Conscious Choice Seattle: Your Dog and the Remote

February 2006 | Closer Look

Your Dog and the Remote

By Andrew Mulholland

Be afraid. Be very afraid for your dog and other pets.

An emerging field of research shows that dogs do indeed watch television and even reason with plot lines during certain programs.

One study developed a hierarchy of interest. Dogs will stay glued to the set for more than an hour, sometimes even a few hours, watching other dogs.

Next, dogs stay in the viewing mode for extended minutes if the TV is showing other animals. They will even stay with a nature channel for a while to see if any dogs, cats, birds or wildlife shows up.

But turn on a family sitcom and dogs are out of there. Some will argue that’s the smart move and wiser than a good number of humans.

An Australian veterinary science researcher, Paul McGreevey, has studied the “visual streak” of dogs. He defines it as a line of vision cells packed very densely and running across the retina.

What McGreevey and colleagues discovered was some dogs don’t have the visual streak, which means they are actually prime candidates to sit up and notice the TV. Visual-streak dogs tend to be hunters. They have long noses and good peripheral vision and can spot something moving out of the corners of their eyes and follow it with their eyes.

Dogs without this “visual streak” and overall acuity have shorter noses, and about three times as many nerve endings in the retina. They may not have great peripheral vision but they see things much more clearly, with greater definition, than other dogs.

As in staring at the TV screen.

These dogs will be more likely to be entranced by the television. Mostly because they can focus on a television screen and decipher it.

Make no mistake, marketers and cable programmers are paying close attention. Animal Planet, for instance, is creating program concepts to be “entertainment that animals will enjoy and humans will get a kick out of, too.”

Expect more on all cable and DVD fronts, and think expansively. Pet owners routinely report (to any researcher willing to listen) that their dogs or cats respond to screen images on computers.

There is no truth to any wildcard reports that some obedience schools are teaching dogs the new trick of fetching and operating the old remote control.

Still, consider yourself forewarned.

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