One of my favorite articles so far has been the dog’s umvelt. As it does with me, it should interest most people to be able to get a grasp on what it’s like to be something alive and not human. Things that could be seen as valued by us mean as little as a piece of paper to us. I myself have a Boston terrier, and it takes these deep breaths and they sound like sighs sometimes, but now I realize that he could be breathing in and out at the same time and getting those deeper breaths the article talked about. I can’t even fathom how he feels when he catches wind of something pungent, because he pulls in much more of the air he breathes than we do. The topic of time in the article was also informing. They tell time using their smell, for example the freshness of a dog turd or urine determines how long it has been there by how much it smells. The most interesting thing was that dogs have this better “flicker vision” than even humans. Dogs were the last animal I would expect to be able to see better than me. I can move just a little bit around my dog and he will react in crazy head nods and now I know it’s because they process the incoming light faster than we can. But at least i had something to fall back on now that I know we see better in a focused path that we look at and they can only see better up close.
Quinn P.
I'm not sure I have confidence in how the author interpreted the flicker vision experience for dogs. I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference in most situations. Flies also have a faster flicker vision (a lot faster) which would mean that they could detect the individual frames of a movie going by on a screen (it wouldn't fuse together as smooth motion). I've also read that they would perceive the on-off cyles of lights on a standard 60 cycle/sec alternating current as sort of a strobe effect. I hope that's not what my dog has to put up with, but perhaps it only comes into play when she is making a great frisbee catch.
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