It is a question that comes up often for anyone who has had a dog in their life, because we spend so much time around them and still wonder what they truly notice about us.
Dogs experience the world with senses that work in very different ways from our own, which explains why their reactions sometimes seem so quick or so intense.
A dog needs to stand around 20 feet away from an object to see it as clearly as a person could from about 75 feet away, and they struggle to see colors like red, orange, and green. They respond best to shades of blue and yellow.
Even so, their vision has advantages. Thanks to the extra rods in their retinas and their naturally larger pupils, dogs see much better in the dark than we do. They are also stronger at picking up movement, which is helpful whether they are watching a mail carrier walk past or spotting a stick thrown across a yard.
Their sense of hearing is also very different from ours. They can pick up sounds that reach around 45,000Hz, while most humans top out at about 20,000Hz.
They can detect sounds that are roughly four times quieter than what humans can hear, although they do not pick up low-pitched sounds as well.
Dogs also experience time differently. Their high metabolism causes them to process time at a slightly slower pace, so one hour for us would feel more like 75 minutes to them.
So what does all this mean in practice? How would a dog’s world look if we could see it through their eyes?
YouTube creator Benn Jordan set out to answer that question by building a simulation that captures the way a dog might perceive its surroundings.
Jordan explained in the video that dogs process time about 33 percent slower than humans do.
As a result, when he played the footage back, the sounds, including his own voice, were deeper and the movements appeared slower.
One person joked that the idea of humans appearing slow to dogs made sense to them, writing: “Crazy to think they’re still our best friends when we are so slow to them lol.”
Another added that they had suspected dogs might view us as slower because of the difference in how fast dogs can move.
Someone else said the idea of dogs seeing the world in slow motion surprised them, adding: “In my wildest dreams I never imagined that dogs perceive the world in slow motion.”
Of course, the simulation focuses mainly on vision and sound, but a dog’s most powerful sense is smell.
Their sense of smell is so sharp that trained dogs can even detect certain illnesses, including some cancers.
