Should You Only Buy Blue Dog Toys?
Dog owners often take canine comforts to dizzying extremes, such as feeding their dogs homemade food or enrolling them in trendy sleep camps. When it comes to buying dog toys, it is becoming popular to consider the color of said toy when you are trying to make the best purchase.
Since dogs are red-green color-blind and do not orient themselves visually (or physically) like their bipedal human companions, some lay experts insist that dog toys be blue – a color that should stand out quite vividly for a dog. frolicking in the grass. , green field or among the autumn foliage.
But does the color of the dog’s toy really matter that much? You don’t need to be a veterinarian to know that dogs rely heavily on their sense of smell to understand their surroundings, and that other stimuli affect their understanding of the physical world more than their vision. So, should you follow the advice of Reddit, or maybe be guided by the small piece of scientific literature that says blue toy matters?
Color is not as important as other factors
A dog’s addiction to toys depends not so much on color as on a number of different stimuli. When it comes to visual perception, brightness matters just as much as overall color, says Sarah-Elizabeth Bjosier, director of the Thinking Dog Center at the City University of New York. She explains that dogs are two-colored, meaning they only have two cone photoreceptor cells that can detect blue and yellow, while humans have three that recognize combinations of red, blue, and green.
But when it comes to a dog detecting similar colors, brightness is key in analyzing subtle differences. “Two shades of the same color are still distinguishable and distinguishable if they differ only in brightness,” she told Lifehacker before expanding the relationship between brightness and color for dogs.
The takeaway is that a green tennis ball may not have to be more difficult for a dog to see as it rolls across a field of grass or for an astronaut if subtle differences in color reflect a particular stimulus, such as sunlight. She explained:
The perception of color can change depending on the brightness of a given stimulus. When light reflects off these stimuli, like a red ball thrown on green grass, the colors reflect the light in different ways. Dogs are sensitive to changes in brightness , so while the colors of the ball and grass may not look like red and green to the dog, they probably still differ in brightness.
There is also a texture problem. Like humans, dogs often rely on differences in the texture and shape of their surroundings to distinguish toys from plants or hills of mud, for example. Bjosier details another situation that talks about how dogs navigate their environment without relying on color:
If you can imagine seeing a brown ball being thrown onto brown grass, you can probably still identify the present object because the structure / shape of the ball is different from that of the grass. One is thin and lanky, and the other is round and with different edges. It may take a little longer, but you can probably find it using clues other than color.
How to choose the right toy?
The problem is not as difficult as you might think. Veterinarian Valerie Patton tells Lifehacker that a dog’s preference for a toy is very similar to a child’s tendency to gravitate towards certain toys.
She wrote in an email:
I found that texture, size and ability to destroy it, and whether or not a squeaker is present, makes the toy a guardian or not. Like children, dogs have reasons to love certain toys that sometimes we can understand and sometimes we don’t.
While your feelings about the color of the toy indicate that the owner is satisfied with his dog’s preferences, it is probably best to let your dog decide which toy he prefers. As Bjosier says, the choice of a toy depends a lot on its color “just oversimplifies and underestimates the dog’s perception ability.” Instead, owners should buy a variety of toys for their dogs, and let their pets decide which toy they like best.
Bjosier describes in detail how best to do this:
Let them choose the items they play with, rotate the toys so they never get bored (don’t leave them always at home), and find creative ways to mentally enrich your puppy with novelties and attachments to the toys they have.
With this in mind, your dog will instantly chew on his favorite toy or tennis ball, regardless of the color.