PlayfulPets
Dogs and cats · Try it

See it like your dog

That bright red ball you bought? To your dog it may look a lot like the grass it landed in. Flip the view below to see a rough version of what they see, then pick toys they can actually spot.

8 cited sources

Flip the view

What you see
A rough idea of what your dog sees
  • Red ball
  • Orange disc
  • Yellow ball
  • Green frog
  • Blue ring
  • Purple rope

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This is an approximation, not exactly what your pet sees. It removes red-green color the way models of human red-green color blindness do (the Viénot 1999 method)[8], since dogs resemble people with that kind of color vision.[4] It doesn't show brightness, night vision or flicker. The cat view also softens color, and the blur toggle is our rough guess, not a measured value.

What the research says

They see color, not black and white

Dogs and cats have two kinds of color-sensing cones, where most people have three. So they see a smaller range of colors, but they do see color.[1],[2],[6]

Blue stands out. Red, orange and green blur together

Dogs can see blue well but have trouble telling red, orange, green and yellow apart, much like a person with red-green color blindness.[2],[3],[4]

Colors look softer to them

A dog's retina has only 10 to 20% as many cones as ours, so colors may not look as intense.[3] Cats have even fewer cones, but see in light about six times dimmer than we can.[2]

Less fine detail

One vet estimate puts dogs at about 20/75 and cats at about 20/150, and a 2017 study found big differences from dog to dog.[2],[5] Small printed patterns on a toy may just blur together.

Picking toys they can see

  1. 1

    Pick blue for play on grass

    Blue is a color dogs see clearly, and it stands apart from a green lawn.[2],[3]

  2. 2

    Skip red and orange for fetch outside

    The classic red ball can blend into green grass for a dog.[3],[4] They may still find it by brightness, movement or smell.

  3. 3

    Yellow can work, if it contrasts with the ground

    In one study, free-ranging dogs picked a yellow bowl more than twice as often as blue or gray ones.[7] That was bowls, not toys, and yellow can look close to green to a dog.[2]

  4. 4

    Think light against dark

    A light toy on dark ground, or a dark toy on light ground, helps when color doesn't. Colors look less intense to dogs, so contrast does more of the work.[3]

  5. 5

    For cats, choose movement over color

    Cats see color weakly but see well in low light.[2],[6] A wand toy moved in a dim room will do more than any color choice.

No study we found has tested whether toy color changes how much a dog plays, so treat these as ways to help your pet spot a toy, not proven play boosters. Looking for a toy? Browse our guides.

Sources

General information, not veterinary advice. If you think your pet's eyesight is changing, ask your vet.

  1. Neitz, Geist & Jacobs, Visual Neuroscience (1989), Color vision in the dog
  2. Ron Ofri, DVM, PhD, DECVO, dvm360, Vision in dogs and cats
  3. The Royal Kennel Club (2019), Annex A: Colour vision in the dog
  4. Siniscalchi et al., Royal Society Open Science (2017), Are dogs red–green colour blind?
  5. Lind et al., PLOS ONE (2017), High visual acuity revealed in dogs
  6. Gerald H. Jacobs, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2009), Evolution of colour vision in mammals
  7. Stanley Coren, PhD, Psychology Today (2025), summarizing Roy et al., Animal Cognition, What's your dog's favorite color?
  8. DaltonLens, Review of open-source color blindness simulations