Maybe your Pomeranian is a little too into The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Your pit bull says he likes mixed martial arts, but really, he’s curled up in a onesie on the couch for The Bachelor. Some dogs pay attention to the television, but what they get out of it may depend on the individual dog’s personality, researchers report in the July 17 Scientific Reports.
While some owners leave the TV on to keep their pooch company, comparative psychologist Jeffrey Katz was a little surprised to see channels devoted to content for dogs — offering soothing music, videos of dogs and other animals and even “exposure” to scary things like vacuum cleaners and doorbells. “I’ve seen them watch TVs or look at TVs. But do we really know what they’re extracting from it?” asks Katz, of Auburn University in Alabama.
For a long time, dogs probably couldn’t see TV in the same way we do, Katz says. “They don’t see the same thing we see, but that doesn’t mean it’s not similar,” he says. Dogs have dichromatic color vision — they have only two kinds of color-sensitive cone cells in their eyes, while most humans have three. They also have a faster flicker-fusion rate, which determines how fast images need to flicker past to be perceived as continuous video. Original cathode-ray tube sets had a slow flicker-fusion frequency, which means dogs would have seen flashing still images instead of smooth film. “It’s not an issue anymore,” Katz says. “These new LED screens, it’s fused together at a much higher resolution rate.”
To find out how dogs might perceive TV, Katz and his colleagues sent surveys out via Facebook and email lists, receiving responses from 453 U.S. dog owners about which TV objects and sounds their dogs responded to, whether they barked, wagged, chased or growled.
Owners reported that their pups showed at least some interest in animals on the screen, with 45 percent responding to images or sounds of other dogs. Factors such as breed, age or sex didn’t seem to matter in how dogs responded, but personality did. Owners reported that more excitable dogs tended to follow moving objects on the screen — especially animals. Study coauthor Lane Montgomery, a cognitive and behavioral scientist at Auburn, observed this behavior in her own dog, a 3-year-old Catahoula leopard dog named Jax. “He is especially a fan of dog shows,” she says. Jax — and other dogs in the study — even look behind the TV to see where an offscreen object or animal “went.”
More anxious dogs, however, responded negatively to sounds like doorbells or doors opening. “I think a lot of times we think, ‘Oh, TV is going to be enriching,’” says Seana Dowling-Guyer, an animal behaviorist at Tufts University in North Grafton, Mass., who was not involved in the study. “But the reality is sometimes it’s too much, it’s overstimulating.”
Dogs might also respond to TV because their owners do, she says. Reports from dog owners don’t necessarily account for what the human is doing. Say, “a sports event, somebody’s watching a game on TV and gets excited,” Dowling-Guyer says. Labradors might love to Monday-morning quarterback a football game just because you do.
Dowling-Guyer says that, before turning on the TV, “people really should know their pets and know their personality and how they react to different types of TV programs and different stimuli.” Maybe your schnauzer really loves true crime and your collie likes Survivor — but a more anxious pup might benefit from peace and quiet.