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Dogs can watch TV!!!

My last standard poodle not only liked to watch TV, he figured out how to turn it on with the remote. No joke. He liked nature shows with bears and also soccer. (The iguana was a huge fan of auto races, but his cage was next to the speakers)

He liked dogs, of course... but the most interesting event happened a few years back when we were watching Westminster. All of a sudden, he got up and CHARGED the TV, both paws on it, barking furiously.

... it was his uncle. (Won, best of show, so you can figure out the year. Standard poodle, white.)

Another time, we were watching a nature show about bears, and in the background, there was a blind. And this guy got out of the blind, and looked around, and he started barking at the guy. Apparently something about that offended him.

Previous poodles weren't so much into the TV. He was, and that was unusual.
 
My dog doesn't pay much attention to the TV but I have a cat who does. The funniest moment with my cat was when I was watching a show on cheetahs. They showed some baby cheetahs on the show. My cat got up, jumped up on the TV table, stared at the screen, tapped it with his paw, and then ran around the back and looked. I think he was searching for the baby kitties who were trapped in that strange box!
 
negativ said:
All my books are packed up at the moment (I HATE MOVING! HATE HATE HATE!) so I can't dig out specifics, but you might want to look into "The Dog's Mind" by Bruce Fogel, as well as "How to Speak Dog" and "How Dogs Think" by Stanley Coren. The "editor reviews" at Amazon sum them up fairly well.

All three provide science-backed explanations for several woo-ish myths about dogs (e.g. they can predict earthquakes, have some sort of ESP, etc.), and as is almost always the case, the science turns out to be far more fascinating than the woo. I enjoyed "How To Speak Dog" in particular for its lengthy examination of canine body language.
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I'll have to look into those. Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation" is also a good one.
 
I seem to recall reading/hearing some time ago that, in general, dogs are not interested in what's on tv because there is no smell associated with the things they see.
 
I recall reading an article about Bottlenose dolphins in an aquarium having TV
piped into their pools. The animals apparently showed interest in the images,
especially when the TV showed another dolphin pool in the same aquarium.
When the dolphins saw on TV that a keeper was feeding the dolphins in the
other pool (the feeding times were allegedly varied to prevent the dolphins
just learning a routine), the TV watchers would get excited and rush over
to their feeding area in anticipation of the arrival of the keeper.

Dolphins are much cleverer than dogs of course :p
 
SteveGrenard said:
My dog brings me the remote and drops it in my lap when the TV is off. I am not sure if he wants the TV on or he wants me to throw the remote to play fetch with it.
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You can perform an experiment by throwing the remote instead of turning the television on. Tell us what you discover. :)
 
l0rca said:
You can perform an experiment by throwing the remote instead of turning the television on. Tell us what you discover. :)
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Okay, I gently tossed the remote. He fetched it, dropped it back in my lap but this time he asked why did you throw it, I just wanted to you to turn on Animal Planet for me.
 
In my case, my poodle was a very paw-using dog. He discovered that if he kept punching the remote with his paw, the TV eventually turned on.
 
SteveGrenard said:
Okay, I gently tossed the remote. He fetched it, dropped it back in my lap but this time he asked why did you throw it, I just wanted to you to turn on Animal Planet for me.
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What langauge did he ask you this in? (I assume it's not something obvious, like German from a German Shepherd or Welsh from a Welsh Corgie.)
 
I knew a standard poodle once that enjoyed watching animal programs on TV. When something got him particularly excited, but then "left" the screen, he would often check around behind the TV to see where it went. His owner would even put in videotapes of animal shows when the dog was alone all day.

He definitely responded to animal sounds--'cause he'd often come running in from another room if animals came on.

My cats seem less selective (and generally less interested) in their TV habits. They'll track movement, and sometimes even paw the screen when something moves across (not necessarily animal). Other times, I think they're only "watching" because the direction they're sitting and staring happens to have a TV there. Switching it off has no effect on their continued concentrated gaze in that direction.
 
On the issue of dog's color vision and their perception of television images:

I have wondered about that. Does the method used to simulate colors on a television produce an image that a dog would perceive in the same way as the dog sees the world.

It obviously works pretty well for humans, but does it work for dogs that only have two different color receptors instead of the three that most humans have.

