Almost everything on the channel comes out of these. If we got something wrong, the sources are right here and you can check.
Dogs are dichromats. They have two cone types, not three, and behavioral testing put the peaks near 429nm and 555nm. That is a blue receptor and a yellow green one. The long wavelength cone people have is missing.
So everything from green through red collapses into a single band for them. A red ball and green grass are not two colors to a dog. They are one color at two brightnesses, which is why a thrown ball disappears the moment it stops moving.
Critical flicker fusion is the rate at which a pulsing light stops looking like it is pulsing. People sit around 60Hz. Four beagles, tested by conditioned suppression, came in near 80.
The same paper found something more useful. Dog rods resolve flicker faster than human rods do, which means dim scenes are the risky ones, not the safe ones.
Less than people assume. A modern LCD or OLED holds light between frames instead of blanking, so it does not strobe the way an old CRT did. The thing that still pulses is backlight dimming, and that is tied to your brightness setting, not your refresh rate.
Turn brightness to 100. That does more for your dog than any refresh number, and it works on any screen you already own.
What frame rate really controls is how far something jumps between one frame and the next. Dogs resolve roughly 3.75 arcminutes, about a quarter of what you resolve. Keep every jump under that and they cannot see the steps at all.
At normal viewing distance that works out to 0.39% of screen height per frame. At 60fps it means nothing may cross the frame faster than about fifteen seconds.
The channel measures this on itself while it runs. Worst case across the whole day is 2.25 arcminutes against a 3.75 limit. We aim under 1.9 because motion detection is usually finer than static acuity, and nobody has measured that number in dogs.
| Segment | Worst jump per frame |
|---|---|
| First Light | 1.00 arcmin |
| The Long Field | 1.37 arcmin |
| Shade | 0.54 arcmin |
| A Friend Comes | 2.25 arcmin |
| Long Shadows | 0.56 arcmin |
| Den | 0.56 arcmin |
Surveys of what dogs watch agree on one thing. Dogs want to watch dogs, well ahead of every other subject. Humans came ninth out of seventeen categories.
Which creates a problem. A real brown and white dog on real ground is close to invisible to a dichromat. We measured a brown dog against dirt and got a separation of 0.032 in canine color space, near the floor.
A camera cannot fix that. A drawing can, because the dog on screen can simply be a color they own. That is the whole reason this channel is animated.
Kenneled dogs rest more and bark less with music playing. Classical held up across several studies, and later work at Glasgow found soft rock and reggae did better still. Every genre beat silence.
Speech is different. Human voices and doorbells came up as triggers for anxious dogs, so neither appears anywhere in what we make. If you add your own music, keep it slow and simple, and rotate it. Dogs stop hearing a loop.
This part matters more than the rest.
Everything above is optics and survey data. None of it demonstrates that your dog enjoys this, finds it calming, or benefits from it. Those are separate claims and we have not tested them.
Screen time is also not exercise, not enrichment, and not company. It is something to have on that is at least built correctly, rather than something built for your eyes and left running near theirs.
Your dog paces, barks at the screen, whines, or will not settle after a few minutes. Some dogs get wound up by screens instead of soothed. That is normal and it means this is not for them.
Never use it as a substitute for a walk, and never leave a dog with separation anxiety alone with a screen instead of getting help. Talk to your vet about that one. We are not a treatment.
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