatic human and a dichromatic dog.

As you can see, dogs can bee blues and yellow but have difficulty discriminating between colours in the red-green part of the spectrum. So I am not sure what the fuss is about with the Daily Mail article. After all, everything in the Daily Mail is true!! See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI if you don’t believe me.