I asked a color blind individual what his thoughts were on this. He said that he thought a TV image was a good representation of how he saw the world so he thought it might be the same for a dog.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this?
 
aggle-rithm said:
If you think about it, looking at a two-dimensional screen and extrapolating three-dimensional events from it isn't necessarily as easy as we think it is. It's easy for US, but does it require more brain power than a dog can handle? I have never had a dog, other than Shiner, that showed any interest whatsoever in the television, except on a few occasions when they heard sound bytes of dogs barking.
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My boyfriend had a rotweiler who loved to watch Telly Tubbies. I don't know exactly why specifically that program; but "they" do say that an adult dog has the same mental capabilities as a toddler.

Anyway, one day she was watching a nature program that had one of those wide aerial shots of a herd of ungulates running across a plain. They were running away from the camera, and, when they ran off the screen, the rottie ran around the back of the television presumably to see where they had gone. The evidence is anecdotal and second hand at that but I think it does imply that at least this dog could extrapolate 2-D to 3-D. I'm not sure what that says about other dogs, but I thought I'd add my two cents.
 
davefoc said:
On the issue of dog's color vision and their perception of television images:

I have wondered about that. Does the method used to simulate colors on a television produce an image that a dog would perceive in the same way as the dog sees the world.

It obviously works pretty well for humans, but does it work for dogs that only have two different color receptors instead of the three that most humans have.

I asked a color blind individual what his thoughts were on this. He said that he thought a TV image was a good representation of how he saw the world so he thought it might be the same for a dog.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this?
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I didn't think the problem would be so much the color perception as the different ways canines and humans process vision. I thought that humans, being language oriented, were already primed to think symbolically and thus could sense that the two-dimensional images on TV corresponded to three-dimensional images in the real world.

In order to do this, you have to pretend that depth perception doesn't matter, and judge relative distances by relative sizes. I thought dogs might have a problem with this.

A lot of times, people assume that dogs can do things that are simple for humans, but if you think about it, that's not necessarily correct. The example that pops to mind is the dog trainer who asks a dog to sit and then says, "Good sit!" as if the dog is able to grammatically parse sentences.
 
aggle-rithm said:
I didn't think the problem would be so much the color perception as the different ways canines and humans process vision. I thought that humans, being language oriented, were already primed to think symbolically and thus could sense that the two-dimensional images on TV corresponded to three-dimensional images in the real world.

In order to do this, you have to pretend that depth perception doesn't matter, and judge relative distances by relative sizes. I thought dogs might have a problem with this.

A lot of times, people assume that dogs can do things that are simple for humans, but if you think about it, that's not necessarily correct. The example that pops to mind is the dog trainer who asks a dog to sit and then says, "Good sit!" as if the dog is able to grammatically parse sentences.
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I understood that this was what you were talking about and I was interested in that issue also. I have watched our dog watching TV with exactly that kind of question in mind.

I just thought I'd use your thread to throw in a question of my own, not completely on topic though it be.
 
A dog's eyes are specially designed to pick out motion. At the level of a single cell in the eye, a moving target appears as a flicker. The average human doesn't see flickering above a speed of 55 cycles a second (55 Hz). The image on a television is redrawn at a rate of 60 Hz. Humans don't see this flicker, and the image appears continuous. However, because many dogs can resolve images at higher speed, the TV screen probably still appears to them as a rapid flicker, making the images look less real.

--from http://hashout.blogspot.com/2007/04/can-dogs-watch-tv.html

ETA: My JRT hasn't cared much for television since MTV stopped showing videos.
 
MWare said:
The image on a television is redrawn at a rate of 60 Hz.
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On a traditional U.S. television screen (i.e. an NTSC standard CRT), the image shown consists of "interlaced" fields that are alternately drawn every 1/30 of a second. That is, the even numbered scan-lines are drawn over the course of 1/60 sec., then the odd-numbered scan-lines are drawn over the course of 1/60 sec., then the process repeats. This produces a noticeable flicker for the human viewer.

Many modern TV sets have what is known as a "progressive scan" mode, that draws both interlaced fields simultaneously. These sets typically refresh the entire screen every 1/60 sec., and so the flicker is much less noticeable.

Traditional British and European televisions (i.e. PAL standard CRTs), however, show an image consisting of interlaced fields that are drawn every 1/25 of a second. Even in a modern "progressive scan" PAL television set, the screen is only going to be refreshed every 1/50 sec..


And let us not forget that movies are only filmed at 24 frames per second, yet we humans have no trouble viewing a movie as though the things on the screen were in motion.
 
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