Science reveals dogs’ favorite type of TV

At the end of a long day, many of us humans unwind with an episode of a favorite TV show. If you’ve got a dog at home, you might have wondered if your beloved pet can do the same. Despite the modern proliferation of dog-centered TV programs, the answer is a little bit complicated, according to new research.

It turns out whether or not your dog enjoys time in front of the tube depends on both Fido’s individual temperament and what’s playing. Traits like excitability and anxiety level determine how pets engage with television, per a survey-based study published July 17 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

“Personality of the dog influences their viewing habits,” Jeffrey Katz, lead study author, psychology professor, and comparative cognition researcher at Auburn University in Alabama, tells Popular Science. He and his co-authors also found that the subject of a show plays a big role in canine engagement levels, with animal-centric content yielding a more enthusiastic response than footage of people. 

The findings build on our understanding of how our canine companions view the screen. In addition to offering insight into pet psychology, this line of research might even help veterinarians create standardized tests for dog vision.

[Related: Dogs really are communicating via button boards, new research suggests. ]

Surveying Fido

Katz and his colleagues collected their data through a digital survey, distributed via social media. They asked basic demographic questions, included standardized canine temperament and impulsivity scales, and devised their own spate of new questions all related to how dogs interact with TV. The novel question set is called the “Dog Television Viewing Scale” (DTVS), and prompts respondents to indicate how often (on a five point scale from “never” to “always”) their pet does things like pawing at the TV or growling in response to different categories of television sounds or visual stimuli on the screen. They specifically asked owners to consider content containing other dogs, non-dog household pets, non-household animals, humans, and inanimate objects like cars. Then, they pooled all of that data for assessment. 

Out of 513 complete responses, 453 were from pet owners who affirmed their dog watches TV. Across the dozens of questions, most dog owners indicated their pet responds to animal content, be it audio or video alone. Fewer people said that their dogs regularly reacted to non-animal content– cementing the idea that media representation matters, even for pets. Then, there were the personality trends. 

Owners who rated their dogs as more excitable were more likely to report their pups attempting to follow objects or animals off screen: pawing, searching, or scanning for what they see beyond the confines of the TV. Owners who described their pets as negatively reactive (akin to appearing more fearful or anxious) on one of the personality questionnaires were also significantly more likely to report that their dog responds to non-animal stimuli at higher rates. Things like doorbell sounds, car horns, or human faces more often triggered reactions in skittish pets. Factors like age, breed, and prior TV exposure didn’t stand out as major drivers of dog-TV habits. 

“I thought it was very well done,” Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin who researches canine visual psychology but was not part of the new study team, tells Popular Science. In particular, Mowat notes that the statistical approach lends credibility and reduces the chance of inadvertent bias. Instead of imposing trends on the data or assessing one relationship at a time, Katz and his co-authors’ used a grouped analysis method that let the data sort itself out, revealing which factors were most responsible for influencing variability among the response population.

[ Related: A visit to dog college. ]

‘Animals are more interesting than people and inanimate objects’

The new results are also closely aligned with a 2024 survey study conducted by Mowat and a separate group of dog researchers at the University of Wisconsin. That research included more than 1,000 responses and also specific video clips for owners to show their pets. It similarly reported that other animals (and specifically dogs) were the most attention-grabbing canine TV content. They also found slight trends related to breed and age. Sporting and herding-type dogs were overrepresented among the TV watchers and older dogs seemed less likely to frequently engage with television. 

Differences in sample size, survey questions, and analysis method could account for why the new research didn’t observe exactly the same trends. Fundamentally, they were approaching the mystery of dog TV watching from different perspectives and disciplines: vision vs. behavioral psychology, Mowat says. Nonetheless, “it was just sort of surprising or reassuring how similar some of the outcomes they got were,” she says. Clearly, for dogs, “animals are more interesting than people and inanimate objects.” 

Yet to resolve the discrepancies in the findings and iron out exactly what keeps canines tuned in, more research is needed, Mowat says. Both her and Katz’s labs have plans to continue pursuing the line of exploration, extending their work beyond surveys and into real-world experiments. Katz hopes to begin a citizen science endeavor, getting owners to record video of their dogs watching video so pet behaviors can be formally cataloged and classified. Initially, he’d thought that such tests could be used to select universally soothing videos for dogs. However, based on the highly individualized, temperament-based responses the animals seem to show in the survey data, he admits that seems less likely. 

“We wanted to come up with a more general set of stimuli that all dogs would like,” Katz says. Now, he thinks that would be a serious challenge, as personalities and dogs’ individual backgrounds get in the way. For anxious dogs, there may be no video stimuli that’s uniformly relaxing. For excitable dogs that are quick to bark, leaving a nature documentary running while you go to the grocery store could be more trouble than it’s worth. Determining what a dog might like to see on TV is “easy to do for individual dogs, but harder for groups,” he says. 

Mowat, meanwhile, is working towards a better method of testing dogs’ vision. Currently, she says strategies are crude and non-standard (like waving a hand in front of a dog’s face, or running a pet through a makeshift obstacle course). A set of finely tuned videos might better reveal how well aging pups can see. 

How dog vision is different

And all of the research helps chip away at the big question of what dogs experience looking at  human screens to begin with. Dog vision is different from our own. For one, canines only have two types of color receptors compared to primates’ three– this makes pups uniformly red-green colorbind. Additionally their visual “fusion rate” (essentially the threshold frequency at which a flickering light begins to look steady), is higher than ours, notes Mowat– so some video content may look like a series of flashing pictures instead of smooth video to a dog. Finally, dogs see in lower resolution than people do, because they have a lower density of photoreceptors, she says. Together, all of these factors mean TV tuned for human vision may not look as interesting to a pet. Yet still, our pets are paying attention. 

High contrast colors, animal content, nature sounds, and lots of movement may explain part of why. “What we’ve designed for our kids might actually be quite engaging– maybe not always good– but engaging for our animals,” Mowat says, whose 2024 work found that cartoons were surprisingly interesting to some dogs. 

But then, maybe there’s another factor at play. 

“They may actually be watching because we’re watching,” she suggests. “We’re sitting on the couch with them, and it’s an enjoyable, companion-level thing to do.” 

 

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