When Maureen and Jay Neitz adopted an adorable, fluffy black puppy in the late 1980s, they had no idea how important she would be in making new discoveries about vision.
They were just looking for a dog who was size-appropriate for the small apartment they lived in as UC Santa Barbara PhD candidates. Eventually, the teacup Poodle they named “Retina” helped the couple prove that dogs see much more than just black and white, and that dogs’ color vision is similar to that of the 8 percent of the human population who are red-green colorblind.
Ten million Americans, most of them male, are affected with red-green colorblindness, a genetic trait carried on the X chromosome. People with this condition can’t clearly see the difference between red and green. They often mistake green for white and red for brown or dark gray.
via Whisker Therapy